Search

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.

Part 4: Case Studies; International audience; This paper discusses the results of a survey on a concrete case of eParticipation, i.e. a campaign to get teenagers to participate in the Youth Council of the City of Lausanne. We analyse both the traditional tools (billboard ads, newspapers, official communication through schools) and the online tools (Web page, Facebook, YouTube). During our survey we used mixed methods: an online questionnaire (1360 respondents), documentary analysis of the Youth Council candidates’ application files, and interviews. We then analysed the impacts of the campaign in terms of participation under different angles, amongst other diffusion channels and use of humour.

Part 2: Digital Transformations; International audience; In the last decade, effectiveness, efficiency and quality have been main objectives in the transformation of government services. Citizen orientation can be seen as the crucial driver behind these objectives. A contemporary theme in all of this is about proactive services. Proactive services switch the service delivery from reactive to proactive, thereby, promising a yet unforeseen level of quality. In this paper, we ask how to successfully design proactive business event services in the Estonian company registration portal. We investigate current problems of this e-service as encountered by Estonian entrepreneurs. We conduct qualitative interviews with experts from the government and micro-business owners that use the registration portal. Based on the findings, we give a set of recommendations for designing proactive business event services in the public sector.

Part 1: eParticipation Developments; International audience; In order to motivate diverse user groups to participate in e-participation, platform designers are keen to offer attractive communication formats in combination with modern tools and suitable forms of online identification. This does not come without difficulties, as individual users prefer different solutions. Research on tools and electronic identification in this context has investigated the appropriateness of different e-IDs for different stages of e-participation. In this respect, this paper offers three contributions to questions of technology application and acceptance in e-participation: Firstly, it showcases two scenarios from a platform simulation on different levels of e-participation. Secondly, the authors present results on the acceptance of these scenarios and tools based on questionnaires and usability tests. Thirdly, viewpoints from interviews with key stakeholders for e-participation in governance and politics are included. Results shall be useful for the future design and implementation of e-participation platforms.

Part 1: eParticipation Developments; International audience; The first ePart conference was organized in Linz in 2009, co-located with the longer-running eGov conference, which at the time was in its 7th year. Since then, we have seen ten conferences focusing on eParticipation research. In this paper, we summarize these ten years by examining authors, keywords and prominent themes of the conferences. Our starting point is two early papers on eParticipation, which aimed to provide an overview and agenda for the field. We show how the eParticipation community addressed this agenda, and how the agenda has changed over a decade of eParticipation research.

Part 2: Digital Transformations; International audience; Advances in Artificial Intelligence technologies have revived the interest in Chatbots in both the private and the public sector. Chatbots could improve public service delivery by being able to answer frequently asked questions and conduct transactions, relieving staff from mundane tasks. However, previous e-Government research shows that the adoption of newer technologies does not always mean public services get improved. It is therefore of interest to research to which degree newer, advanced technologies such as Chatbots are able to improve, change and restructure public service delivery. This paper gives an exploratory insight using desktop research into three Chatbots currently used in the public administrations of Latvia, Vienna and Bonn. The findings suggest that minor organisational changes are accompanied with the introduction of Chatbot-technology in public administrations, but question whether Chatbots are able to transform traditional services to digital, integrated public service transactions.

Part 4: User Perspectives; International audience; This article seeks to understand how eParticipation can boost individual capabilities in an ICT4D context. The analysis has regard eParticipation as a mechanism for expanding capabilities since it increases the democratic and participatory involvement of individuals in society. To this end, we examined the eParticipation field according to Sæbø et al. [18] and Medaglia [11], combining the capability approach from Sen’s [21] and Nussbaum’s [15] perspectives. Although the literature recognized that the capability approach is particularly difficult to operationalize in practice, we discovered some mechanisms in the eParticipation literature to support our analysis. However, despite its apparent benefits, eParticipation can indirectly contribute toward increasing inequalities among people since it is not available to all. We believe that recognition of the inequalities generated by the digital divide and the subsequent decrease in eParticipation could lead to a better understanding of the ICT4D context and assist in public policy-making.

What are the determinants of social media adoption by local government? This ongoing research provides a tentative answer to this question by analysing the 308 municipalities in Portugal. Extending previous analyses of Facebook and/or Twitter usage levels, we examine why local governments adopt a particular social media platform. More concretely, we explore, with statistical analyses, the determinants of the adoption of different types of social media. We investigate the adoption of three extremely popular social media (i.e. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) as well as possible alternatives to those, more popular, applications. Since these platforms have distinct natures and can serve diverse purposes, we examine to what extent aspects such as local government’s commitment to transparency and participation, administrative capacity, media landscape, and socio-demographic and economic factors can explain the adoption of certain social media platforms. The results show that, indeed, demographic characteristics and administrative capacity are important factors for the adoption of less popular social media. Surprisingly, we also observe a geographical difference in municipalities’ social media adoption, with the south, in this regard, being ‘trendier’, or more innovative, than the north., This paper is a result of the project “SmartEGOV: Harnessing EGOV for Smart Governance (Foundations, methods, Tools)/NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000037”, supported by Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (EFDR). António Tavares acknowledges the financial support of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science through national funds [Grant No. UID/CPO/0758/2019].

