جوامعی از پشتیبانی خدمات عمومی: مشارکت شهروندان در یادگیری اجتماعی در شبکه های همسالان نظیر به نظیر

New Public Management and bureaucratic models fail to acknowledge the value of peer-to-peer cooperation between citizens as a resource for public service support. Social media enable citizens to create environments for sharing information about public services in Communities of Public Service Support. The success of this model for public service support depends on the availability of communities, the level of active participation, and the information content. This paper presents an empirical study of virtual communities of expats in The Netherlands. Our analysis shows that there is a wide variety of virtual expat communities with a high level of participation and valuable content. We conclude that virtual communities play an important role in public service support since they facilitate social learning between citizens.

Providing public service support in communities of citizens provides a radically different perspective from the New Public Management doctrine and the traditional bureaucratic approach to public services. NPM typically sees citizens as consumers of public services (Barzelay, 2001 and Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2000) while a traditional bureaucratic approach focuses on the legalistic and formal logic of the service provider (Bovaird, 2007). Both approaches have a common focus on the relation between government and citizens and do not consider the relations between citizens. A similar focus on the relation between government and individual citizens dominates the literature on e-government (West, 2005). In contrast, the basic idea behind peer-to-peer support is that citizens contact other citizens with questions regarding public services. This line of thinking is based on ideas about civil society as a sphere of support for citizens (Edwards, 2009). Citizens may be able to obtain useful answers that combine expert information with insightful experiences from others. This approach shifts our attention from interactions between citizens and government to peer-to-peer interactions between citizens in (virtual) communities.

Our study has shown that expat communities generate information that is relevant for public service support and this content is generally of high quality. New Public Management approaches and bureaucratic models indeed neglect the value of this resource. Government can choose to ignore this domain of citizen activities or explore ways of connecting to these active communities. The production of information content is a key activity of government and in this information age this production should not only be structured along the lines of a producer-centric approach. This empirical study of virtual communities of expats showed that digital ties amongst citizens can actually work and provide a valuable addition to the traditional provider-centric approach of public service support.