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What is a Padget?
A padget is a resource (application or content), typically instantiating within a social media platform, created by a policy stakeholder, providing interactivity with the citizens.
From the policy maker’s perspective a padget can take the shape of a micro application that he/she can set up easily and without explicit technical knowledge in a web environment. A padget allows him to concentrate in it a policy message, through various content types, and disseminate it uniformly across his social media channels, thus avoiding a considerable degree of fragmentation. In addition, a padget allows him/her to keep track of and analyze users’ reactions and feedbacks to his/her policy message.
From the end-user perspective, a padget is represented as connected content (title, post, links, images, video) generated by another user (the padget initiator) and expressing a certain policy. End-users can access this information easily within their social media platform of choice (i.e. in Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs) and react to it using the standard activities provided by the corresponding platform. Therefore they can choose to express their opinion or perform several other allowed activities (for example sharing, endorsing, commenting, disapproving) seamlessly without having to access any external environment or tool. Additionally, end-users can also come across a padget over a web application environment, i.e. website widgets, native applications for iGoogle or a mobile application for iPhone or Android phones. In this case a padget is a web micro application that conveys to them the policy message of the policy maker and provides them with specific functionalities for reacting to it (i.e. questionnaire, poll functionalities).
A padget is composed of four main components as illustrated in the figure below:
- A message, that is a policy in any of its stages and forms
- A set of interaction services, that allows users to interact with the policy gadget (find it, access its content, comment its content, share it etc.). These interfaces may be provided by either the underlying social media platforms in which the Padget Campaign is launched or by the padget itself when it takes the form of a micro application (i.e. in the case of the iGoogle gadget).
- The social context, that is the framework describing the social activity and content relating with the policy gadget in each individual social media platform where the policy gadget is present.
- The decision services, which are offered by two modules. The PADGETS analytics and the PADGETS simulation model.The decision services component is responsible for the generation of the information outputs to be presented to the padget initiator (usually a policy maker).
What tools and methodologies are used?
PADGETS will use publicly available APIs for interconnecting, publishing and retrieving content from underlying social media platforms. The collected information and user activities that policy gadgets invoke in the media platforms will be categorized using semantic tags as to their relation to the policies (e.g. “For”/ “against”/ “neutral” – “relevant to user”/”irrelevant” – “high priority”/”low”/”medium” etc) - in order to help the policy maker form an opinion about what the users think about relevant issues and policies.
How do the users interact with policy makers and therefore assist them in formulating policies?
- ….by accessing a policy message and related content
- ….by giving their opinion to the proposed subject
- ….by retransmitting a policy message
- ….by engaging their online environment to the policy making process
The main strength of the “Policy Gadget” concept is the advantage of engaging users within their preferred and familiar social media environments. The policy message and the means of user response will be implemented through the existing multimedia and interface functionality (images, text, videos, interactive applications, games, maps, etc) of each social media platform.
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