Part 4: User Perspectives; International audience; Despite the importance of citizens as users of digital public services, e-government research has not explicitly considered different perspectives on citizens as users of said services. This paper sets out to explore the possible variations in which the citizen as a user of digital public services is conceptualized within the e-government literature. Through a qualitative and interpretive approach, we have analysed literature from different fields of e-government research to create an overview of how citizens as users of digital public services are conceptualized in e-government research. The structure of the review departs from, and is framed by, four established value paradigms for e-government management. Our approach reveals that – depending on the perspective taken – the conceptualization of the citizen varies considerably and, as a consequence, may impact the results and contributions of each research perspective. The conception of the citizen as a user of digital public services varies from being a passive recipient of government services, to being an active co-producer of services. This article contributes to e-government theory by unboxing the conceptions of citizens as users of digital public services that are existent in current research on digital public services. In providing a framework that relates these conceptions to previously known value paradigms, the article offers a starting point for taking a multidimensional perspective in e-government research that considers the citizen as a multifaceted and heterogeneous entity.

Part 1: eParticipation Developments; International audience; Balancing between online-offline stages of participatory procedures is a delicate art that may support or hinder the success of participatory democracy. Participatory budgeting (PB), in particular, is generally rooted in online platforms, but as our case study on the City of Helsinki PB trial suggests, face-to-face events are necessary to engage targeted and often less resourceful actors in the process. Based on a longer-term participant observation, covering the PB process from its early to ideation phase to the current stage of proposal development for the final vote, we argue that the process has thus far been successful in blending online-offline components, largely supported by the active support of borough liaisons who have served as navigators between the different stages. From the point of view of co-creation, different stages of the PB process (ideation, co-creation) call for different strategies of online-offline participation. Effective mobilization of marginalized actors and interactions between public servants and citizens seem to benefit from face-to-face processes, while city-wide voting and discussion can effectively occur in the online platform.

Part 3: Crisis and Emergency Management; International audience; One of many contemporary public-sector challenges is the increasing socio-economic gaps and excluded areas in many cities worldwide. This study explores ICT-enabled citizen co-production using volunteers as first responders in excluded areas near Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. The study indicates that these volunteers can make a major difference if arriving first at an emergency site, e.g. saving lives by administering CPR and extinguishing fires before they spread. Major challenges relate to individual versus collective engagement, gender aspects and language barriers. Current ICT support, in the form of text messages or a basic app, is deemed sufficient but, for the initiative to expand and enable long-term effective engagement, calibrated solutions matching competence, role and language with incident and area are needed. In a public-sector innovation context, the study highlights the need for future research on digitalized co-production with an explicit focus on the ICT artifact and its co-creation artifact as catalysts for change. In relation to this, this study confirms previous research arguing for the merging of policy science and information systems research in an era of rapid digitalized public-sector transformation, but adds that they need to be complemented by perspectives from sociology, e.g. on gender and ethnicity, in initiatives involving citizens in excluded areas.

Part 4: User Perspectives; International audience; Engaging citizens in open data hackathons provides opportunities for innovation and the generation of new services and products. This paper aims to explore the motivations of citizens who engage in open agriculture data hackathons. We conducted a case study and analyzed data collected from 161 participants of 11 farming hackathons held between 2016 and 2018 in the Netherlands. We found that participants of open agriculture data hackathons have different roles, including business developer, concept thinker, data analyst, data owner, developer, manager, marketer, problem owner, and student. Our analysis shows that citizens are predominantly motivated to engage in open agricultural data hackathons as part of their work. Furthermore, developers and problem owners are mainly motivated by fun and enjoyment. This indicates that it is important for open data policymakers and hackathon organizers to consider different approaches based on citizens’ roles when organizing open data hackathons. This paper contributes to the literature by providing insight in the motivations of citizens engaging in open agriculture data hackathons in comparison with hackathons in other sectors, and by mapping citizens’ roles to their motivations for engaging in such hackathons.

Part 4: User Perspectives; International audience; This paper aims to analyze the phenomenon of device divide in the Brazilian context in order to understand how different Internet access devices and sociodemographic factors influence the development of digital skills. The research uses the microdata of 2014 and 2016 editions of a Brazilian nationwide survey named ICT Households survey. The main findings show that mobile devices are widely used by Brazilian Internet users. However, while in upper classes this device plays the role of complementary access to other devices, allowing users to access the Internet using computer and mobile platforms, for lower-income groups mobile is the only means of Internet access, substituting the use of computer equipment. The results also demonstrate that Internet users who access the Internet using both computational and mobile devices exhibit the highest level of digital skills. In contrast, users connecting exclusively via mobile show lower levels of digital skills which might reduce their effectiveness in using the Internet. These outcomes show the relevance of understanding the conditions of Internet access as well as their implication for the development of digital skills and provision of Internet services.

