Social government

Abstract

Administrations increasingly struggle with changing requirements demanding more transparency, better connectivity and collaboration among different actors, and better responding to particular needs and social innovations of their constituencies. Using the Internet, social media, crowd-sourcing and mobile technologies influence communication structures, expectations and behavior of citizens and businesses. At the same time, financial constraints in the public sector result in less staff available for keeping pace with these fast developments in the digital era. Strengthening the partnership and collaboration between government and private as well as civic sector actors has emerged as a strong demand of open government and new governance models of state. Based on these settings, this paper introduces a concept of social government (SocialGov) that unites methods, concepts and tools of co-creation, co-production and social communities (including the use of social media) with those of open government (enabling transparency, participation, and also exploring open data and open services) in public service provisioning. The social government concept includes an environment, in which governments, citizens and businesses collaborate in order to identify, design, create, execute, and monitor public services and to share ideas on how to tackle public and societal challenges.