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In this paper, we perform sentiment analysis and topic modeling on Twitter and Facebook posts of nine public sector organizations operating in Northeast US. The study objective is to compare and contrast message sentiment, content and topics of discussion on social media. We discover that sentiment and frequency of messages on social media is indeed affected by nature of organization’s operations. We also discover that organizations either use Twitter for broadcasting or one-to-one communication with public. Finally we found discussion topics of organizations – identified through unsupervised machine learning – that engaged in similar areas of public service having similar topics and keywords in their public messages. Our analysis also indicates missed opportunities by these organizations when communication with public. Findings from this study can be used by public sector entities to understand and improve their social media engagement with citizens.

In this study, we investigate the implementation, benefits and results of an online participation tool, called Cyber Policy Forum, and other for e-participation tools, by the Seoul Metropolitan City Government (SMG) in Korea, used for citizen participation in the policy making process. The Forum has not only shifted the paradigm of city governance by easing SMG's burden of policy planning, but also has raised public awareness and understanding of municipal issues. However, we do not think the Policy forum tool has enough features for "shared governance" to achieve a true citizen-government partnership in policy decision making. We recommend a provenance data based policy transparency model that captures and makes the policy decision making data transparent to citizens to be used in the deliberation process. The provenance data-based policy transparency model implies transparency in policy data, process, role and context information generated in the policy decision making lifecycle by the government. In addition, we advocate augmenting citizen participation tools with personal decision support system functionalities, such as content management and social analytic tools. Such tools can help enhancing the efficient management of the deliberation data to overcome information overload. They will also make it easy for citizens to understand the interactions among participants, and to grasp the conditions and contexts related to policy decision making.

This special issue features selected papers from the dg.o 2010 conference on the theme of “Public Engagement and Government Collaboration: Theories, Strategies and Case Studies.” E-government initiatives and solutions are characterized by the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for public administration to achieve their strategic goals. US government strategies in implementing e-government are focused on citizen-centered, result-oriented and innovation-based services and processes [2]. Recently the US federal government has also started the Open Government Directive to promote information transparency, citizen participation and cross-government collaborations [4]. Similarly, municipal and state governments have their own strategic goals and missions to be implemented via ICT-based e-government programs and initiatives. In order for each government and each agency to achieve its strategic goals, e-government projects and initiatives need to be properly planned, modeled, managed and implemented. Quantifiable measures of success also need to be defined in terms of productivity gains, service quality improvements and cost reductions. In this issue, we present two broad categories of government strategies for collaboration. One deals with public engagement in citizen-to-government (C2G) collaborations, and the other is government-togovernment (G2G) collaborations to achieve data transparency and strategy sharing as well as innovative technology implementations.

Collaboration and information sharing among government organizations is becoming increasingly important for promoting efficiency and productivity as well as for enhancing citizen services. With Internet connectivity widely available and with the ease-of-use of social media tools, citizens actively participate in producing content. However, the abundance of content causes another problem for governments - the difficulty of determining what truly useful and relevant information is to be shared for mission critical tasks and to produce better citizen services. Information resources, such as data, documents, multimedia objects and services stored in different agencies and produced by citizens need to be easily discovered and shared. We propose a data model of rich social tags and a Citizen-Government collaborative tagging environment} where governments and citizens can collaboratively annotate the resources, thus facilitating collaboration responsiveness through accessibility to information. The collaborative annotations capture not only the semantics but also the pragmatic and social aspects related to the resources, such as who, when, where, how and for what related tasks the resources are shared. The benefits of the a rich tag data model emphasizing the relationships of a tag to semantic, social, pragmatic and contextual reference frames include the ability to filter, discover and search new and dynamic as well as hidden resources, to navigate between resources in a search by traversing semantic relationships, and to recommend the most relevant government information even when distributed over different agencies. A distributed architecture of a government collaborative tagging system is proposed and tag-based search and recommendations are illustrated.

The Web 2.0 technologies allow dynamic content creation using syndications or mashups, extracted from diverse data sources, including government enterprise data. As a primary source of citizen data, the US government has the obligation not only to make public data available for citizen access as stated in the Freedom of Information Act, but also to protect the privacy of individual citizen's records as stated in the Privacy Act. In a mashup, a third party mashup Web application provider requests the individual's data from the government agencies through Web services. Since the data is public data and not necessarily provided through electronic interactions, individual citizens may not be able to express fine-grained privacy policies on how data may be used. In addition, the government agency's privacy policy is very coarse grained, and the relative sensitivity of individual information is not considered. We discuss the opportunities and issues associated with the programmable web and mashups, provide a Privacy Protection Model for Mashup Applications, using a mashup related multi-dimensional privacy protection space and present policy recommendations to complement the technological solutions. The model and recommendations include deployment of a personal privacy policy network, a distributed system over which citizens can publish their individual privacy policies. These policies are accessible by all web service providers to be consulted in real time by data providers including government agencies for the purposes of automated privacy protection reasoning concerning data release.

Information and communication technologies (ICT’s) have the potential greatly to transform how government works and how it relates to citizens, businesses, and other stakeholders. One such transformative capability of ICT’s is to facilitate government information sharing and integration in a networked environment. Integrating government information has raised important concerns about citizens’ privacy and the possibility of government to exercise greater surveillance on citizens. However, the need to share government information and to interoperate between diverse information systems has been highlighted, not least after events such as terrorist attacks and natural disasters, and by the fragmented nature of policy making and service provisioning revealed following those events that contributed to the administrative burden for citizens and businesses. The ability to share information across organizational boundaries is a pre-requisite for efficient processing of citizen services and for effective decision making by multiple collaborative environments. Government information sharing offers a real opportunity to share databases and make decisions based on more complete information [12]. It also offers important benefits such as increased productivity, improved decision making, lower administrative burden (information is already held somewhere in government and not duplicated), better enforcement (greater information availability), higher information quality (resulting in fewer mistakes), and integrated services [4,6,13,19,34,43]. However, inter-organizational information sharing and integration is a complex and difficult task facing a myriad of political, organizational, legal and technical challenges including lack of political support, lack of financial resources, citizens’ privacy and confidentiality concerns, and poor technical skills, among others [22,36,37]. This special issue contributes to a practical and theoretical conversation about government information sharing and integration as a socio-technical phenomenon by presenting multiple theoretical perspectives, disciplinary approaches, and practical applications. Scholars from different theoretical traditions propose that in order to realize the most important benefits from the use of ICT’s in government, agencies should integrate their information across organizational