This document presents a maturity stages model for social media-based citizen-sourcing by government agencies. It describes 5 stages of maturity: 1) Setting up and manually operating multiple social media accounts. 2) Centrally managing the operation of multiple social media accounts from a single ICT platform. 3) Centrally monitoring "external" social media accounts and internet sources in addition to internal accounts. 4) Monitoring external accounts with quality filtering to provide high quality expert information. 5) Internal dissemination and consultation of collected citizen and expert information and opinions to facilitate policy development. The model was developed through several EU projects focused on exploiting social media in government. It aims to balance citizen input

1. A Maturity Stages Model for SM-
based
Citizen-sourcing
– The EU-Community Project
Dr Euripidis Loukis
Professor
Information Systems Laboratory, ICSD

2. 2
Introduction
Crowdsouring initially developed in the private sector as ‘a new web-
based business model that harnesses the creative solutions of a
distributed network of individuals, in order to exploit ‘collective
wisdom’ and mine fresh ideas from large numbers of individuals’
(Brabham, 2012)
Citizen-sourcing: Application of the ‘crowdsourcing' ideas by the
public sector for the collection of policy-related information,
knowledge and ideas from the general public, concerning various
social problems and needs, in order to support the development of
better, more effective and acceptable public policies.
Εxpert-sourcing: collection of information, knowledge and ideas from
experts, in order to complement citizen-sourcing for the formulation
of effective public policies, for addressing the high complexity of
modern social problems:
DEMOCRACY – TECHNOCRACY QUESTION
2

3. 3
Introduction
• We are going to present a maturity stages model
concerning SM-based citizen-sourcing by
government agencies
• we have developed through a series of relevant EU-
projects on SM exploitation in government
(PADGETS, NOMAD, EU-COMMUNITY, and
previously LEXIS)
• and we will focus more on the more recent of these
projects
• the EU-Community,
• on which we have been based for the development
of the more advanced stages of this maturity stages
model
• Also we will propose some theoretical foundations
(=previous relevant knowledge) that can be useful

4. 4
Government Citizen-Sourcing
• Use of SM for one-directional information dissemination from
government agencies to citizens: promote/advertise activities,
services, future plans
• active citizen-sourcing: use of government agencies’ web-sites
or social media accounts, to pose a particular social problem or
public policy direction, and solicit relevant information,
knowledge, opinions and ideas from citizens
• Initially manually, and then in a more automated way
• Passive citizen-sourcing: analysis of political content that has
been developed by citizens freely, without any stimulation or
direction by government, in various external web-sites or
social media to extract useful information
• Highly beneficial to target – beyond the general public – also
knowledgeable experts on the particular social problem or
public policy of interest. to collect higher quality policy-related
information and knowledge;
• citizen-sourcing should be combined with expert-sourcing

5. 5
Approaches to Government Citizen-
Sourcing
ACTIVE
CITIZEN - SOURCING
ACTIVE
EXPERT - SOURCING
PASSIVE
CITIZEN-SOURCING
PASSIVE
EXPERT - SOURCING

6. 6
A maturity stages model for SM-based
citizen-sourcing
• STAGE I. Set-up and manual operation of multiple
SM accounts:
• In this initial stage a government agency sets-up
accounts in the most popular SM (e.g. Facebook,
Twitter, YouTube),
• and operates them manually
• content concerning its current services, activities as
well as policies (current and future) is posted
manually in each SM account,
• while citizens comments are read by public
servants,
• and then summarized,
• and conclusions are drawn from them and sent to
the appropriate interested units.

7. 7
A maturity stages model for SM-based
citizen-sourcing
• STAGE II. Centrally managed operation of multiple
SM accounts:
• In this stage the posting of content on each
particular topic the government agency is dealing
with
• is conducted from a central ICT platform
automatically to all SM accounts of the government
agency (using APIs)
• this ICT platform also retrieves automatically
citizens’ interactions (e.g. likes, shares, comments)
for each posting,
• and makes advanced processing of them (using
advanced text analysis, opinion mining, sentiment
analysis) to facilitate summarization and conclusion
drawing.

8. 8
A maturity stages model for SM-based
citizen-sourcing
• STAGE III. External SM accounts central monitoring:
• In this stage, in addition to the centralized
operation of the SM accounts of the government
agency,
• we proceed to centralized monitoring of ‘external’
SM accounts and Internet sources in general (e.g.
high quality political blogs, fora, Facebook
accounts)
• which have high quality content of interest, related
to its activities and competences
• interesting content is automatically retrieved,
• and then undergoes advanced processing (using
advanced text analysis, opinion mining, sentiment
analysis),
• in order to facilitate summarization, main points

9. 9
A maturity stages model for SM-based
citizen-sourcing
• STAGE IV. External SM accounts monitoring with
quality filtering:
• This stage combines the characteristics of the
previous ones,
• with quality filtering of the collected policy related
content,
• based on the reputation of the author or/and the
sources
• aiming to provide high quality information,
knowledge and opinions from highly
knowledgeable experts,
• and promote a ‘democracy – technocracy’ balance
in the formulation of public policies.

