Community Engagement through Social Media

Abstract

Community engagement, i.e., attracting eyeballs of citizens to focus on their civic government and its functioning is a vital aspect in nurturing healthy democracy at the local level, in both developed and developing countries. This paper looks into specific instances such as graffiti reporting through social media (in a developed country), collaborative focus on local community infrastructure issues in the form of digitizing the traditional "Letters to the Editor" mechanism used by citizens (in a developing country) as well as how the crowdsourced digitization of electoral records - wealth declaration documents of candidates for instance, lead to improved awareness of significant data among voters. Apart from these specific instances, the paper also looks into how patterns from these applications can be applied to other areas of social innovation, especially those involving utilizing social media to shape and administer both public policy as well as the awareness of the same by the citizens.