Appendix B: glossary of online community engagement tools and applications

The following provides an overview of the tools and applications that can be used for engagement purposes. Practical guidelines on how to use the majority of these tools and applications can be found in the Official use of social media guideline.

Get Involved Online Consultation Toolkit

Get Involved is the Queensland Government's suite of online community engagement tools suited to the capture and reporting of community feedback on public policy. Using the tools the community can:

• participate in forum discussions on particular topics
• participate in government online consultations
• participate in a survey
• provide their opinion through polls
• subscribe to be kept informed about online community engagement opportunities.

Potential uses for engagement

• Get Involved is mandated to provide the online community engagement mechanism for the Queensland Government’s public policy consultations

Benefits

• For the community: a trusted and convenient central reference point for keeping informed about opportunities to influence decisions of the Queensland Government
• For the Queensland Government: A cost effective method to build and deploy online consultation tools to engage with a wide segment of the community

Limitations

• Target audiences need to be aware of the Get Involved website in order to participate
• Not a tool for statistical market research
• Participants may not represent the larger population

Social networks: e.g. Facebook

Social Networks are web-based online communities where users interact and communicate with each other. Facebook is currently the largest social networking site in existence.

Facebook allows members to share personal news, comments, photos, videos and links to content from outside the Facebook system.

Agencies can create a Facebook profile and use it to post information about their events, people, services and activities. People who become fans and friends will be in the loop on their agency's news and can share it in their online sphere.

Potential uses for engagement

• Facebook is good for sharing information about agencies and making announcements
• Could be used by agencies to gauge public opinion on topics by finding out whetherpeople 'like' or 'dislike' information posted
• Pages can also attract 'fans'
• Posted comments can generate lively discussion

Benefits

• Content can reach large audiences very quickly
• Fast way to gauge public opinion
• Good way to connect with a broad range of demographics in their own space
• The 'viral' nature of interesting material or referrals from popular people can quickly raise awareness

Limitations

• Not the best tool for reaching discrete targeted audiences
• It is not a useful tool if you need to facilitate or record discussion. There is very little control over comments posted and comments cannot be copied into another format
• Facebook format and user terms are constantly changing

Microblogging sites: e.g. Twitter

Twitter is currently the most well-known and popular micro-blogging application. It is designed as a channel for instant exchange of communications within member-created networks. It allows members to post messages of up to 140 characters. Twitter's value is created as participants post ('tweet') and pass along ('retweet') content of interest. Once members can follow the posts of other members and also collect their own followers along the way, resulting in networks of people with shared professional or personal interests.

Potential uses for engagement

• Twitter is increasingly being used as a news and information channel by business and government agencies
• Government agencies can use Twitter to share updates such as meeting times and locations, bite-sized bits of meeting content, links to new blog posts, announcements and warnings and policy decisions
• Can also be used to gauge interest in topic or subject

Benefits

• Communication by twitter is instantaneous
• You can reach an extensive audience quickly
• A call for responses usually gains a lot of interest
• Not good for specialist issues

Limitations

• You cannot communicate much content (140 characters)
• It is not a useful tool if you need to facilitate or record discussion. There is very little control you can have over comments posted, or the volume of comments posted, and comments cannot be copied into another format

Weblogs

Blogs have become commonplace as a channel for knowledge leaders in specialised fields. Blogs usually involve a monologue by the blogger (which can be text, audio/visual or video) with readers able to respond by adding comments via a web form. A dialogue can develop between the blogger and those who comment but may not. Blogs are often integrated and branded within a website, but sometimes separate.

Potential uses for engagement

• Agencies can host a blog to share news and information about the agency or issues of interest to its clients
• Blogs are also useful for research and for following issues and public perception

Benefits

• Weblogs are good for sharing comprehensive pieces of information
• A good way to frame issues, especially to a target audience that has a specific interest in the issue discussed
• Owner has control over content, and can moderate comments
• Comments can be copied, and therefore recorded

Limitations

• Blogs are quite one-sided. You might not get any comments
• Best when directed toward a small target audiences

Online forums

Online forums are similar to blogs but are dedicated to inviting creative or problem solving input from the public, usually in respect to a particular issue or subject. Forums are usually governed by rules, which the forum owner can govern. Forums enable the owner to communicate a large amount of information, and to get comments from readers about the information provided.