Part 2: Digital Transformations; International audience; It is estimated that during the period 2020–2025, about 30% of the employees at the Austrian Ministry of Defence will retire. This raises the question of how to encourage employees to share informal knowledge in order to successfully embrace organisational change in increasingly digitised environments with a view to retaining them long-term. Through the development of a three-part empirical study, this research paper investigates the role played by informal knowledge sharing networks and social media in expediting digital transformation within a public sector organisation. Our findings show that the public sector stands to benefit from informal knowledge sharing, and that both a permissive organisational culture and the provision of clearly demarcated ‘knowledge sharing spaces’ are fundamental in this respect.

Part 3: Crisis and Emergency Management; International audience; The ongoing digital transformation in government has enabled innovative changes in operational processes and service. However, while e-services and social media are widely adopted, earlier studies indicate that this transformation is still being awaited in other areas, such as crisis or disaster preparedness. Recent events such as the 2018 wildfires in several parts of Europe, as well as empirical research, highlight the need for more (systematic) training of local governments’ crisis management teams. Conventional training methods are time- and space-dependent and require long-term planning, making it complicated to increase the extent of training. In this interdisciplinary study, we report on the results from the Swedish-Norwegian CriseIT project that aimed to develop information systems (IS) for crisis management training. The purpose of the article is to describe information systems designed to support local governments’ crisis management training and to discuss how these artefacts could improve crisis management training practices.

Part 4: Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics and Automated Decision-Making; International audience; Social networks have become an important channel for exchanging information and communication among citizens. Text mining, crowdsourcing and data visualization are some approaches that allow the information and knowledge extraction from texts in comment formats, exchanged between citizens in social networks. This movement can be indirectly used as a bias for popular participation, gaining prominence in the construction of smart cities. The objective of this work is to present a method that geocodes citizens’ comments made on posts in Social Network Pages of Local Government Agencies, and extracts the most frequent topics present in these comments. In order to validate our method, we implemented a web system that implements the steps of the proposed method, and conducted a case study. The tool, and consequently the steps of the presented method, was evaluated by four software developers, which indicated that the tool was easy to use, new knowledge could be extracted from it, and some interesting improvements were pointed out by them.

Part 2: Open Data, Linked Data, and Semantic Web; International audience; This article summarizes the results of a systematic literature review on how the new data technologies affect the public sector and what their impact on governments are. The opportunities and the challenges that public administrations face nowadays in a data-driven world are important. Our research retrieved opportunities related to transparency, innovation, public participation and efficiency, while challenges regarding privacy issues, technical difficulties, data management, cultural and political obstacles were found. By overcoming the challenges and empowering the opportunities for data usability in public sector, exploitation of data could become the foundation for innovation and public sector transformation.

Part 1: General E-Government and Open Government; International audience; Land governance is a complex issue to be addressed in many countries including India. All three branches of the government viz. judiciary, executive and legislature have tried to address the issue in various forms but have failed to achieve the outcomes of development. The failure, or limited success can be attributed to their narrow vision of or focus on the problem. The objectives of land governance have changed over time. With the advent of digitization, land administration has become more efficient and transparent, aiding the managerial process of land records and registration. However, the outcomes of economic, social, human, and cultural development, have been given paltry importance. In this paper we present the cases of Bhoomi and KAVERI, two initiatives to computerize land records and registration in the state of Karnataka, India. We present an ontological framework to envision the big picture in eLand governance. We argue that in achieving the desired outcome, we must see the problem in its entirety without losing focus on its key aspects. Regarding eland Governance, policy instruments, eGovernance, and land governance must work in tandem.

Part 1: General E-Government and Open Government; International audience; The Ministry of Transparency and Comptroller General is the agency of the Federal Government in charge of assisting the President regarding the treasury and public assets and the government’s transparency policies. The Agency takes care of active transparency mechanisms on federal public resources, that is, improves actions related to information the State must disclose, without being demanded for. It establishes ways of assuring information will be appropriated and effectively used by society, including through web applications for citizens. Thus, the Agency is part of a governmental environment in which the complexity of data management involves improvement of information quality and interoperability between systems, as a consequence the need of a capable model to manage all of its data assets rises up. It’s necessary to organize and implement a data management capability that allows understanding (semantic), finding and sharing data. This article describes a research study directed to data management under ontological approach, which proposes an Enterprise Information Architecture Model in the form of a conceptual layer-based data prototype, taking into account both academic and industry-driven studies.

Part 3: Smart Governance (Government, Cities and Regions); International audience; Business-to-government information exchange has over the past decades greatly benefited from data exchange standards and inter-organisational systems. The data era enables a new shift in the type of information sharing; from formal reporting to opening up full (and big) data sets. This enables new analytics and insights by government, more effective and efficient compliance assessment, and other uses. The emphasis here shifts from establishing formats to deciding what information can be shared, under what conditions, and how to create added value. There are numerous initiatives that explore how to put data to better use for businesses, for government and for their interactions. However, there is limited attention to exactly how these new forms of extensive data sharing affects the supervision relationships. In this paper, we exploratively look across three research projects to identify the implications of information sharing beyond the regulatory requirements (‘over-compliant’). We find that the lack of attention to those implications lead to solutions that are hard to scale up and present unexpected consequences down the line, which may negatively impact the future willingness to explore new potential added value of data sharing.

