DATE / TIME:

2017•10•10    10:00 - 11:00

Location:

Guimarães

Speaker

Ayman Alarabiat is currently a Research Assistant at UNU-EGOV and a PhD student at the Department of Information Systems, University of Minho, Portugal. Prior to joining the doctoral programme, Ayman has worked at several public institutions in Jordan. He has been granted a joint scholarship from Erasmus Mundus (PEACE II program) and from Al-Balqa Applied University (Jordan) to pursue a PhD in September 2014. Ayman is expected to successfully finalize his thesis during the first semester 2017-2018.

Ayman holds a MSc in Electronic Business, College of Business Administration, Mu’tah University, Jordan, and a BSc in Economics, College of Economic and Administrative Sciences, Yarmouk University, Jordan.

Ayman has published some papers in the most reputed conferences in the e-Governance area; IFIP EGOV-EPART 2016; ICEGOV2016; and HICSS 2017. His research interests include, among others, e-Participation, information systems, e-Government, e-Governance, and social media applications.

Abstract

Electronic Participation (e-Participation) initiatives, seen as the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for facilitating citizen participation in the process of policy decision making, have often had a limited success of citizens’ engagement, particularly those initiatives sponsored by governments (government-led e-Participation initiatives). While the rapid growth of using social media networks, specifically Facebook, represented a new promising venue for enhancing citizens’ participation, the problem of low-level citizens’ acceptance and engagement remains.

Since the successful implementation of government-led e-Participation initiatives through Facebook is unlikely to be realized without extensive citizens’ acceptance in the first place, the study argues that the factors influence citizens’ acceptance to engage in such initiatives need to be properly understood and examined. Thus, the study aims at investigating relevant factors that influence citizens’ intention to accept and to engage in government-led e Participation initiatives through Facebook (as a representation of other social media networks).

To move in this direction, the study theoretical foundation is based on the theory of planned behavioural (TPB) − a theory that seeks to understand and predict why a person performs or not performs particular behaviours. The study also follows information system (IS) behavioural science paradigm − a paradigm that focus on how and why a user accept to use or not to use a particular system.

Based on extended TPB − through the incorporation of a set of factors that emerged from related research areas such as sociology, psychology, e Participation, e-Government, political science, IS and information technology (IT) – a citizens’ acceptance model has been developed and validated using data gathered from a survey of 400 Jordanian citizens.

The seminar will present the study findings, which provide several insights about the factors affect citizens attitude and acceptance of government-led e-Participation initiatives through social media and proposes important implications for theory and practice.