Integrating data from user activities of social networks into public administrations

Linking social networks with government applications promises various benefits, such as improving citizens’ public engagement, increasing transparency and openness in government actions, and new or enhanced government services. The research goal is to drive innovation in governments through the integration of user activities from social networks into government applications. Instead of using third-party social media tools, we call for self-developing integration software, so that the government retains full control of the sensitive government data that is linked to social network user data. Following a design science approach, we developed a data model of user activities in social networks. Our 40 user activity types conceptualize the common fundamental data structure and are a means for comparing current features of ten prominent social networks. We find that a substantial share of user activities can be mutually integrated by wrapping social network Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).