Politician 2.0: Information Behavior and Dissemination on Social Networking Sites - Gaps and Best-Practices

This article covers our findings on the information behavior and dissemination of parliamentary decision-makers using social networking sites like Facebook. The article investigates why politicians use these technologies and are increasingly integrating into their everyday workflow. In addition to determining the purpose of social network usage, the focus of our paper is also on best practices and on how to deal with challenges like the authenticity of politicians' online profiles. The results presented within the remit of this paper are the outcome of 16 semi-structured interviews that took place as part of an evaluation effort within the EU research project WeGov 1 . The overall aim of the project is to develop a toolbox This article covers the evaluation of the initial toolbox of the EU e-participation project WeGov - Where eGovernment meets the eSociety with different types of end-user groups. The evaluation results are part of the overall evaluation process in which politicians will systematically be integrated into the development process of the toolbox. The initial toolbox is intended to demonstrate the basic use case of testing a politician's statements on Facebook. Here, the end- user posts a statement onto a Social Networking Site (SNS) and runs the analysis components on the users' feedback. Injection and analysis are two main functionalities (Wandhoefer et al. 2011) which were extracted from all the designed use cases (Addis et al. 2010; Joshi et al. 2010). The initial toolbox (Claes et al. 2010) injects one decision-maker's statement into a Facebook test group, with the analysis running on a test bed of an Obama tweet with nearly 1000 comments. The current software prototype acts more as a demonstration tool to show that all components fit together rather than a-ready-for use piece of software that would dominate decision-makers' everyday workflow. This initial toolbox was presented to 29 assistants to members of the German parliament, in conjunction with a discussion on the WeGov approach, the basic use case and the different kinds of analysis that will be conducted as part of the toolset. The outcomes from this event were used to plan the evaluation process of the initial toolbox. Because the software is not yet able to demonstrably assess the analysis results for decision-makers, a semi-structured interview was conducted as part of the evaluation methodology in order to evaluate the WeGov approach and the