Part 2: Open Data, Linked Data, and Semantic Web; International audience; It is believed that co-creation may lead to public service quality improvements, the provision and creation of new and innovative services, and bring public service providers closer to their service users. There has been an increased interest and focus on how new technological innovations are enabling and facilitating co-creation; one such digital innovation is open government data (OGD). This paper examines a relatively new concept, that of co-created OGD-driven public services and aims to understand how the availability and exploitation of OGD to co-create new public services allows service users to become collaborators rather than customers of public service providers. An exploratory case study is conducted on a pilot project within Estonia where a new public service has been co-created through the exploitation of OGD. The initial results show that in order for an OGD-driven public service to be effectively co-created, a new understanding of the role of stakeholders is needed.

Part 1: General E-Government and Open Government; International audience; Digital image alterations (morphing) of identity document photos is a major concern and may potentially allow citizens with malicious intent to enrol for identity document(s) later to be used also by another individual. Taking the photo in the application office – live enrolment – can address this issue. However, this is a break with tradition and entails a sizeable overhaul in the public sector, which can be reluctant to change and often lacks the necessary formal methods that ensure a smooth transition. The objective of this paper is to map the main barriers and drivers related to live enrolment based on theoretical research and interviews conducted with high-ranking officers at passport authorities in Estonia, Kosovo, Norway and Sweden. These countries have successfully switched to live enrolment. The main driver for live enrolment has been increased security; for Estonia, user convenience was important and was behind the decision of keeping alternative application processes for the citizens around. The absence of legacy systems makes it easier to implement public sector innovations, such as live enrolment. Behind the successful implementation is proper risk management, covering technological, political and organisational risks. Finally, the research results indicate varying experiences, obstacles, cultural differences and trade-offs, emphasizing the need to understand barriers and drivers in a contextualised way.

Part 1: General E-Government and Open Government; International audience; Working with an integrated management system (IMS) is a challenging task. In public organizations, the formalization of an IMS including the communication of control mechanisms, rules, goals and culture are crucial. Several types of carriers are used in order to communicate the content in an IMS – both human actors and artefacts. An artefact studied in this paper is an intranet, as one carrier of the IMS. The purpose of this paper is to explore how institutional theory – focusing institutional carriers – can help us to understand how an IMS is represented through human actors and technology in a government agency. The conclusion is that the application of an institutional carrier perspective on an IMS can help us to understand the past and present, the role, and the relative success of such a system. An IMS can be aligned or misaligned related to three dimensions of structure, process and people. Achieving an aligned and legitimate IMS is crucial in order to achieve goals in an organization. The implications of this study are that further research and practice should give more attention to institutional carriers when studying and improving IMS.

Part 2: Open Data, Linked Data, and Semantic Web; International audience; When focusing on open government data (OGD) publishing and related barriers, there are several complexities present. Largely, current research is focused on publishing and usage of OGD; and we argue that there are a need to investigate and to systematise OGD barrier research in order to understand and outline an expanded scope of the phenomenon. We expand by clarifying barriers linked to the release decision and the data’s organisational context. To investigate the OGD barriers, we conduct a systematic literature review, identifying 34 articles as a point of departure for our analysis. From these articles we create, present and discuss illustrations on historical development, barrier types, and different research focuses on OGD. When analysing the articles, we identify a focus on technical, organisational, and legal barrier types, while studies on open data usage and systems are less frequent. Our analysis also identifies some possible open data research barriers. In the article we also relate barriers to an expanded OGD process (Suitability, Release, Publish, Use, and Evaluation), identifying 46 barriers with possible linkages. The results is an expanded scope and a conceptual illustration of OGD barriers.

Part 1: General E-Government and Open Government; International audience; This paper explores the relationship between electronic government and corruption. Our main hypothesis is that digital government can increase the availability of information on public sector, making it more difficult to engage in corrupt activities without being caught. Our estimations are performed under several alternative methodologies: ordinary least squares, first differences, fixed effects and random effects. Based on a dataset that covers more than 150 counties, we find that a higher E-Government Development Index is associated with better corruption outcomes. Our results are robust to all the methodologies that we have implemented. The quality of telecommunication infrastructures and human capital can amplify the impact of digital government in corruption. We investigate how this relationship varies across income levels. Upper middle income countries are the ones that can extract more benefits from developing digital government. Low income countries should invest in infrastructures and education in order to benefit from electronic government.

Part 2: Open Data, Linked Data, and Semantic Web; International audience; This research paper explores the impact that the access to, and free usage of, stored (mainly public sector) data has on society, the economy and on good governance, together with the implications of this new paradigm for modern-day governments. Although a number of recent research studies attempt to identify the benefits and drawbacks of open data, or to demonstrate its role in governance processes, there exists to-date no systematic attempt to both rigorously survey current literature to enumerate the areas in which open data has had an impact and to discuss its potential as a significant tool for policymaking. To address this research gap, and to highlight its intrinsic value to different actors, we examine the current state-of-the-art on the impacts of open data research and practice through a systematic survey of extant scholarly and practitioner literature. The first part of our study will present a comprehensive overview of the societal, economic, and political impacts of open data. We will then evaluate the new possibilities afforded by open data to policymaking, and conclude with a discussion of its role in open governance.

