Social Media and Civic Engagement - Scott P. Robertson Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics

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government. He notes that social media allows for the reemergence of “coproduction” whereby citizens are seen as partners in the development, implementation, and maintenance of government services. He explores three modes of coproduction:

      • Citizen Sourcing (C2G), which involves citizens providing government with information to improve services;

      • Government as a Platform (G2C) in which the government provides data and/or infrastructure on which citizens can build services;

      • Do It Yourself Government (C2C) in which citizens band together to carry out or augment functions with which governments are traditionally tasked.

      Linders further examines these modes of coproduction in the contexts of three stages of service delivery: design, execution, and monitoring. This allows for the analysis of systems into a 3×3 typology that crosses the modes of coproduction with the stages of service. For example, citizen-sourcing projects in the design phase might involve sharing citizen opinions with the government, as with eRulemaking systems. Citizen sourcing projects in the execution phase might involve crowdsourcing, as with challenge.gov where the government posts challenges and asks the public to propose solutions. Citizen sourcing projects in the monitoring phase might involve feedback from citizens about government services, as with various FixMyStreet applications that have appeared in many cities (King and Brown, 2007; Maeda, Sekimoto, and Seto, 2016).

      At the current time, there is an emphasis on the concept of “smart cities.” The smart cities movement is an attempt to take advantage of the information generated by multiple independent data-producing activities within an environment in order to understand otherwise invisible interconnected processes. Naphade et al. (2011) characterize a smart city as a “system of systems” in which interdependent public and private systems share information with each other, and with metasystems, to provide an integrated overview for purposes of planning, management, and operational efficiency. Smart cities often rely on data-generating sensors and monitors in addition to modeling and visualization software. For example, a traffic planner might utilize GPS data from phones in cars, camera data on highway density, weather data generated by multiple stations, social media text generated by commuters, and a myriad of other diverse information sets to generate a view of current traffic conditions, which might then be made available to users in visualizations of various kinds for multiple purposes.

      The term “civic technology” (Civic Tech) has emerged to describe grass-roots, citizen-inspired technology development for civic purposes. Boehner and DiSalvo (2016) note that the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) has emphasized several aspects of the human side of computing technology in turn—including cognitive, followed by social, followed by cultural—and now may be turning to “civic.”

      Foth et al. (2015b) argue that civic engagement has finally become a critical issue for HCI for the following reasons.

      • Re-emergence of place: There has been a move from the technology-enabled erosion of distance to place-based media and engagement.

      • Ubiquitous technology: The integration of information technologies with every aspect of people’s lives that have erased boundaries between the physical and digital city.

      • People as producers: The ability for non-professionals to create content and design information systems encourages engagement that can have wide influence.

      They specifically call out the technology trends of mobile/personal devices, broadband connectivity, open data, urban interfaces, and cloud computing as important in changing the outlook for civic engagement.

      The Knight Foundation (Sotsky, 2013) identifies two overarching themes in civic tech: (1) Open Government; and (2) Community Action. Within each theme, several clusters were also described as follows:

      • Open Government clusters:

      ° Data Access and Transparency

      ° Data Utility

      ° Public Decision Making

      ° Resident Feedback

      ° Visualization and Mapping

      ° Voting

      • Community Action clusters:

      ° Civic Crowdfunding

      ° Community Organizing

      ° Information Crowdsourcing

      ° Neighborhood Forums

      ° Peer-to-Peer Sharing

      The Knight Foundation study found lower investment being placed in the Open Government clusters of voting, public decision-making, and resident feedback, and the Community Action cluster of civic crowdfunding. During the two-and-a-half-year study beginning in 2011, the most money was being invested in peer-to-peer sharing and neighborhood forum development, with this money coming primarily from private capital and not grant funding. Grant funding was supporting projects primarily in the data utility, data access and transparency, and resident feedback clusters. More generally, Open Government initiatives were not supported by private investors, who instead preferred Community Action projects.

      In reflecting on interviews with several civic tech innovators in the Atlanta area, Boehner and DiSalvo (2016) found that there was a move toward what they referred to as “Google-style” apps, or apps that emphasized search by information seekers instead of structure by information providers. This emphasis on supporting exploration instead of information design may have many implications for the flattening of governmental bureaucracies or procedures and the relationship between “data holders” and “data seekers.”

      The rise of urbanization and the concurrent spread of ubiquitous networked information technologies has given rise to a new area often called “urban informatics” (Foth, Choi, and Satchell, 2011). As the name implies, urban informatics deals with cities and has place as a central component of its professional identity, although place is considered both physically and digitally (Foth, 2009). Urban informatics as a discipline supports efforts to expose and utilize information to urban planners in addition to citizens who wish to influence and understand the environment in which they live and to engage with others in creating an urban community.

      Foth (2017) distinguishes between “bird’s-eye view” versus “street view” applications in the space of urban informatics. A bird’s-eye view is a top-down approach often advocated by administrators in the service model of government in which digital government spaces are designed for citizens, whereas a street view is a community-centric approach empowering people to create their own urban spaces. The distinction is intended to emphasize citizens as active participants in creating civic space, and indeed to re-conceptualize the city as an interface environment between individuals and their physical spaces via ubiquitous computing (de Waal, 2014; Foth et al., 2015b).

      After the emergence of social media, development of community portals diminished precipitously. A collection of special purpose review and recommendation sites, for example restaurant review sites, took the place of the services sections of portals. Social media took the place of the discussion forums and bulletin boards that had been so carefully crafted, curated, and studied. This move, however, also resulted in a loss of the local, neighborhood-level quality of portals since service recommender and rating sites typically operate at a national or global level. Similarly, the most widely used social media platforms never implemented neighborhood-level, or even physical-space based networks, although it is possible to create them. Neighborhood-oriented social networks such as NextDoor have not seen the same kind of explosive adoption as sites like Yelp! in the recommender space, or Facebook in the social media space, or Twitter in the microblogging space have seen.

      Nonetheless, some neighborhood and community networks have developed in the current digital environment. Known as “hyperlocal” social spaces,

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