Harnessing the cloud for citizen engagement
By 2050, 70 percent of the world’s population will be living in urban areas. As cities around the globe become more crowded, it’s critical that governments proactively engage citizens so they can direct their limited resources to meet the needs of a growing population.
With today’s digital technology, governments can more easily connect with the citizens they serve. They can monitor citizens’ social media conversations to better understand their interests and concerns. They can encourage citizens to ask questions and express their opinions. And they can create shared workspaces that inspire like-minded citizens to connect and work together to solve some of their most pressing problems.
Over the past several years, governments around the world have been turning to social media to engage citizens in the political process. A great example is President Barack Obama’s #SOTU Twitter hashtag set up to give citizens a voice during his 2016 State of the Union address. The hashtag drew nearly 2.6 million tweets from 642,000 Twitter accounts, his most popular annual address on Twitter during his eight-year presidency. Like the Obama administration, governments around the world are tapping into social media to better understand citizens’ concerns. And with tools like Microsoft Social Engagement, they can easily track and analyze these online conversations to ensure their priorities are aligned with the citizens they serve.
Another way in which governments are engaging citizens is by enlisting them to solve urban problems. For example, the Government of Telangana in India and Microsoft recently hosted Open Hack, an open source hackathon that brought together local developers to create digital solutions based on the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform. The six solutions that best promoted the state government’s digital initiatives were selected for further development, helping the government to spur economic development while operating more efficiently. By forming public-private partnerships such as this, governments can establish forums for citizens to coproduce services, which is what citizen engagement is all about.
Microsoft is partnering with governments around the globe as they work to increase citizen engagement—and the approach we offer is human-centered, inclusive, and resilient. We are a global company that understands that the way to promote citizen engagement differs from region to region around the world. And we offer a resilient cloud platform that allows governments to continue to reach out to citizens even in the event of an environmental or physical disaster.
In the end, cities that proactively engage citizens will develop a higher level of trust. And now more than ever, governments have the tools they need to foster that collective conversation. To learn more about how Microsoft’s technology solutions can help engage citizens, please see our Microsoft in Government website. Interested in more? Request access to one of our available trials: Azure Government Trial, Office 365 Government Trial.
