BeWell: A Sentiment Aggregator for Proactive Community Management

Abstract

Granular, localized information can be unobtrusively gathered to assess public sentiment as a superior measure of policy impact. This information is already abundant and available via Online Social Media. The missing link is a rigorous, anonymized and open source artefact that gives feedback to stakeholders and constituents. To address this, BeWell, an unobtrusive, low latency multi-resolution measurement for the observation, analysis and modelling of community dynamics, is proposed. To assess communal well-being, 42 Facebook pages of a large public university in Germany are analyzed with a dictionary-based text analytics program, LIWC. We establish the baseline of emotive discourse across the sample, and detect significant campus-wide events in this proof of concept implementation, then discuss future iterations including a community dashboard and a participatory management plan.