Policy making 2.0: From theory to practice

• We analyze an advanced centralized cross-platform approach to social media use by government agencies in policy making.
• We develop for this purpose a multi-dimensional evaluation framework including technological, political and organizational perspectives, based on theoretical foundations from different domains.
• The analysis conducted highlighted strengths and weaknesses of the proposed approach.

Government agencies are gradually moving from simpler towards more sophisticated and complex practices of social media use, which are characterized by important innovations at the technological, political and organizational level. This paper intends to provide two contributions to the current discourse about such advanced approaches to social media exploitation. The first is of practical nature and has to do with assessing the potential and the challenges of a centralized cross-platform approach to social media by government agencies in their policy making processes. The second contribution is of theoretical nature and consists in the development of a multi-dimensional framework for an integrated evaluation of such advanced practices of social media exploitation in public policy making from technological, political and organizational perspectives, drawing from theoretical constructs from different domains. The proposed framework is applied for the evaluation of a pilot consultation campaign conducted in Italy using multiple social media and concerning the large scale application of a telemedicine program.