Transparency 2.0 through Social Media

Anna Jo (blessedanna.j@gmail.com)

Summary

Unexpectedly, Google is not the no.1 visited site on the internet in 2011. Facebook

has passed Google as most visit website on the internet, and 11% of the world population has

a Facebook account. Especially, comparing with a number of motor vehicles which are about

750,000,000, a number of Facebook users are more than 800,000,000 as well as fifty percent

of the users log on to Facebook every day. According to Video Infographs, average user has

130 friends and spends 700 minutes per month on Facebook. Furthermore, there are 510,000

posted comments, 293,000 status updates, and 136,000 uploaded photos every 60 seconds on

Facebook. Twitter has more than 225,000,000 users who send 150,000,000 tweets a day, 1736

per second. The average user has 115 followers. YouTube has 490,000,000 unique visitors

that generate 92,000,000,000 page views each month. YouTube not only reached

700,000,000,000 playbacks last year, but also 35 hours of video is uploaded every minute.

With rapid growth of these social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, E-

government has been cost-effective and convenient trend among many governments to

promote openness and transparency so as to reduce corruption. In particular, the Obama

administration has been emphasizing new social media service in order to be transparent,

participatory, and collaborative government. While the use of social media technologies

create great opportunity as a means to increase a government's transparency and its

interaction with citizens, the issue of how these emerging technologies with social media

motivate governments to behave transparently and engage in open discourse with their

ecosystems of citizens and organizations has not been clearly considered. Therefore, this

proposal explores a mechanism to motivate government transparency based on behaviors and

tendency of social networking service users, remarkably, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,

YouTube, and Foursquare which are freely available. As a next step, this proposal also

includes official guide to manage these social media technologies as primary channels for

proactive dissemination by the government with reliable source, especially regarding:

1. How to promote a diverse range of people/perspectives to participate in open discourse with governments in social media

2. How to measure government transparency using social networking platform

1st Step: An official guide to promote Transparency 2.0

Social media participation creates new ways of democratic participation, pressures

for new institutional structures, and processes and frameworks for open and transparent

government on an unprecedented scale. Although government agencies are increasingly using

social media technologies to conduct their business and seek input, heading to efficient and

transparent government with open-discourse initiatives is still in its formative stages.

Therefore, this proposal explains how to develop, design, and deliver government services

with social networking services based on a diverse range of people and perspectives.

Facebook for Public Relations. Government agencies can create official Facebook page to

connect with each citizen by their voluntary participation. When citizens become a fan and

then receive updates from the government agencies regarding transparency and open

discussion in their News Feed. The function of comments and Like enable active discussion

not only to promote a culture of transparency but also to statistically measure public response

for updated events. The official pages help to easily link the homepage of government

agencies and to release proactive dissemination by the government regarding transparent

status. For example, last year Ferrari sold 5329 cars, but they managed to get 5,267,365 fans

on their Facebook page.

Twitter for real-time information delivery. With certified official account of government

agencies, government agencies can send official tweets regarding corruption events

immediately to their followers. Considering that Twitter personal record is 8900 tweets per

second, the speed of information delivery in Twitter surpasses that of mass media such as

CNN and BBC, and retweet function promotes the dissemination and public opinion toward

government decisions and actions.

LinkedIn for monitoring profile of government representatives. Government agencies

can disclose the LinkedIn pages of government representatives. LinkedIn has more than

135,000,000 users that is 15 times the population of New York City, and two users sign up to

LinkedIn every second. Age demographics of LinkedIn are composed of age 18-24(21%), age

25-34(36%), age 35-54(36%), and over age 55(7%). The demographics include most voters.

By allowing citizens to access the profile of government representatives such as their CV and

connections, the activities of government officials can be tracked and controlled by citizens.

Foursquare for disclosing real-time location of government actions and expenditures.

Using location-based service Foursquare by government agencies can promote transparency

in government activities and expenditures. With connecting to Facebook and Twitter, this

exposure enables citizens to access to governance structures and operations as well as has a

broad cultural impact on unveiled government bureaucracy for open and transparent

government.

YouTube as a next-generation broadcasting network. YouTube channel enables the

public to engage in government policies and functions by simply making Like and Dislike

about government information and services. The direct interaction between government

agencies and the citizens they serve reduce the cost of collecting, distributing, and accessing

government information, services, and resources. Using YouTube channel, government

agencies can broadcast transparency and accountability of recent events.

2nd Step: Assessment using Google Docs to conduct survey for government transparency

These ten indexes present how to measure comprehensive government transparency:

open data, disclose spending data, procurement data, open portal for public request for

information, distributed data, open meetings, open government research, collection

transparency, allowing the public to speak directly to the president, searchable, crawl able and

accessible data. In order to evaluate existing transparency and open discourse based on these

indexes, government agencies can use another social platform Google Docs. Using Google

form, survey questions can easily be created and embedded within Facebook, Twitter.

Furthermore, the Google docs automatically provides statistical analysis of the results.