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The presented research demonstrates that e-participation can be viewed and studied not only as technical tools but also in terms of the underlying mediums in which the act of participation unfolds. Informed by the real-world empirical evidence collected with the help of a number of case studies at the level of local municipalities in Russia, we build a model of e-participation ecosystem bringing together three technically different types of communication mediums: Internet websites, social networking media and mobile applications. We begin with the literature review to discuss the changes in the media beyond the web-based Internet itself. After that we describe an ecosystem approach and apply its principles to e-participation, followed by characterizing briefly e-participation research in Russia. In the following chapter we present the research methodology, discuss the obtained results and propose an e-participation ecosystem model. Limitations of the research are also covered.

Part 5: Smart Cities; International audience; The introduction of Smart City technologies is aimed at creating various types of public values, including operational, political and social values. One of the basic values created by the Smart City is the increase in trust by its stakeholders. Trust is often considered as one of the most important factors contributing to the success of Smart Cities. The level of trust affects the interactions between actors, which is the basis for the successful development of a Smart City. Interaction is needed the generation of the required public values. Therefore, it is important to know the sources of trust and the degree of their presence in the city turned into a smart one. This paper describes one of the recent studies of trust factors done within the framework of the “Smart St. Petersburg” development project. The findings show that the willingness to participate in the Smart City’s strategy development discussion and its development plans co-creation highly depends on the willingness to trust municipal authorities and the familiarity with the Smart City’s solutions from around the world.

Part 1: General E-Democracy and E-Participation; International audience; This paper is devoted to the study of methods for assessing the effectiveness of public information systems that can identify the relationship between the characteristics of individual factors of their creation and assess the impact of these factors on their overall effectiveness and ability to create public values. After reviewing, selecting and adapting an evaluation methodology, it was tested with several e-participation portals. This choice was due to both the growing interest in increasing the effectiveness of these portals, and the relative availability of initial information for analysis. During the research, a number of hypotheses were formulated and tested. The results obtained and presented in this paper confirm the suitability of the chosen methodology to solve the stated tasks of effectiveness assessment of government information systems and the influencing factors.

1 The paper presents the main results of an expert survey aimed at determination the factors impacting e-participation development in Russia. The authors conducted an expert poll and systematized experts' assessments and proposals regarding the list of influencing factors and their strength. The list of the most influential factors and accompanying recommendations will help policy makers in their efforts to strengthen e-participation. Russian Federation has been selected as a typical case of a developing country attempting to follow international trends in e-participation development while facing considerable barriers and institutional traps. That is why the obtained results may be of interest to other Eurasian Union countries.

This paper addresses the important issue of open government data (OGD) development evaluation. The overview of existing approaches for open government data evaluation is given in the paper. The authors categorized five groups of OGD assessment approaches: data-oriented, use and user-oriented, program-oriented, scorecard and impact, network and ecosystem. After a brief description of each approach, the authors present recommendations for ways to address the complexity of OGD development.

Informational and analytical activities, as well as forecasting for the processes of socioeconomic development, should be an important element of all levels of governmental administration.

Biometric identification technologies have become very popular in the last ten years. Applications that use biometrics are multiple and can be used for a variety of purposes: from physical access control, to authentication and access to information, recognition of people, etc. E-government is certainly a context where biometrics has a crucial role, because high level of assurance about the identity of citizens is required, whenever they interact by means of digital procedures with the Public Sector. Advanced technologies of digital identity may be seen as a factor influencing the quality improvement and raising the availability of services that require trusted environment.

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of (the theory and practice of) prosperity indicators for assessing the impact of governmental policies and the data sources associated to their calculation, touching also on the broad theme of Open Data which opens up new horizons for the calculation and exploitation of Social Indicators. Following a quick overview of the basics of prosperity indicators, their basic methodological principles and their typology, a presentation of the Policy Compass project approach and the description of its pilot application in St. Petersburg are provided, which are tackling the above mentioned issue with the provision of a powerful ICT platform.

The assessment of the development of the information society could bring information about changes needed for sustainable development. As the information society has grown to become an ever-more critical part of the competitiveness of nations, a wide range of indicators, composite indices and international rankings have been developed to compare national performance. Based on Russia's official targets and documents, four of the leading composite indices on ICT development were selected for analysis: e-Government Development Index, Network Readiness Index, Knowledge Economy Index and ICT Development Index. The researches selected a gap analysis method for describing Russia's weaknesses in world rankings. The study resulted in a list of recommendations to improve information society development in Russia.

This paper describes the experience of ongoing project 'Increasing capacity of local governments in providing e-services in Ida-Virumaa-Leningrad oblast cross-border areas' (ELRII-470), implemented under Cross Border Cooperation Program of the ENPI Estonia-Latvia-Russia 2007--2013. Lessons learned from this project seem interesting to learn and use in similar projects.

This article considers the results of a comparative analysis of three e-petition portals in: Russian, the UK and the USA. The authors have developed a set of comparison criteria and identified similarities and differences in the will expression process development of citizens from various countries on the Internet. The advantages of the UK portal are as follows: simple registration, open petition publishing, clear attachment to the petition-reviewing authority. The US portal is considered to be much more practical when compared to the non-electronic petition filing procedure in the country and, moreover, it continues to collect signatures after the submission to the authority. The Russian portal is notable for its clear separation and representation of initiatives on the federal, regional and municipal levels.