Part 1: General E-Government and Open Government; International audience; This paper presents selected findings from a recent empirical research conducted in the context of modernization of public administrations. E-government adoption has reached a stagnation point over the last few years in the DACH region. The European Commission has been working intensively on projects aiming to overcome the existing digital barriers between EU Member States. Citizens repeatedly provide the same personal information to different public authorities, which causes frustration and inefficiency. The Once-Only Principle suggests that citizens should have the right of providing information to public authorities only once and that the provided data will be exchanged between national authorities of the EU Member States. By signing the Tallinn Declaration in October 2017, EU Member States have already committed to implement this principle. Sharing personal data of individuals between public authorities within national boundaries as well as with the public administrations of other EU Member States would assuredly ease-up data provision and increase efficiency. Yet, higher convenience comes at a cost of data protection and privacy, which becomes highly critical when sensitive personal data is involved. From this standpoint, a particular emphasis needs to be placed on understanding expectations, sensitivities and privacy related concerns of citizens, which is argued to be one of the key drivers behind the adoption of G2C e-government initiatives.

Part 1: General E-Government and Open Government; International audience; The KaPa (Kansallinen Palveluarkkitehtuuri, in Finnish) program establishes the national e-government service platform in Finland. The platform, Suomi.fi, provides a one-stop portal for citizens and organizations to access both public and related private sector services. This research reports a case study of the platform by analyzing it in light of recent characteristics identified with the emerging concept of Government 3.0: openness and transparency, sharing, increased communication and collaboration, government re-organization through integration and interoperability, and use of new technologies. Our results contribute by concretizing the hitherto abstract and loosely defined concept of Government 3.0 by describing a timely and complex national e-government implementation in detail in light of such characteristics. Our study also suggests three emergent themes in relation to contemporary Government 3.0 characteristics: opening up technologies and solutions in addition to open data, cross-border integration and development, and the enhanced role of the private sector in both development activities and merging into the portfolios of one-stop services.

Part 3: Smart Governance (Government, Cities and Regions); International audience; The growth of smart cities is forcing governments to focus their efforts on the increase of public value creation. Based on prior research, on the perception of smart city practitioners and on an empirical observation, this paper seeks to analyse the public value creation under the context of the smart cities, examining the model of citizen participation and the use of new technologies by city governments in smart cities with the aim at improving e-participation of the citizenry in the public arena. Findings indicate the need for using new technologies to adopt a more participative model of governance, although, nowadays, sample smart cities are not putting available technological tools or promoting citizens to be involved in online public consultations, discussions and petitions.

Part 1: General E-Government and Open Government; International audience; Coordination is a critical enabler when creating and managing coherent, integrated, secure and smart public electronic services (e-services) as a part of digitalization. With an increased demand for such services, coordination as an internal organizational phenomenon is becoming increasingly important. Based on a qualitative case study, and informed by coordination theory, this paper investigates two different theoretical views applied on internal e-service coordination within a government agency in Sweden. At the outset, the agency is seeking one generic way to coordinate the current heterogeneous and fragmented internal e-service landscape in a more efficient way. Hence, our aim also includes investigating the prerequisites and potential for this type of coordination. We conduct this study in two stages. First, we apply a well-established theoretical lens from organizational theory on a set of coordination efforts, thereby perceiving coordination as a planned and anticipated activity based on a fixed set of mechanisms. Second, we apply a lens of coordinating as emergent practice, which allows for an in-depth investigation of more flexible and dynamic aspects of coordinating activities in daily work. By combining these two views, we argue that this approach can facilitate and increase understanding of the dynamics and flexibility needed to understand the type of coordination needed in public e-service contexts. This can also imply that there is no single best practice or ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to internal e-service coordination. Instead, organizations need to acknowledge the need for multi-dimensional views revealing the inherent complexity of coordination; as planned as well as emerging activities.

Part 2: Open Data, Linked Data, and Semantic Web; International audience; Commercial reuse of open government data in value added services has gained a lot of interest both as practice and as a research topic over the last few years. However, utilizing open data without proper understanding of potential quality issues carries the risk of undermining the value of the service that relies on public sector information. Instead of establishing a data quality assessment framework this research considers a review of typical open data quality issues and intends to connect them to the causes leading to these various data problems. Open data specific problems are concluded from a case study and then theoretical and empirical arguments are used to connect them to root causes emerging from the peculiarities of the public sector data management process. This way both practitioners could be more conscious about appropriate cleansing methods and participants shaping the data management process could aim at eliminating root causes of data quality issues.

Part 1: General E-Government and Open Government; International audience; Standardization plays an important role for a smooth organizational, semantic, technical and legal interoperation of eGovernment services. Still, standardization struggles with the complexity of administrative procedures that have to be supported and provided online. Managing this complexity poses a crucial challenge for an efficient and effective eGovernment. Different management frameworks have been developed, but the progress of standardization in practice is still perceived as insufficient. To address the challenge of standardization management in eGovernment, we propose a coordination theory based framework for analysis. It consists of three coordination modes distinguished based on their mechanisms and relevant context dimensions. In our research approach, we interpret a single case study of a standardization project in Germany where artefacts were developed from a pragmatism perspective. We discuss our findings and conclude on implications for research and practice.

