The Government has approved and notified two frameworks to ensure effective citizen engagement and communication with all stakeholders using various offline as well as online channels, including social media.
Citizen participation
To support this goal, the citizen engagement framework for e-Governance projects has been developed for all government agencies, the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) said. “There is now a consensus that citizen participation and civic engagement are the building blocks for good governance and e-Governance is a critical component of good governance,” it said in a statement.
Social media are being used across the world by different government agencies. It is believed the framework and guidelines will be useful for departments and agencies in formulating their own strategies.
It will help them engage in a more fruitful manner with their respective stakeholders, the DeitY said. It said the guidelines will enable the various agencies to create and implement their own strategy for the use of social media.
“The document will help them make an informed choice about the objective, platforms, resources, etc to meet the requirement of interaction with their varied stakeholders,” it said.
The guidelines provide in-depth review of types of social media, their characteristics and challenges in their uses.
To assist the departments to undertake such an engagement, the document provides for a framework and detailed guidelines governing each element of the framework, the Department said.
Priority area
Awareness and communications in e-Governance is a priority area to ensure widespread dissemination of e-Services and service access channels and DeitY has been mandated to enhance visibility of e-Services enabled under the National e-Governance Plan.