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The relationship between citizens and government has been gradually changing from government centered to citizen centered. These changes can be understood from the public value perspective, which is a promising way to foster the use of electronic services (e-services) by citizens. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how key drivers for public value creation can enhance adopting electronic public services by citizens. The use of e-services as a basis for applying smart technologies is also discussed.

A qualitative study based on both a systematic literature review and a case study of an e-service provided by a Brazilian state government.

The study identifies that creating public value happens only after adopting e-services and that public value can be perceived directly by those who use the service or indirectly by the observation of people who have adopted it. A two-dimensional framework showing the direct and indirect factors that drive public value creation is proposed based on the data collection and literature review.

The proposed conceptual framework remains untested and the data collection in the Brazilian context might be a limitation. Other studies could gather data based on the collective uses of e-services.

The framework can be used in other studies concerning public value creation. Public managers might consider its drivers when planning e-services as a way to link them to social, political and collective issues in addition to smart technologies.

This research was conducted to understand how vulnerable communities used social media (SM) tools to face the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Affected by the lack of information and the absence of effective public policies, residents from slums in the city of Rio de Janeiro displayed new and unexpected uses to SM tools to tackle the health and socio-economic impacts of the pandemic.

The research methodology consisted of a qualitative, exploratory study, combining a series of in-depth interviews with the analysis of various posts, containing videos and texts, extracted from SM during the first six months of the pandemic. The data were collected in the context of 10 different communities in Rio de Janeiro city.

In the context of the pandemic, people combined different uses of SM not only to inform themselves and communicate with others but also to articulate and execute fundraising and food donation strategies within vulnerable communities. Accordingly, this SM use is characterized by improvisation, learning by doing and building resilience, which are all constructs related to the concept of bricolage. Users had no specific SM knowledge, and adjusted these technological tools to emergent new activities in practice, which is characteristic of sociomaterial process. In addition to emphasizing the importance of context for the emergence of the phenomenon, this work also highlights reliability, validity and authority as characteristics related to the citizen-led participation approach that was observed.

Future research can develop approaches based on pandemic sociomaterial bricolage (PSB) aspects, which could guide governments and practitioners on building innovative solutions for the use of SM by the population, especially in emergency situations.

This study proposes a framework, termed PSB, to represent SM usage promoted by the pandemic context, which emerged from the triangulation of empirical data and an analysis based on the concepts of bricolage and sociomateriality.