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Social Media for Government Services pp 169–196Cite as

Next Step: An Online Community for Delivering Human Services

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Abstract

With the expansion of the Internet, the number of online support groups has grown rapidly, and they have become a serious alternative to face-to-face meetings. Online support groups or communities allow their members to connect and share with others and get the support they need. In our work, in collaboration with a Government Department, we wanted to investigate whether these benefits could also occur in the public administration domain, in particular to support people in receipt of welfare payments. We designed and deployed an online community to support a specific group of welfare recipients. Our intent was to provide them with both informational and emotional support. In this paper, we present the design of the community, with a specific focus on the support it provided its members, together with a qualitative analysis of what happened during our trial. We observed that people found the targeted information and the emotional support they received in the online community useful and that they welcomed it. We also found that the community provided a way for participants to feel heard by the government.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    www.patientslikeme.com/.

  2. 2.

    www.dailystrength.org/support-groups.

  3. 3.

    www.babycenter.com.au/community.

  4. 4.

    http://www.athletenetwork.com/.

  5. 5.

    For example, the page for students, accessed May 7th, 2013. https://www.facebook.com/StudentUpdate.

  6. 6.

    While the original site www.katelundy.com.au/category/campaigns/publicsphere/ is no longer available, a full archive of the original website from when Kate Lundy was Senator for the ACT has been retained by The National Library of Australia through Pandora and is accessible at: pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/38983/20140908-1403/ www.katelundy.com.au/index.html—Accessed September 19th, 2015.

  7. 7.

    TANF: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families: http://www.tanf.us/ (retrieved September 15th, 2015).

  8. 8.

    Work for the Dole (Legislation introduced to Parliament 1997) https://employment.gov.au/work-dole (retrieved September 15th, 2015).

  9. 9.

    http://www.liferay.com/.

  10. 10.

    http://www.liferay.com/community/wiki/-/wiki/Main/Portal+Hook+Plugins.

  11. 11.

    http://www.liferay.com/documentation/liferay-portal/6.2/development/-/ai/leveraging-the-plugins-sdk-liferay-portal-6-2-dev-guide-02-en.

  12. 12.

    https://dev.liferay.com/develop/tutorials/-/knowledge_base/6-2/developing-jsp-portlets-using-liferay-mvc.

  13. 13.

    Nielsen Norman Group. http://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/—Accessed September 14th, 2015.

  14. 14.

    All posts are reported verbatim.

  15. 15.

    http://provalisresearch.com/products/qualitative-data-analysis-software/.

  16. 16.

    We also observed 341 positive ratings, another form of support from members to each other.

  17. 17.

    We had a high level of inter-annotator agreement, ranging from 87 % to 100 % depending on the categories.

  18. 18.

    It is also worth mentioning that the moderators did not censor any posts. The only constraint placed on participants (explained in the Terms and Conditions) was not to be abusive towards anyone in the community (a participant or a moderator).

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Acknowledgments

This research has been partially funded under the Human Services Delivery Research Alliance (HSDRA) between the CSIRO and the Australian Government Department of Human Services. We would like to thank P. Aghaei Pour, B. Yan, S. Bista, and N. Colineau for their work on the project, all the staff at the Australian Government’s Department of Human Services for their support in this work, and all our Next Step community members for their invaluable participation and engagement.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CSIRO Data61, Sydney, Australia

    Cécile Paris & Surya Nepal

Authors
  1. Cécile Paris
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  2. Surya Nepal
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Correspondence to Cécile Paris .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. CSIRO Data61, Marsfield, New South Wales, Australia

    Surya Nepal

  2. Services Flagship, CSIRO Data61, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Cécile Paris

  3. RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Dimitrios Georgakopoulos

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Paris, C., Nepal, S. (2015). Next Step: An Online Community for Delivering Human Services. In: Nepal, S., Paris, C., Georgakopoulos, D. (eds) Social Media for Government Services. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27237-5_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27237-5_9

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