Part 1: General E-Government and Open Government; International audience; Citizens are increasingly using Open Government Data (OGD) and engaging with OGD by designing and developing applications. They often do so by collaborating in groups, for example through self-organized groups or government-induced open data engagement initiatives, such as hackathons. The successful use and engagement of OGD by groups of citizens can greatly contribute to the uptake and adoption of OGD in general. However, little is known regarding how groups of citizens develop in OGD engagement. This study aims at exploring and understanding the development stages of citizen groups in OGD engagement. To attain this objective, we conducted a comparative case study of group development stages in two different types of OGD engagement. Our cases show that leadership and diversity of capabilities significantly contribute to the success of citizen groups in OGD engagement. These findings suggest that connecting citizens having a diversity of expertise prior to the OGD engagement event helps to improve its effectiveness. This research is among the first to apply group development stages model in open data engagement studies and thus opening up new research opportunities concerning group developments in the open data literature.

Part 1: General E-Government and Open Government; International audience; Local governments have increasingly been applying an open and collaborative approach towards public management during the last years. Accordingly, they aim at increasing accessibility by releasing public data and providing participative decision-making arenas. ‘Open government’ has also been implemented in Austrian municipalities. This paper takes stock of the current status of open government implementation in Austria by analyzing survey data from city managers. Findings indicate that Austrian municipalities choose releasing public data over involving citizens in decision-making. Although public managers seem to value the principles of an open government, a successful implementation of open government is hampered by resource constraints.

Part 1: General E-Government and Open Government; International audience; Whereas in market-driven situations the private parties have an interest in driving innovations towards implementation, in the case of public concerns, it is often the public concern that initiates the innovation process. The issue for the public funding agencies is then to stimulate idea generation and the process towards implementation and impact. However, these innovation processes are complex, as they involve a multiplicity of public and private actors with different and sometimes conflicting concerns. Thus, the benefits and business cases are not immediately clear and this makes it hard to scale beyond the proof of concept. In this paper we examine and derive lessons learned based on a longitudinal case study of a series four EU-funded projects (ITAIDE, INTEGRITY, CASSANDRA and CORE) in the international trade domain that aimed to develop digital trade infrastructure solutions (data pipelines) to address security and trade facilitation challenges. For our case analysis, we adapt and extend Bryson et al.’s framework [1] on cross-sector collaborations. We show how each of these projects covered one part of the public–private innovation trajectory, moving the innovation from the Initial R&D stage, to the Showcasing and dissemination stage to attract critical mass, towards a Turning point stage when the business cases for further upscaling become visible. We identify continuities (i.e. continuity of network & vision, funding and process) as well as a number of alignments as important factors that drive collective innovation processes towards implementation and impact. Further research is needed to establish to what extent these findings are applicable in other contexts.

Part 5: Big and Open Linked Data; International audience; Since its inception, open government data (OGD) as a free re-useable object has attracted the interest of researchers and practitioners, civil servants, citizens and businesses for different reasons in each target group. This study was designed to aggregate the research outcomes and developments through the recent years towards illustrating the evolutionary path of OGD portals, by presenting an analysis of their characteristics in terms of a maturity model. A four-step methodology has been followed in order to analyse the literature and construct the maturity model. The results point out the two greater dimensions of OGD portals, naming traditional and advanced evolving within three generations. The developed maturity model will guide policy makers by firstly identify the current level of their organisation and secondly design an efficient implementation to the required state.

Part 7: Evaluation; International audience; Electronic government, or e-Government, is the use of information and communication technology in the public sector. As a research field, it is characterized as multi-disciplinary with heritage from both the information systems and public administration fields. This diverse background may be beneficial, but it may also result in a fragmented theoretical base and conceptual vagueness. This paper applies decision theory to e-Government to tie a number of theoretical and practical concepts together. In particular, five concepts from decision theory (i.e. objectives, stakeholder inclusion, weighting and resource allocation, risk analysis, and outcomes assessment) are compared with counterparts in e-Government. The findings have both theoretical and practical implications. First, they add to and unite e-Government theory. Second, practical methods for operationalizing the theoretical concepts are proposed. This operationalization includes using a holistic approach to e-participation throughout decision processes.

Part 3: Organizational Aspects; International audience; Networking and collaboration, at different levels and through differentiated mechanisms, have become increasingly relevant and popular as an effective means for delivering public policy over the past two decades. The variety of forms of collaboration that emerge in educational scenarios makes it hard to reach general conclusions about the effectiveness of collaboration in general and of inter-institutional networks in particular. The university environment is particularly challenging in this respect as typically different agendas for collaboration and competition co-exist and are often promoted by very same entities. Although no ‘one-fits-all’ model exists for the establishment of a network of universities, the prime result of the research reported in this paper is that the concept of such a network is a most promising instrument for delivering specific services within the high education universe. In this context, the paper discusses the potential of these networks for the design of educational programmes for the GCIO (Government Chief Information Officer) function and proposes a set of guidelines to successfully establish such networks.

