Twitter-based reporting system for public infrastructure in Saudi Arabia

摘要

In recent years, many governments have adopted the open government concept to serve several purposes such as increasing transparency and facilitating communication with their citizens. One of the aims of open government is to help society by engaging the citizens in the country’s development processes. Citizens' participation is one of the most important factors in improving countries today, and this motivates governments to focus on encouraging their citizens to play a role in the improvement process. In this regard, the citizens can participate in several areas, and problem reporting is one of the most common ways of citizen participation. There are many applications that can perform these tasks in different countries; however the Saudi Arabian government does not currently employ these applications. This paper aims to propose a model and application that allow citizens' participation in reporting problems with public infrastructure. The application can inform the Saudi Arabian government about the problems facing public infrastructure that are encountered everyday by the citizens, such as potholes, graffiti, damaged lights and any broken or dirty streets that need repairing or cleaning. Because of the shortage of classic methods of reporting, this project depends on Twitter as an intermediate platform to collect the citizens' reports and deliver them to the relevant government agencies, due to the large number of Twitter users and problems with communication between government and citizens. The result of the study shows that the proposed application yields significant results with regard to improving services in Saudi Arabia. It helps to improve the quality of public infrastructure, facilitate the communication between government and citizens, and increase transparency by publishing reports and enabling citizens to view them and express their opinions.