Potential uses for engagement

• Forums are well-suited to consultation and active participation
• Agencies can use a forum provide information about topic, issue or policy and invite discussion and comments from the community
• Forums work well if the target audience has indicated they are interested in providing input through a forum
• They tend to work best when framed around issues that are of key interest to the audience
• Forums can attract quality responses which are useful for policy formulation

Benefits

• Forums enable you to communicate large amounts of information
• Good for more targeted consultation
• There is a strong likelihood that you receive quality responses which are useful for policy formulation
• Comments can be copied
• Forums are usually governed by rules, which the forum owner can develop

Limitations

• You may need to use an online facilitator to get the most out of comments and prevent discussion from going off-track
• Not useful for sharing information to a high volume of people
• Most people will view information and comments, but not comment themselves
• The a-synchronous nature of the forums means that days or even weeks may go by between comments within a particular discussion thread

Wikis

A wiki is an online resource that allows users to add and edit content collectively. This results in what is essentially collaborative authoring, or virtual collaboration. Changes can be controlled, tracked and reversed by the wiki owner. Using a wiki is similar to emailing a document out and asking for others to provide changes or comments, but these are made and saved in one document that is accessible online to all those invited to participate. Comments and edits facilitate the sharing of expertise among participants. Wikis can be created as part of an organisations online space or a web-based application can be used.

Potential uses for engagement

• for purposes such as collecting input from the public, managing knowledge within a project team or inviting participatory review
• It is especially useful when targeted tospecialists in the field
• Wikis provide a good platform for active participation

Benefits

• advantage of being able to put many ideas together and then going back to edit them when necessary or when time allows
• By using a wiki one user can share his or her workwith all of the users at one time
• All the drafts of a document are saved, and it is possible to go back and retrieve previous versions
• A wiki can be protected with a password if access restrictions need to be applied

Limitations

• Wikis do not manage themselves. If no one is keeping tabs on the content, it may turn into one big 'idea mess'
• Wikis require the users to be fairly tech-savvy
• A wiki is a web based document which means that what you put up into cyberspace can be found by other people. If you are working on a project that you really don't want others to see, you may not want to use a wiki

Video-sharing websites: e.g. YouTube

YouTube is a video based social network, originally developed for anyone to share video content. Organisations can create a 'channel' and post their video content there. An organisation's YouTube channel home page keeps track of the number of videos posted, the number of views, and the number of channel subscribers. Once posted, video content can be pulled into windows on the agency's website, blogs etc. Viewers may receive an e-mail link from a friend, encounter the video on a website or blog, or find a particular video by searching the YouTube index. Viewers are able to comment on the video content.

Some organisations have set up their own video-sharing websites in order to protect intellectual property.

Potential uses for engagement

• YouTube allows longer-form videos, which enables lengthy explanations of policy in a relaxed style
• It can also be useful for shorter promotional purposes

Benefits

• A good tool for promoting and explaining issues
• Provides an alternative to text-based explanations and formal documents
• Because it is visual, there can be more context provided, which is often missing in online communications
• Can be embedded into other websites, forums or blogs

Limitations

• YouTube videos tend to attract a large number of inappropriate or malicious comments. Agencies will therefore need to monitor comments carefully
• YouTube cannot protect intellectual property rights over any content. Video content may therefore be copied or altered by others
• To ensure accessibility, transcripts and captions may need to be provided

Tools used for interactivity

The tools and applications in the table above can be supplemented with various features to enhance interactivity. Some of these are briefly described below.

Voting and rating systems

These are commonly used on e-commerce platforms as recommendation engines. Users are invited to indicate their support, or otherwise, of a product in a binary fashion or by applying a numerical rating.

Tagging

Tagging is widely employed on blogs and social networks and allows users to categorise text and other artefacts with descriptive keywords. This permits search and aggregation based on the tags applied.

RSS and Atom feeds

Users can subscribe to these feeds to be alerted when items of interest to them are published on a website, blog or social network. Feeds enable content to be drawn from a variety of trusted sources and aggregated together for ease of reading by the user.