Part 3: Organizational Aspects; International audience; The paper aims to contribute to the development of an e-Government capabilities repository. The purpose of this repository is to increase the level of success of the e-Government projects and initiatives. The results are based on an examination of a multidisciplinary body of knowledge, an iterative structured methodology and a comparative in-depth case study performed in two Canadian public administrations. We analyzed the data to identify the presence or absence of the capabilities, the evolution of these capabilities and their interrelationship. We proposed a preliminary knowledge repository of e-Government capabilities composed of 4 interdependent categories: the strategic capabilities, the project capabilities, the business capabilities and the technological capabilities.

Part 6: Open Government; International audience; Analysis of the U.S. government response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 remind us that inter-governmental and intra-governmental communication plays an important role in effective response to disaster. Hurricane Katrina highlighted the lack of information sharing across levels of government and sectors and showed that such gaps in sharing contribute to slower and uncoordinated response and insufficient deployment of resources. The response to Hurricane Sandy was much more effective because of the lessons learned from Katrina about cross-boundary information sharing but problems still existed. The conclusion that more complex and severe incidents require more coordination and information sharing across levels of government and functional agencies makes it increasingly important to increase information sharing capability as part of EM. This paper presents the argument that the unique and important opportunity of leveraging OGD in this regard requires continued attention and investment in ways that maximize value in the form of more effective and efficient emergency response efforts.

Part 7: Evaluation; International audience; This article shows the results obtained with a model to assess the digital maturity of a government at country level. The model is based on maturity model concepts with focus on the digital strategy of the country. The application of the model to public agencies shows the weaknesses of the digital strategy that should be improved as country, but more interesting is the correlation that exists between the ICT investment in a public agency and its maturity.

Part 3: Organizational Aspects; International audience; Today’s increasing connectivity creates cyber risks at personal, organizational up to societal level. Societal cyber risks require mitigation by all kinds of actors where government should take the lead due to its responsibility to protect its citizens. Since no formal global governance exists, the governmental responsibility should start at the national level of every country. To achieve successful management of global cyber risks, appropriate alignment between these sovereignly developed strategies is required, which concerns a complex challenge. To create alignment, getting insight into differences between national cyber strategies, is the first step. This, in turn, requires an appropriate analysis approach that helps to identify the key differences. In this article, we introduce such an analysis approach based on social contract theory. The resulting analysis model consists of both a direct and an indirect type of social cyber contract between governments, citizens and corporations, within and between sovereign nations. To show its effectiveness, the proposed social cyber contract model is validated through an illustrated case examining various constitutional rights to privacy, their embedding in the national cyber strategies and how their differences could cause potential barriers for alignment across sovereignties.

Part 7: Evaluation; International audience; The paper explores the patterns and factors of e-governance development in ineffective institutional settings. Although it is assumed that most of e-projects in such countries failed, we argue that in some contexts such initiatives can survive in the hostile environment and achieve relatively positive results, leading to limited institutional changes. We adapt the pockets of effectiveness framework in order to analyze the Our Petersburg portal (St. Petersburg, Russia). Our findings suggest that such electronic “pockets” may emerge as a deliberate policy of the political elite in an attempt to make institutions work properly. The key factors of such projects’ success relate to agency, namely the political patronage and control, policy entrepreneurship, as well as organization autonomy and the power of the initiative.

Part 3: Organizational Aspects; International audience; In this paper, we examine the policy documents that define the Norwegian policies on language use in the public sector, with an emphasis on how ICT is mentioned as a tool for creating a public sector language citizens find easy to understand. Norway and other countries have had a series of projects aimed at making the public sector use plain language in their communication with citizens. We present two example cases of successful plain language use and one less successful case, and discuss these cases using the lens of new institutional theory. We argue that the institutional context of change and user-centricity have had a major impact on the success of our example cases.

Part 1: Smart Governance, Government and Cities; International audience; There is some consensus among researchers that the first urban civilization labeled a ‘city’ was Sumer in the period 3,500–3,000 BC. The meaning of the word, however, has evolved with the advancement of technology. Adjectives such as digital, intelligent, and smart have been prefixed to ‘city’, to reflect the evolution. In this study, we pose the question: What makes a ‘Smart City’, as opposed to a traditional one? We review and synthesize multiple scientific studies and definitions, and present a unified definition of Smart City—a complex concept. We present the definition as an ontology which encapsulates the combinatorial complexity of the concept. It systematically and systemically synthesizes, and looks beyond, the various paths by which theory and practice contribute to the development and understanding of a smart city. The definition can be used to articulate the components of a Smart City using structured natural English. It serves as a multi-disciplinary lens to study the topic drawing upon concepts from Urban Design, Information Technology, Public Policy, and the Social Sciences. It can be used to systematically map the state-of-the-research and the state-of-the-practice on Smart Cities, discover the gaps in each and between the two, and formulate a strategy to bridge the gaps.

