The Government on Thursday 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.
To enable and support this goal, the citizen engagement framework for e-Governance projects has been developed for all government agencies, 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 is being used across the world by different government agencies. It is believed that the framework and guidelines will be useful for departments and agencies in formulating their own strategies.
It will help them in engaging in a more fruitful manner with their respective stakeholders, the DeitY said.
It said that 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 to 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. In order 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.
Awareness and communications in e-Governance is a priority area to ensure wide spread dissemination of e-Services and service access channels. DeitY has been mandated to enhance visibility of e-Services enabled under National e-Governance Plan (NeGP).
Also, there was an immediate need to create framework for citizen engagement and use of Social Media which would enable government agencies to undertake meaningful engagement with citizens as well as leverage Social Media platforms more effectively for such engagements, it added.