Introduction to the Social Media in Government Minitrack.

Social media in government is one of the most recent fields of research in e-Government. It focuses on government adoption and use of social media platforms - Periscope, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook - including their use on mobile devices. Opportunities for users to interact with and share government information have increased through the use of social media platforms. At the same time public administrations are creating and receiving massive amounts of new data from internal agencies and external stakeholders, including citizens. The purpose of this mini-track is to understand the use and social impacts of these media on related e-government areas, such as open government, open data, and information policies.. This mini-track welcomes papers with an empirical, theoretical, or conceptual contribution that show the role of social media, particularly in the context of citizen participation and electronic government. Our topics include case studies, applications (apps), user experience, prediction of events such as elections, privacy, guidelines and policies for social media use, mobile location sensing, disaster management, and implementation challenges. This year’s mini-track attracted four paper submissions, from which two were selected for presentation at the conference. The two are briefly summarized here.