16-01-2013, 12:50 PM
MODELING SOCIAL MEDIA SUPPORT FOR THE ELICITATION OF CITIZEN OPINION
INTRODUCTION
Town hall meetings, radio call-in shows and citizen surveyshave been traditionally used by politicians to learn ofthe issues facing their constituents. The goal of this processis often to aid government policy conceptualization or policy feedback. Increasingly, politicians areusing social media as channels to support this citizen opinionelicitation. For example, YouTube has been employedby a number of politicians who answer most of the popularquestions posed to them by their online audiences. In thisregard, it is the collective opinion of social media users that
help to set a political agenda [4].Participatory policy making [19] can besupported by socialmedia when a community collectively ranks the mostpopular and important issues. Users assign a positive or negativevaluation (a \vote") on each other's comments. Thisarrangement results in a `collaborative _lter'; the highest valued comments are shown prominently, while content oflow value is hidden from view1. Ideally the highest-valuedcomments would represent the rationally-determined importantissues facing the community. However, scholars andpolicy makers are _nding that variations in the arrangement and organization of the user-generated content resultin changes to user contribution and democratic' debate. These variations thus help to shape the system's underlying social values.
Design choices tacitly embedded in a technology help todetermine user behaviour, participant goal achievement andinterdependent relationships. Analysing the impact of various system configurations on these goals and dependenciesat an early stage can help guide the design process. Models support this kind of reasoning by abstracting thedomain into a depiction of elements that aid in answering ananalysis question. For example, a designer can model how different configurations may contribute to the success or failureof a system. This can be demonstrated in a model of thealternatives available to the designer of a collaborative alter. Such systems canbenefit from precise, model-supportedanalysis of its complex sociotechnical domain.
Goals and Design Decisions
In the collaborative _lter, the criteria that outline what isan important comment depend on the goals of the stakeholders,in particular the client political institution. Based onthe literature, politicians often desire to advertise themselves[2] and advantageously frame a publicly discussed issue [15]in order to manage citizen expectations on what is plausible[11]. Therefore, depending on the issue, the politician maydesire that elicited citizen opinions be framed either as aconsensus or as an open debate.Based on recognition of the above goals, the system designer
can choose to con_gure the collaborative _lter eitherto highlight popular and agreeing opinions or conversely, diverseand connecting views. The former design alternative,hereafter referred to as the \complementary _lter" wouldcompare user comments and pro_le information with thoseof other users in order to display familiar content and ideasto the user. This would likely encourage users to consolidateand clarify existing positions [3].