Part 3: Organizational Aspects; International audience; The shadow economy can be defined as economic activities that escape detection in the official estimates of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). A larger size of the informal sector poses a significant challenge for policymaking as it reduces the reliability of official estimators and increases the likelihood of adopting ineffective policies. Furthermore, the shadow economy may also influence the allocation of resources. The phenomenon is particularly important in the developing world. This paper aims to investigate a possible contribution of e-Government (eGov) to mitigate the problem of the shadow economy. We argue that the implementation of eGov will allow the government to reduce the administrative burden costs, reduce tax evasion, and allow citizens to act as whistle-blowers, all of which may eventually lower the size of the shadow activities. Since the implementation of eGov corresponds to the stage of infrastructure development in the Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), the diffusion of eGov also requires particular threshold points by which the impact can only be seen. We investigate the data of 147 countries during the period 2003–2013, where the data on estimated shadow economy (based on [1]) and eGov index (based on [2]) are both available. We found that increasing the eGov index significantly reduces the size of the shadow economy. Moreover, the marginal impact is greater in the developed and higher income countries. This sheds a light on the importance to achieve a sufficient level of critical mass in eGov infrastructure before countries are able to reap the benefits of the initiatives.

Part 7: Evaluation; International audience; The evaluation of systems or artifacts as “outcomes” of software engineering (SE) projects has been a focus of study in SE-related research for quite some time. In recent years, evaluating artifacts, for example, mobile applications or websites has become more important, since such artifacts play increasingly critical roles in generating revenues for businesses, and the degree of artifact effectiveness is seen as a competitive factor. With the TEDS framework/procedure a novel and comprehensive approach to systematic artifact evaluation and comparison had been presented a few years ago, whose effectiveness and analytical power in comprehensive and highly detailed artifact evaluations and comparisons was empirically shown; however, despite its demonstrated capability TEDS still proved to be time and resource consuming like other evaluation approaches before. In order to overcome these constraints and provide evaluative feedback more quickly to developers and service providers, TEDSrate, a Web-based evaluation tool employing the TEDS framework/procedure, was developed. The tool was tested with two real-world organizations, the City of Seattle Emergency Operations Center (EOC) and the Seattle Sounders Football Club. The tests suggest that the highly configurable TEDSrate tool can fully implement and administer the TEDS framework/procedure and, at the same time, provide instantaneous, cost-effective, comprehensive, and highly detailed artifact evaluations to both developers and service providers.

Part 5: Big and Open Linked Data; International audience; Governments are creating and maintaining increasing amounts of data, and, recently, releasing data as open government data. As the amount of data available increases, so too should the exploitation of this data. However, this potential currently seems to be unexploited. Since exploiting open government data has the potential to create new public value, the absence of this exploitation is something that should be explored. It is therefore timely to investigate how the potential of existing datasets could be unleashed to provide services that create public value. For this purpose, we conducted a literature study and an empirical survey of the relevant drivers, barriers and gaps. Based on the results, we propose a framework that addresses some of the key challenges and puts forward an agile co-production process to support effective data-driven service creation. The proposed framework incorporates elements from agile development, lean startups, co-creation, and open government data literature and aims to increase our understanding on how open government data may be able to drive public service co-creation.

Part 2: Service Delivery; International audience; Georgia’s achievements in public sector modernisation have been lauded, since 2004, for their ability to increase transparency, fight corruption, ease the way of doing business and improve public service delivery to citizens. Information Communication Technology (ICT) played an important role as an enabler of public sector reform. Despite this, research into the Georgian model of governance and inter-governmental cooperation is extremely limited. Similarly, literature reviews have, in recent years, pointed out limitations in the understanding of technology use in public service delivery and, particularly, the role governance, cross-governmental decision making, and cooperation play when introducing ICT solutions and online services to citizens. As part of a larger qualitative, multi-country comparison, this article analyses the Georgian approach to electronic governance (eGovernance). The analysis highlights the influence of politically motivated and driven public sector reforms underpinned by ICT use for better service delivery, transparency and a fight against corruption in the period 2004–2012. Despite early success in relation to ICT infrastructure, standards and roll-out to key enablers, the article finds that the electronic government (eGovernment) eco-system is fragmented and that the use of public and private online service (eService) is limited, despite high internet penetration and usage. The key barrier found is the lack of an effective governance and inter-governmental cooperation model to improve cooperation between government actors (e.g. data collection, quality and reuse, shared infrastructure, systems and service), build on existing infrastructure and enablers to optimize the value-added of earlier investments – particularly in relation to electronic identity management (eID), digital signatures (eSignature) and eServices. Georgia would benefit from a more formalized approach to ICT related programmes and projects by considering an IT-implementation model to effectively manage risk, improve benefit realization and link individual key performance measurements (KPI) to those of the eGovernment strategy and action plan.

Part 7: Evaluation; International audience; Understanding public value creation through electronic services is a complex and important research problem. Recent attempts to understand electronic services value from the citizen perspective suggest that dividing service delivery in several stages could be a valuable approach to understand ways in which information technologies support value creation when providing electronic services. Therefore, we propose the use of this process model as a tool to analyze and define public value creation through electronic services. We show the potential value of the model using birth certificate requests as a hypothetical example. We conclude the paper by describing how we are applying the model to our current research.