Beyond Financial Support: Helping Citizens in Welfare Programs

Governments are turning to Social Media as a way to engage citizens in public policies through online debates and discussion forums. Together with the communication team of a government department, we are exploring another facet of government-citizens communication, and another opportunity for governments to exploit Social Media. In particular, we are investigating whether online communities could become a new channel to support specific groups of citizens. In this model, a government would facilitate the creation of online communities for specific cohorts of people sharing goals and needs as well as act as mediator. This model would enable governments to capitalise on the power of crowd-sourcing and the social capital that gets created through such communities to provide social and emotional peer-support. These communities would also serve to provide direct feedback on social security policies. We propose to explore the issues that arise in this context. Bringing governments closer to their citizens With the development of the social web and its suite of tools, the Internet is not only a source of information, but it has also become an engaging place where anyone can create, participate, meet and interact with other people. Through these new connections, individuals are organising themselves in various groups creating “virtual” communities with specific needs. For several years now, governments have recognised the potential of the Web 2.0 to bring closer together citizens and their government. The social web promises a better two-way communication where citizens are engaged through public consultations, contributing to the design of government policies and where the government becomes a collaborator more accountable, responsive and transparent. Leveraging off the benefits social media tools can provide to reach communities, many government agencies have Copyright © 2011, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. begun actively increasing their online presence to engage more with citizens. Twitter and Facebook are now used as as communication channels; data sets are released so that anyone can use them in innovative projects; discussion forums are setup to encourage citizens to participate in policy developments. We believe that social media can play yet another role in a two-way communication model between Governments and Citizens: A government could support specific groups of citizens through the creation and mediation of online communities, thereby capitalising on the potential power of such communities to provide social and emotional peersupport and get feedback on social security policies. This would address the social dimension of governments. Two questions arise, then: Is this a role that the government should take? Would this be useful for citizens? These are the issues we are currently exploring. Our work is being done in partnership with the communication division of Centrelink, the Australian Government’s service delivery agency which is responsible to administrate all social welfare payments. Centrelink is already exploring the use of social media to complement their current communication channels. This project is investigating the social facet of Web 2.0 technologies, as a first step to answer these questions. Together with Centrelink, we are developing a trial online community, facilitated by Centrelink, as a support group for parents in receipt of income support. We hope the trial will provide the data appropriate to start answering the questions above. Our work to date has focused on exploring these ideas with citizens, though group interviews and questionnaires. This is to enable us to design the trial online community. In this paper, we first look at recent changes in welfare programs and investigate ways of helping welfare recipients beyond traditional financial supports. We then discuss a number of issues government agencies may face when supporting specific groups of citizens through the creation and mediation of online communities.