aes18 International Evaluation Conference

Tanja Porter (ACIL Allen Consulting)

It's been almost a decade since the Australian Government announced that social media would revolutionise how citizens engage with government and would lead to a raft of improvements in policy making and service delivery. Today, social media features in most government interactions with citizens - from managing expectations about hospital waiting times, to taking reports on pot holes that need fixing, or consulting on tax policy reform. 

How do we evaluate the impact of government activity that involves social media? Commonly we use the data generated by social media (hits, likes, shares, etc.) and draw conclusions about outcome and impact based on these measures of popularity and 'reach'. Social media measurement tools and dashboards make it increasingly easy to do so.

Drawing from case studies of social media in the development of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and the 'one punch' laws in NSW, my research shows that this data disguises the complexity of citizen-government interactions on social media. Evaluations relying on social media data alone are blind to context and power relations and can result in inaccurate appraisals of an activity's outcome or impact. 

Introducing the concept of 'deliberative systems' and the emerging techniques of 'digital ethnography', and by applying them to the same two case studies, this presentation will show how evaluators can achieve far richer, and more nuanced insights of citizen-government interactions through social media.