Online Idea Management for Civic Engagement: A Study on the Benefits of Integration with Social Networking

Idea Management (IM) has increasingly been adopted in the civic domain as a tool to engage the citizenry in processes oriented toward innovating plans, policies, and services. While Idea Management Systems (IMSs), the software systems that instrument IM, definitely help manage this practice, they require citizens to be committed to a separate virtual space for which they need to register, they must learn how to operate it, and they must return to it frequently. This article presents an approach that integrates IMS with today’s most popular digital spaces of participation, the social networking sites, thus enabling citizens to engage in IM processes using ordinary tools and without having to step outside their daily habits. Our goal is to reach out and pull into IM those large and demographically diverse sectors of the society that are already present and participating in social networking sites. Through a real case study of IM in the public sector that mixed both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods, our proposal demonstrates a promising approach to reduce the barriers of participation. We conclude with an analysis of the strengths and limitations of our proposal.