# A Method for Assessing the Performance of e-Government Twitter Accounts
## 3 E-Government Twitter Social Networks  
In the e-government context, Twitter and other social media serve as platforms for sharing information on key political developments, engaging the public, exchanging views, increasing participation, and stimulating political debates [35; 36]. The functions identified by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) [37] as the stages in the development of policy making are information, consultation, and active participation. Information flows in one direction, from the government to citizens. Governments disseminate information on policy-making on their own initiative--or citizens' access information upon their demand. Consultation is a limited two-wayrelationship between government and citizens. Governments ask for citizens' views, questions, criticism to bodies of administration and receive citizens' feedback on policy-making. Finally, active participation is an advanced two-way relation between government and citizens based on the principle of partnership. Citizens themselves take a role in the exchange on policy-making. At the same time, the responsibility for policy formulation and final decision rests with the government. In Twitter, at the information stage, administrators of governmental accounts should strengthen popularity and activity of the accounts. At the next stage, efforts should focus on strengthening the influence of the account through the increased diffusion and penetration of the messages [22; 34]. Thus, consultation can be measured by the response of the users to the messages of each government agency through the responses they produce. Through the acts of following, mentioning, replying, and retweeting, discussion may be promoted in Twitter, small or larger networks of users may be constructed, communities may be formed, and consultation may be lead to the next stage of active participation. Communities have the ability to sustain member relations, affect the individual-group interactions [38] and increase opportunities for citizens to participate and collaborate in government public service delivery. Through the communities that are formed, a message may be distributed and receive attention from an amount of users even though they are not followers of the account that made the tweet [39]. In this vein [PERSON] and [PERSON] [22] noted: \"the further the content is spread, the further the influence of the user reaches\". This paper, in addition to activity and popularity of the accounts, explores whether potential communities of citizens, who follow governmental Twitter accounts, are formed. In this way it takes into consideration the status of the proposed stages of governmental Twitter accounts presence; information diffusion and community formation and discussion. Then, it uses the properties of the formed communities in the ranking system. Twitter, as any other social network, can be represented by a graph as a set of nodes (accounts) and of directed edges that represent how the nodes are related. The nodes in a network can be connected by very short paths. Two properties of community formation are considered: small-worlds and homophily. Small-worlds and homophily are considered a state of the art methodology to explore community formations. Small-worlds are networks where each actor can practically reach any other actor in a small number of steps. The property of a social network to be so rich in short paths is known as the small-world phenomenon [40]. Such networks are crucially important for communications [41] as information spreads far faster than in a network where the paths between nodes are relatively long [42; 43].