On Joinup, public services, businesses and citizens get together to develop interoperability solutions. We share eGovernment applications, standards and code-lists and encourage others to improve and extend future versions. We are a community of practice, and we aggregate knowledge, news, studies and events. We bring together government digitalisation professionals that use, develop and implement eGovernment solutions. We focus on European public services, but our projects are open to all. Joinup is created by the European Commission. The portal is funded by the European Union via the Interoperability solutions for public administrations, businesses and citizens (ISA²) Programme.
This How-To document presents some guidelines and tips on how to increase awareness of your Collection outside of the portal.
Collaboration with other Collections
Joinup makes it easy for you to reuse the valuable knowledge available on the platform. In your Collection, you can easily share content created by or available in other Collections. Click on “share”, and in the resulting menu, select your own Collection. Using the same link, you can bring your knowledge to other Collections that you have joined.
In this way, you will bridge your Collection with others, and extend and strengthen the network. This collaborative exchange of knowledge and best practices is one of the portal’s purposes.
Use relevant social media channels
Social media is an easy and efficient way to reach new audiences and to raise awareness about your collection. Use these channels to communicate important updates and milestones, and to announce key events. Examples include LinkedIn groups, Twitter and Facebook. Used wisely and, depending on your target audience, these channels can help you attract new potential members to your Collection.
LinkedIn and, to a lesser extent, Twitter give access to groups of eGovernment professionals with a common interests or specialisation. Getting involved in these external conversations is a good way to contact new members, and to promote the Joinup Collections. For this purpose, you can use your own LinkedIn or Twitter account or create a new one that is dedicated to the Collection.
One way to leverage social media is to make use of tags. To attract the attention of professionals interested in a certain topic, use #Hashtags in the message by identifying keywords and adding a ‘#’. On LinkedIn and Twitter, a hashtag is automatically converted into a clickable link, taking users who click on it to a page featuring all the recent tweets with that hashtag. Here is another tip: address a particular opinion leader, a key member, or the Joinup Twitter managers by adding a @ in front of their Twitter name. So, if you want our attention, use @Joinup_eu.
On Twitter, owners or facilitators can interact with the Joinup or ISA² account by tweeting and retweeting, liking and sharing their content.
Similarly, on LinkedIn you can interact with the ISA² programme and the Joinup Community group.
Interact with users
To start a discussion in your Collection, make sure you are signed in with your account, click on the + button in your Collection and select ‘Add discussion’. This will prompt a discussion form. Fill in all the relevant information and confirm by clicking on ‘Publish’ at the bottom of the page.
Once the discussion is published, you may also promote this using the methods described above in this ‘how-to’.