The collaboration with the council was based on the separate but related agendas of the CE team and our imperatives as university researchers. In our case, the problem-solving agenda for the CE team is better community engagement and greater citizen participation in Council decision-making. As most of the CE team and researchers lived in the local area, their participation in the workshop would have a dual agenda.
Our longitudinal study assessed the long-term impact of the practical results of AR on the EC activities of the Council. Additionally, interviews were conducted at critical points in the development of the Council's ongoing CE program as the technology environment evolved over time. Analysis of the detailed data collected by Phase 1 AR provided immediate practical application for Council policy development.
The researchers conducted a manual inspection of the Zing data (the text as anonymously typed by workshop participants) using the Cynefin lens to categorize the responses as ordered or unordered (Ali 2014).
Stage 1: Automated Analysis of Zing Data
Stage 1 Outcomes – Towards the Council’s CE Policy of 2012
It appears that, despite a pronounced willingness to explore new ways of working, there was little appreciation of the potential of technologies as they were still seen as risky and a challenge to the entrenched, orderly, organizing principles of the Council. The Council uses the website to publish new programmes, and promptly responds to any posts by citizens. In 2015, posting was moderated by citizens. Appendix 3c shows its Facebook policy in 2015 with the rules for posting on the right.
One member of the CE team is responsible for posting on behalf of the Council and in 2015 for moderating citizens' posts. In a 2015 phone interview, the Council's CE manager said her team used what it learned from the AR stage of our research when writing the 10-year CE strategy in 2012. When it came to implementing the strategy, the CE team spent most of 2013 rebranding the Council, which was reflected in the look and feel of the entire Council website.
The CE team has also started to incorporate some of the Web 2.0 features and found our research extremely valuable. This led to the adoption of the BTT software, shown in Appendix 3b and described in Table 7, demonstrating that it is not a tool to suit the disorderly nature of the community, but rather to meet the ordered demands of the world. Sometimes concerns raised by a citizen in an email result in a post on the BTT website if the CE team feels it could be useful to other citizens.
The overall message we received from the 2015 interview was that there was progress in the Council's use of IS for CE and that the CE manager believed that changes would continue as their confidence and understanding increased. In 2018, we interviewed a new CE team manager who wanted to make more use of social media, but expressed frustration with the way the two main online CE platforms, BTT and Facebook, operated in a structured and bureaucratic way the Council's policy is controlled. She noted that the potential that social media once had was for citizen engagement in local government.
Stage 2 The 2018 Council CE Policy Document
5 Theorising Community Engagement: An e-Democracy Framework
The Foundations of the Framework
Here there is recognition of disorder by the government but with attempts to impose order by controlling the agenda. Ubiquitous engagement is where there is a synthesis of the ordered bureaucratic needs of government systems and the unordered diversity of views held by local residents, where government and citizens share ownership and responsibility for collaborative decision-making. The elements in Lee & Kwak's (2012) model can be interpreted, outside the boundaries of a maturity model, as the general nature of the community involvement and the outcomes of this involvement.
In this broader interpretation, these elements match the concepts identified in the workshop and represent the social behavior of (local) governance. In this context, our understanding of online CE follows Oni and Okunoye (2018) who use the terms e-engagement for IS that supports government consultation and participation with citizens and e-consultation as exchanges between government and citizens using the Internet. When viewed through Cynefin's dialectical lens, we see the ordered concerns of Council management (risk, politics etc) on the right and the left, the irregular (fashionable) demands of the community and the perceived concerns of community benefit.
In Sharif et al. (2015)'s model, the three dominant factors are Technology, Organization and Environment. These factors represent areas that are affected, or themselves have an impact, on the use of social media. However, based on the findings of our study, we judged these factors to be necessary, but not.
We interpret Sharif et al. (2015)'s model as a synthesis of the ordered-disordered dialectical perspectives and accepts the three factors of technology, organization and environment as a second dimension of our proposed e-democracy framework. Technology: from the Zing experience discussed under Question 14 and the evaluation of post-workshop online CE efforts over seven years. Organizational practice: from the analysis of responses to Question 5 in Table 2 and feedback from the CE team.
Development of our Framework
On the one hand, we use the concept of orientation in terms of the government organization's intention and behavior towards CE. In this sense, we adapted Lee and Kwak's elements for the orientational dimension of the framework as an order-disorder continuum, as discussed in the previous section. On the other hand, Hirschheim et al. Domains of Change identify which aspects are transformed as a result of CE activities.
The five factors adapted from Sharif et al's (2015) model and listed above form the second dimension of the framework. The resulting e-democracy framework, shown in Figure 4, links these two dimensions as a matrix to create different views of CE activity and opportunities for change as one moves around the matrix. In Figure 4 we have populated this matrix with typical CE activities as an illustration of how CE can be understood in terms of the order-rule dialectic.
In our study, we have observed CE in data transparency, open participation, and open collaboration, but have not observed a true ubiquitous engagement orientation. In the continuum of each domain of change, CE moves from more order to a synthesis of order and disorder as CE progresses across the Orientations from left to right. It is important to note that the e-democracy framework depicted in Figure 4 results from our study's research agenda formulated in the action research in Phase 1, with examples from the study inserted into relevant cells in the table.
Implication of the e-Democracy Framework for CE Practice
6 Concluding Remarks
In particular, our findings suggest that issues confronting government–society engagement cannot be resolved solely through an ordered or disordered paradigm, but must be treated as a dialectical synthesis of both. True e-democracy represents a radical, disorderly departure from the current orderly practices of e-government, which are comfortable to the bureaucracy because they conform to the traditional way of doing business, albeit with different technology. The dialectical challenge facing government is the need to deliver mandated efficiencies while allowing for different constituents of civil society to be involved in decision-making and co-production of services (Nalbandian et al. 2013).
There is no doubt that IS, especially social media, has the potential to enable more open interaction between government and citizens that is at the core of e-democracy. Such technology, when appropriately placed within an IS artifact, allows governments to build the capacity to work with the irregular networked and informal cultures of civil society. The tensions between the EC's IS-led openness and the day-to-day work of the Council were evident in our findings.
On the other hand, our long-term view of the Council's progress in implementing their EC strategy shows that they are aware of civil society's expectation and citizens' desire to be involved. What is also apparent is that the real issue facing the Council is resolving the dialectic between their mandated operational imperatives and the demands for irregular citizen participation. However, we speculate that the emerging adoption of newer IS platforms may support the emergence of authentic e-democracy in the form of citizen journalism and the use of social media by politicians and government leaders.
In exploring these issues, we used our research to theorize e-democracy in a way that takes into account the competing demands on government. But on a practical level, the framework can also be used to map an organization's current status of CE or to design a CE strategy to make interactions with civil society more meaningful. It should be noted that as action research we approached and investigated only one Council.
- Zing questions
- Leximancer Output
- CE Online Presence
- Summary of the CE Policy in the 2018 draft document using the IAP2 approach
Back to the future for KM: the case for Sensible Organization, invited paper for Journal of KM Research and Practice. Two Models of E-Democracy: A Case Study of Government Online Engagement with the Community, Australian School of Business Research Paper no. From e-government to us-government: Defining a typology for citizen co-production in the age of social media.
A knowledge-centered view of the diffusion and adoption of complex information technologies: the case of BPR, Info Systems J. Role of Social Media in Social Change: An Analysis of Collective Sense Making During the 2011 Egypt Revolution, Information Systems Research 26/1, 210–. For clarity, Appendix 2a shows only the topic labels, and Appendix 2b shows only the concepts within those topics.
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