In this paper the analysis of e-governance monitoring methods is given. The article includes international measurement techniques description. The authors introduce expert poll methodology for e-governance development assessment and the results of it's application in Russia.

Electronic governance has received much interest worldwide and a significant amount of attention and money is being put into making e-governance a reality. Proper assessment of e-governance projects gives us crucial information on the kinds of changes needed in order to make them successful.International ratings are extremely important in relation to comparing the achievements of different countries, analysing their experiences and making decisions about further development. On the other hand, a country's ranking position forms or adjusts the world's attitude toward this country.This article discusses the possible problem when a high position in such ranking becomes an aim in itself and determines the misdirection of e-Governance development -- in this, the case we have chosen to study is Russia.

This paper argues that access to public e-services encourages citizen engagement in the e-government policy making processes and the further empowerment of citizens through participation in the democratic processes of developing/transitional countries like Tajikistan. It presents e-citizenship, with e-participation as its driving force, as a phenomenon concerned with the transformation of the citizen's role and status from the e-government periphery to the e-democracy core. This transformation is mainly based on three models of e-participation, namely: push, pull and interactive. To find evidence of this transformation the five distinct types of individual instrumental freedom, identified by Amartya Sen, were tested against these models. An analytical framework, adapted from the Sen's capability approach theory, was applied to analyse the revealed evidence. A profile of e-citizens and their attributes were identified to evaluate their role in Tajikistan.

The paper provides an overview of e-government development within the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). Taking into consideration, the history and specifics of regional cooperation in terms of post-Soviet Union space, as well as best international practices of ICT innovations in regional blocks, the authors conducted research on the progress, challenges and prospects of e-government development in EEU member countries. The research methodology is based on the three stages of regionalism proposed by Van Langenhove and Costea (2005). From measuring the current e-government progress in contemporary EEU economic regionalism conditions, the authors moved to study the challenges that e-governments are faced with. The prospects of e-government that have created possibilities for foreign policies' integration and coherent development of inter-regional relations are also described. The research methodology combined qualitative and quantitative methods, which allowed a quick identification of a comparative progress in EEU countries using international sources and identifying challenges and prospects through an expert survey.

Part 3: Organizational Aspects; International audience; During the last years e-governance is being implemented in many countries. Within the same country, the level of achieved results can vary significantly between sectors. The implementation of e-governance in Republic of Moldova has had a good start, but some stagnation in the implementation of the e-governance agenda is registered. In the educational sector, the implementation is still at the low level. This practical paper surveys the e-tools in the educational sector of the Republic of Moldova, thus revealing the e-governance level of the sector. By comparing with the usage of IT tools in the Swedish educational system, and identifying the benefits and issues met during their development, it proposes a way for future implementation of the e-governance agenda in the educational sector in Moldova. While Moldova as a country has extensive Internet coverage, Sweden was choose for the comparison because of its Internet coverage plus its focus on furthering the skills of its workforce and also the considerable efforts of e-governance agenda implementation.

Part 5: Big and Open Linked Data; International audience; In the public sector, big data holds many promises for improving policy outcomes in terms of service delivery and decision-making and is starting to gain increased attention by governments. Cities are collecting large amounts of data from traditional sources such as registries and surveys and from non-traditional sources such as the Internet of Things, and are considered an important field of experimentation to generate public value with big data. The establishment of a city data infrastructure can drive such a development. This paper describes two key challenges for such an infrastructure: platform federation and data quality, and how these challenges are addressed in the ongoing research project CPaaS.io.

Part 6: Open Government; International audience; Taking a closer look at current research on e-government diffusion shows that most studies or conceptual works deal with citizens as one broad mass that is not further described or divided into smaller subgroups. Such efforts are mainly limited to the digital divide discourse and distinguish at most between haves and have-nots or younger and older parts of the population. Understanding why and how citizens use public online services also requires an understanding of how different segments of the population react to IT in general as well as to e-government in particular. To date, no meaningful attempts to develop such an e-government user typology have been undertaken. Therefore, the study at hand aims at developing a user typology for the e-government context. To this end, we chose an explorative design and conducted a qualitative interview study in Germany in 2016 with 18 respondents from all age groups. We qualitatively analyzed the sample regarding usage behavior, variety of use, and e-government specific uses and perceptions. Our research reveals six user types differing in quality and quantity of use with regard to internet-based technologies in general and e-government services in particular. Understanding how different populations perceive e-government and contextualizing their behavior can help explaining why some citizens are making advanced use of e-government while others widely ignore these services.

Part 6: Open Government; International audience; In this paper, we discuss the topic of governmental transparency, and more specifically in relation to Open Data. We look at governmental transparency in terms of channels, benefits, context, directions, etc., and we argue that there is an emergence of new intermediaries in the domain of governmental transparency, made possible mainly through information and communication technology. We then use the concept of public utility to integrate transparency and open data in a larger governmental perspective and we give a few examples of the use of open data to that effect. We propose an approach to support proactive transparency based on Open Data, based on a “lens” to be used to analyse transparency and open data in given contexts.