10. 10
A maturity stages model for SM-based
citizen-sourcing
• STAGE V. Internal dissemination and consultation:
• This final stage includes the characteristics of the
above stages II, III and IV,
• combined with ICT-based internal dissemination of
the collected information, knowledge and opinions
from the citizens’ general public and the experts
on a specific problem/policy,
• and also internal consultation on them (e.g.
through ‘internal’ SM);
• this facilitates collective sense making,
assimilation, conclusions drawing, and better
exploitation of them
• towards taking action, making innovations and
designing better policies.

11. 11
• It adopts a ‘selective’ approach,
• focusing on the most knowledgeable and credible people
on each topic we are interested in,
• by using advanced reputation management methods.
• and also focusing on the most relevant and high quality
documents
• such as web pages, blog posts, social media content,
online comments, word/pdf documents, collected from
various external sources on each topic we are interested
in,
• using documents’ curation/relevance assessment
methods
EU – COMMUNITY: Passive Expert-
sourcing

12. 12
• It consists of three main processes:
• the first two of them crawl at regular time intervals the
most relevant external sources of EU policies
knowledgeable and credible people, and also of relevant
documents of various types,
• Update corresponding databases,
• and also assess their reputation/credibility of the former
and the relevance/quality of the latter.
• These databases are used by the third process,
• which processes users’ queries (e.g. concerning the most
reputable/credible people or the most relevant
documents on a specific topic)
• and presents the results, making use of
Description of Passive Expert-Sourcing
Approach

13. 13
ICT Platform Architecture

14. 14
• The first ‘EurActory’ component crawls at regular time
intervals various external sources of profiles of people with
high levels of knowledge, expertise and credibility in one or
more EU policies
• and updates the corresponding people database
• Furthermore this component will perform credibility ranking
• The second ‘CurActory’ component crawls at regular time
intervals various external sources of documents related to EU
policies, relevant media
• and also social media accounts where relevant positions and
opinions are published,
• and updates the corresponding documents database.
• These documents are first related to the most relevant policy
topics and subtopics,
• and then for each document its relevance is rated with respect
to various relevant policy topics/subtopics
ICT Platform Architecture

15. 15
Passive Expert-sourcing Method
• Directory of profiles of individuals possessing high levels of
knowledge and expertise on pre-defined topics related with EU
topics
• Data crawled at regular time from numerous external sources
(websites, SM) or through self-registration
• Calculation of ‘reputation score’ for each expert per topic
through Reputation Management algorithm
15
Digital Reputation Criteria
Self-
evaluatio
n
direct
input
from user
based on
his/her
own area
of
expertise
Peer-
assessme
nt based
on
endorsem
ents from
other
experts
Business-
card
based on
reputatio
n ranking
of the
organizat
ion
expert
works in,
or
committe
es
belongs
to, and
his/her
Document
s
Assessme
nt results
of his/her
authored
document
s’
assessme
nts by
their
readers
Network
value
level of
influence
as the
sum of
his/her
network
connectio
ns
Proximity
trust
degree of
connectio
n in
social
media
Past
rankings
reputatio
n
rankings
in
previous
months
Offline
Reputatio
n
manually
added for
persons
with no
online
presence

16. 16
ΙCT Platform

17. 17
Theoretical Foundations for
Design and Evaluation
from Wicked Problems Research
• Public policies address social problems of high
complexity - Wicked (Rittel &Weber, 1973)
• many stakeholders with different and heterogeneous
problem views
• no clear and widely agreed definition (=specific issues
to be addressed) and objectives to be achieved
• ‘Second generation’ methods for addressing them
• first stage of consultation among problem stakeholders,
to formulate a shared understanding and definition of
the problem
• can be supported by issue-based information systems’
(IBIS) ⇒ allow stakeholders to enter and exchange
information about their perceptions on the main elements
of a social problem:
• ‘questions/issues’ - ‘solutions’ - ‘positive/negative
arguments’
• second stage of mathematical optimization analysis of

18. 18
Evaluation Framework
• Τo what extent the citizen/expert-sourcing
methods enables the collection of high quality
information and knowledge concerning the above
main elements of a social problem we want to
address through appropriate public policies:
• questions/issues
• solutions
• positive/ negative arguments on them,
• as perceived by various problem stakeholder groups
• and time wise changes of them (e.g. with respect
to their intensity, or attitudes/sentiments against
them).
• This evaluation framework is of wider applicability
(it can be used for the evaluation of any active or
passive citizen-sourcing or expert-sourcing
method)

19. 19
Theoretical Foundations for
Design and Evaluation
from (Knowledge) Absorptive Capacity
Research• As the modern economy becomes increasingly “knowledge intensive”
and dynamic, the continuous acquisition, assimilation and
exploitation of external knowledge becomes critical for the success
of firms
• The capacity to perform these critical and difficult tasks = firm’s
absorptive capacity (ACAP) : important for firm’s adaptation-
innovation
• This has led to an increasing interest of both researchers and
practitioners in ACAP (development, improvement and impact) –
mainly in the private sector
• The ACAP of a firm has three important components = Its abilities to
1. Recognize, acquire and understand relevant and potentially
valuable new knowledge from outside the firm
2. Assimilate this valuable new knowledge = connect it with existing
knowledge base  continuous enhancement
3. Exploit this assimilated knowledge/continuously enhanced
knowledge base in order to make adaptations to external
environment, and innovations in firm’s processes, work methods,
as well as products and services