Introduction to the Workshop on Government and Citizen Engagement

The trend towards more user contributions on the web and an increased interest in social media technology, from both governments and citizens, leads to new potentials and challenges in designing for citizen-government interactions. For several years now, governments have recognised the potential of the web 2.0 to bring citizens and their governments closer together. Indeed, the social web holds the potential of supporting a better two-way communication where citizens are engaged through public consultations, contributing to the design of government policies. The question is what role governments have to play in this development. How do we best support the notion of government as a collaborator that is more accountable, responsive and transparent? Citizens, government employees, and public institutions all have different, sometimes discrepant goals for their engagement. The challenge of supporting a prolific collaboration depends to a large extent on the alignment of the goals of the involved actors. Furthermore, several scholars (e.g. Barney, 2000) have argued that any promised democratic revolution in the wake of the introduction and increased use of e-government and e-participation services has failed to manifest itself. As argued by e.g. Toregas (2001), providing mere access to information does not ensure citizen participation, much less does it innately undergird citizen empowerment. In addition, while web 2.0 tools bring opportunities for capitalizing on the communities ideas