Models for Facilitating Social Engagement through Online Media

The final speaker in this ECREA 2014 session is Nico Carpentier, whose interest is in how civil society uses online media to facilitate social engagement. This addresses the problems with much current debate, which is either outright utopian or speaks forever in potentialities. A solution to this is to focus on a discourse based on the diversity of possible models.

Online media, civil society, and social engagement are the defining concepts for this inquiry. The project began with a conceptual map, identified good practices in international and Belgian civil society organisations, and engaged with Belgian CSOs to gather what they thought was good practice. This resulted in some 176 possible concepts.

The typology which emerged from this contained internal, internal/external, and external dimensions (relative to the organisation itself), as well as dimensions of access (to information), (communicative) interaction, and participation (in decision-making). These different dimensions may be combined with each other in a range of ways, and there is a great number of examples for how these possible combination are carried out in actual practice.