What do the citizens want?

What do the citizens want?
Dr. Tania C. D. Bueno

Citizens are increasingly seeking for a direct and balanced relationship with the government. It is what is observed with the use of social networks. More and more "communities" are organized in a network to find solutions to their problems, inform, share, discuss and decide matters of everyday life in order to influence since public policy, or even the existence or not of governments.

People are increasingly connecting in social networks, also called social media, forming pressure groups spontaneously, with speed and effectiveness. And why is that so?

Social networks have enabled the ordinary citizen a technological independence and freedom of thought never seen before. Nearly no censorship in social media and almost no state control. It is clear that government intelligence is moving in this direction, but control is still incipient.

But one question still hangs in the air: What do the citizens want?
Governors often complain of public participation when they open space for discussion of public policies and a lack of citizen participation in important discussions is a common and when it occurs is to "prevent" a claim or action or government initiative. Also, the contributions, if any, fail in the review and the study.

On the other hand, those who are able to contribute with studies and assessments can not establish a relationship of share of information and influence in the political environment. They are researchers and consultants who can not get their knowledge to be used effectively in this environment.

Recently, the UNCTAD-WTO-ITC * held a workshop with the intention of reducing the gap between researchers and policy and noted that the results of research will only contribute to the development of national policy "if researchers and policymakers work closely to understand the specific needs, ensuring the relevance of topics, and improve communication, dissemination and implementation of research recommendations. "

In the meantime, researchers are seeking solutions. One of the ideas is the Manager of Social Networks (GRS-i3G). The creation of an environment of social media management can improve the relationship between politicians, citizens and researchers. The politician need to go to these virtual communities and put up in disposal to "listen" to events that arise spontaneously and then use the knowledge of researchers to generate solutions.
A good environment for the Management of Social Media must use technologies to store, interpret of disseminate results in a dynamic way, with speed of quality. This is where we have the technologies of artificial intelligence, Cloud computing and the social networks themselves.

Creating Swapps (Social Web Applications) enables the citizen approach in his virtual community within the context of community and collaborative model. Swapps provided by the GRS-i3G integrate data from social networks used by most citizens, ie Facebook of Twitter, as well as blogs and mobile applications geolocalization.

The next step of the evolution of these programs will allow sharing location information with contacts and follow where they are, it will be the intensive use of social recommendation applications, such as displaying local products or services: the use of social networks of geolocalization mobile applications such as Foursquare, Yelp, Google Maps, Yobongo, Pointer, Kekanto, etc..

Thus, the conclusion is that the advancement of information technology is providing the human being a revolutionary tool. How, when and for what to use it is the citizen the ones to decide. And the researchers and politicians have as duty to support this movement, and when they provide resources and knowledge they are contributing to the strengthening of citizenship.


*See more at:
http://vi.unctad.org/tda/papers/tradedata/tdarecs.PDF
http://www.i3g.org.br/grs-laguna/sobre