New data sources to indicate levels of active citizenship

Data availability is a general constraint in the generation of indicators for decision-making processes. Web 2.0 technologies offer new potentials of data sources (also considered as big data sources) that needs to be investigated. In our research we focus on indicators of active citizenship as a relevant dimension of social capital that needs to be measured and monitored. Citizens’ participation empowers communities, increasing social capital and reducing possibilities of social exclusion, thus beyond-GDP initiatives consider citizen engagement an indicator of societies’ quality-of-life.
Classical measurements of active citizenship are mainly based on surveys, which are costly and time consuming, and on voter turnout, which temporal availability depends on election periodicity.
Considering that the information publicly available by online social networks may offer a sense of how much citizens are engaged in their communities, our research analyses the potential of the microblogging online site Twitter as unofficial data source to measure active citizenship. As a result, we define a method to use Twitter data to obtain indications of active citizenship that complement the results from official data sources offering a more timely, less costly information, and with higher spatial and temporal resolution.