Guest Editorial

摘要

At the first European Conference on Social Media in Brighton in July 2014, the two guest editors of this special issue hosted a mini track on e-participation and democracy. The mini track ran for the two days of the conference, across the full program, proving to be an extremely popular topic of interest, provoking discussion and the generation of further ideas for research. Within the context of this conference, we heard papers focused on the impact of e-participation and democratic processes at national governmental level (Mundy and Asmi, 2014; Arslan et al., 2014); use of social media by local government and public organisations (Warren et al., 2014; Bayerl et al., 2014); critique of the use of the social web to support policy, citizen-based movements and processes (Preece et al., 2014; Bowser et al., 2014; Fernandez et al., 2014; Keshtiban, 2014; Planosi and Bull, 2014; Ellison and Orchard-Webb, 2014; Ronzhyn, 2014); and a small number of additional related papers (Barrett, 2014; Magnusson, 2014).