Social media experiment a success for Government

Crowd-sourcing citizens’ ideas for better governance is here to stay, according to a new report on last year’s UAE brainstorming session.

Dr Saeed Al Dhaheri told the conference that brainstorming sessions were an effective way of sourcing ideas from social groups. Jeffrey E Biteng / The National

DUBAI // Crowd-sourcing citizens’ ideas for better governance is here to stay.

The Government collected more than 82,000 ideas from the public via social media in a national brainstorming project in December, leading to changes in health care and public education. There were more than 41,000 tweets in Arabic and 2,700 in English.

In fact, the response was so overwhelming that analysts were unable to cope with the sheer volume of information. “They weren’t able to grasp everything because they didn’t use big data tools to analyse the findings,” Fadi Salem of the Mohammed bin Rashid School of Government said on Wednesday at a social-media conference in Dubai.

Better planning by more people, the involvement of more government entities, diversifying platforms and localisation could also be useful for future sessions, Mr Salem says in a report on the brainstorming project.

Sixty per cent of the population actively use social media, and to maintain the long-term benefit of the brainstorming initiative, citizen engagement “should not be a one-time event”, Mr Salem says in his report. “It should only mark a beginning.”

Saeed Al Dhaheri, an independent researcher who spoke at the conference, expects more brainstorming sessions and a framework on them in the future.

“I think this will be institutionalised in the Government and will be government practice in the future,” he said

That could have a “profound” effect on citizens. “People will feel that they are part of the development – that they are responsible for voicing their opinion and engaging with the Government.”

More than half the responses in the brainstorming project were from women, which surprised researchers because less than 30 per cent of social media users are female.

Mr Al Dhaheri said this showed that brainstorming sessions could be a more effective way of crowd-sourcing ideas from not only women, but other social groups.

Government entities should create a risk-management plan for the sessions, he said, because hashtag campaigns such as the brainstorming session can be hacked.

Critical responses should also be welcomed and officials could use the opportunity to clarify issues with citizens, said Mohammed Al Marzooqi, a columnist at Emarat Al Youm.

“Negative tweets are quite important in any hashtag campaign because we don’t want a rosy picture,” he said. Constant praise of the health sector and the UAE in general was pointless, he said. “The hashtag in the end gave an opportunity even for those complaining of the situation, whether in health or education, to have a fruitful result of their complaint, and in itself I think this is an achievement.”

The initiative produced ideas for programmes including health institution evaluation and a teacher career progress system.

One tweet, from Omar Al Hamadi, an Emirati doctor, led to the creation of a medical board, Mr Salem said.

“That tweet in a few days was grasped by the Cabinet and was developed into an actual decree.”

The case was an example of how the brainstorming enabled citizen interaction with Government and better idea-gathering for services, Mr Salem said.

“It ended up from a tweet into an actual idea on the ground that all doctors were for years asking for, but there were not proper channels to reach to the Cabinet of the Government.”