Flores et al. Twitter as communication channel for popular participation Proceedings of the Nineteenth Americas Conference on Information Systems, Chicago, Illinois, August 15-17, 2013. 1 Strategic Digital City: Techno-social Network Twitter as Communication Channel for Popular Participation in City Comprehensive Plans Research-in-Progress Carla Cavichiolo Flores Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná carla@copta.com.br Denis Alcides Rezende Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná denis.rezende@pucpr.br ABSTRACT The need for action towards an effective popular participation in public policies requires focus on citizens participating in decision-making. This paper aims at analyzing the use of the techno-social network Twitter as a communication channel for popular participation between government and municipal citizens. This research is applied in its nature and exploratory in its aim. A case study is underway in the municipality of Curitiba, state of Paraná, Brazil. First results let us suggest that the techno-social network Twitter has attributes that augment the communication between government and citizens for the spreading abilities inherent in network environments where information may traffic along many levels and in multilateral directions among users. Keywords Digital city, strategic digital city, information and communication technology, techno-social network, city comprehensive plans. INTRODUCTION The need for actions focusing on citizens as agents taking part in decision-making for an effective popular participation in public policies becomes urgent, as citizens should be the ones to determine the demands to be equated by the State (Souza, Rezende and Hardt, 2007). Aiming at this purpose, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can play a significant role as they are capable of augmenting the communication and increasing our power to interact “and expand our personal and collective boundaries to a global scale" (Firmino and Duarte, 2010), in such an extent one can assume that policies that have created arenas for public participation in no way could antedate the appearing of the Internet with features providing people of similar beliefs with the possibility of communicating in such a velocity and over large distances (Ingram and Schneider, 2008). Regarding this matter, on the one hand, Norris (2001) and Egler (2007) show the ‘enthusiasts’ standpoint to whom information technology promises to offer new ways of communication which enhance the deliberation in the public sphere. Norris (2001) also talks about the Internet as a two-way communication channel that may reinforce links between citizens and intermediary organizations while Gomes (2005) sees it as a multilateral channel where information and communication flow reflecting a political structure, which assumes that the civil sphere may influence on policy-making. Therefore emerges the hypothesis of a new kind of democracy, a virtual environment forged by the Internet for people that share common interests: a Virtual Agora (Braga, 2006). In contrast, cyber-pessimists suggest that, rather than transform, the Internet will keep the same patterns of public participation and, furthermore, will deepen the gap between the engaged and the indifferent (Norris, 2001; Gomes, 2007). But such a change of the public space, result of the Internet environment, requires continuous research (Sorj, 2006). This paper aims at analyzing Twitter as a communication channel for popular participation in city comprehensive plans for strategic digital cities trying to answer the research question: “Which attributes of the techno-social network Twitter may augment the communication between the municipal government and its citizens? A case study is under way using the official Twitter account of the municipality of Curitiba, state of Paraná, Brazil and first results presented in this paper refer to a pilot research.