A Social Networking Adoption Model for Communication and Collaboration in e-Government

The use of social networking as a tool for information dissemination, collaboration, community creation, and feedback has proceeded at an extraordinary pace, yet no comprehensive adoption model for government organizations exists. Such a model is needed to help government organizations weigh the benefits and risks associated with the use of public (external) social networking applications (SNA's) and it would serve as a basis for the custom design of private (internal) social networking applications tailored to specific types of government organizations. Reliance on readily available SNA services such as Facebook and Twitter poses a number of challenges for government organizations related to privacy, security, and potential negative unintended consequences of their adoption. The intent of the model proposed in this paper is to assist in the development and use of custom SNA's with high value and low risk. We provide illustrations of each factor and its attributes as well as a discussion of how each can be viewed from an adoption perspective in a government setting. In addition, the paper contains commentary on tools used in social network research, an overview of the mathematical foundations of social network applications, and illustrative cases involving the use of SNA's at various levels of government accompanied by an evaluation relative to the proposed model.