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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.

Part 2: eParticipation Implementations; International audience; International rankings of e-participation development provide useful information for making strategic decisions for a more successful information society development. However, when we start the interpretation of the ranking details, it is important to consider the context, as well as national factors and existed barriers on the way. The paper presents some results and conclusions drawn from the expert survey and aiming to detect the factors which affect e-participation development in Russia. The authors conducted an expert poll with the participation of 41 experts from government, business, NGO, scientific and education structures, and city-activists. The survey results allowed to detect the target of e-participation tools development in Russia; to determine the factors that influence positively and negatively on its development. The major finding of the survey showed the following trend: e-participation tools in Russia served to optimize the authorities’ work and fight such barriers as administrative, regulative and lack of citizens’ trust in e-participation tools.

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 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.

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 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 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 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.

Part 7: Evaluation; International audience; The following paper presents the results of the outcome evaluation of StartBiz; an online tool for start-ups in Switzerland. StartBiz is provided by the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) and allows start-ups to enroll with trade registers, VAT, social insurances and accident insurances without any additional fees directly via the internet. The outcome evaluation was required to learn about generated benefits for start-up companies that have used StartBiz so far. At the same time, the evaluation was aimed at providing decision-makers in the SECO with strategic information for their future e-governmental activities (esp. planned expansion of StartBiz to an electronic One-Stop-Shop for small and medium sized enterprises). The paper contributes to the debate of evaluating e-governmental activities by emphasizing an outcome orientation based on the assessment of quantitative benefits. It underlines the advantages but also the disadvantages of such a focus for future outcome evaluations in the field.

Part 1: Smart Governance, Government and Cities; International audience; The integration and interoperability of e-government systems, and information sharing is essential in transforming governments to “smart governments” that deliver services to enhance the socio- economic inclusion and the quality of life of its citizens. The aim of this doctoral study is to understand institutional barriers to e-government integration, interoperability and information sharing preventing governments from transforming to smart governments. The study is an interpretive case study, using South Africa as a unique case of a developing country which has adopted the “smart” agenda. Findings will contribute to theory through advancing knowledge in the new research area of smart government as well as contributing to practice through generating applicable knowledge on digital transformation in the public sector.

Part 3: Organizational Aspects; International audience; Health sector institutions’ websites need to act as effective web resources of information and interactive communication mediums to address the versatile demands of their multiple stakeholders. Academic and practitioner interest in health sector website assessment has considerably risen in recent years. This can be seen by the number of papers published in journals. The purpose of this paper is twofold to further establish the field. First, it offers a literature re-view on hospitals’ websites assessment. Second, it offers a conceptual framework to address the website assessment issue in health sector. The proposed assessment framework focuses on four main criteria: content, technology, services, and participation being evaluated by the use of several indicators. Academics, hospital practitioners, public officials and users will find the review and the framework useful, as they outline major lines of research in the field and a method to assess health institution websites.

Part 1: Smart Governance, Government and Cities; International audience; Smart cites are rapidly gaining momentum but our understanding of their underlying management framework has to a large extent been unexplored. Under the different initiatives within the label of smart cities, there is no systematic understanding of how city decision makers manage the configuration of resources and processes within the dynamic urban environment. This research in progress paper develops a research agenda on the capabilities of smart city management by synthesising the findings of 72 papers. Further to consolidating the enabling aspects of technology and data as key resources is smart city development, the review leads to the identification of dynamic, operational, cultural and management capabilities. The paper concludes by discussing the value of this approach for future work in the area of smart cities.

In this contribution we discuss the characteristics of what we call the fourthgeneration of public sector service channels: social robots. Based on a review ofrelevant literature we discuss their characteristics and place into multi-channelmodels of service delivery. We argue that social robots is not one homogenoustype of channels, but rather breaks down in different (sub)types of channels,each with different characteristics and possibilities to supplement and/or replaceexisting channels. Given the variety of channels, we foresee challenges inincorporating these new channels in multi-channel models of service delivery.This is especially relevant given the current lack of evaluations of such models,the broad range of channels available, and their different stages of deploymentat governments around the world. Nevertheless, social robots offer anpotentially very relevant addition to the service level landscape. In this contribution we discuss the characteristics of what we call the fourthgeneration of public sector service channels: social robots. Based on a review ofrelevant literature we discuss their characteristics and place into multi-channelmodels of service delivery. We argue that social robots is not one homogenoustype of channels, but rather breaks down in different (sub)types of channels,each with different characteristics and possibilities to supplement and/or replace existing channels. Given the variety of channels, we foresee challenges in incorporating these new channels in multi-channel models of service delivery.This is especially relevant given the current lack of evaluations of such models,the broad range of channels available, and their different stages of deploymentat governments around the world. Nevertheless, social robots offer anpotentially very relevant addition to the service level landscape.

Part 5: Big and Open Linked Data; International audience; Demographic, economic, social and other datasets are often used in policy-making processes. These types of statistical data are opened more and more by governments, which enables the use of these datasets by the public. However, statistical data needs often to combine different datasets. Data cubes can be used to combine datasets and are a multi-dimensional array of values typically used to describe time series of geographical areas. While Linked Open Statistical Data (LOSD) cube software is still in an initial stage of maturity, there is a need for evaluation the software platforms used to process this open data. Yet there is a lack of evaluation methods. The objective of this ongoing research paper is to identify functional requirements for open data cubes infrastructures. Eight main processes are identified and a list of 23 functional requirements are used to evaluate the OpenCube platform. The evaluation results of a LOSD platform show that many functions are not automated and need to be manually executed. We recommend the further integration of the building blocks in the platform to reduce the barriers for the use of datasets by the public.

Part 3: Organizational Aspects; International audience; While work with benefits realization requires organizational learning to be effective, emphasis on organizational learning is hard to find in benefits realization studies. To remedy this research gap, we study how organizational learning theory can contribute to improve benefits realization processes. A qualitative approach was used to gain in depth understanding of benefits realization in an ICT healthcare services project. We found that individual learning is present, but organizational learning has not been given explicit attention neither in the project nor in the literature of benefits realization management. We argue that the individual learning in the project forms an excellent basis for organizational learning, i.e., in the form of organizational structures, routines, and methods for benefits realization.

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.

Part 4: Infrastructures; International audience; Digital infrastructures (DI) that support information exchange related to international trade processes (here referred to as Digital Trade Infrastructures (DTI)) have been seen as an instrument to help address the trade facilitation and security challenges. Data pipelines can be seen as an example of a DTI. Data pipelines are IT innovations that enable the timely provision of data captured at the source from different information systems available in the supply chain. Using the pipeline companies can share information with authorities and enjoy trade facilitation in return. The benefits of such data pipelines have been showcased in demonstrator settings. However, outside the controlled environment of demonstrator installations, the adoption and growth of these DTIs has been limited. The benefits based on purely implementing the data pipeline are limited. Combining data pipeline capability with Coordinated Border Management (CBM) has potential to articulate more clear benefits for stakeholders and push further investments and wider adoption. In this paper based on the FloraHolland trade lane related to exporting flowers from Kenya to the Netherlands we discuss a data pipeline/CBM innovation. Through the conceptual lens of DI (examining architectural, process and governance dimensions) we demonstrate the potential benefits of data pipeline/CBM innovation and the complex alignment processes between business and government actors needed for the further adoption. From a theoretical point of view we enhance the understanding regarding the governance dimension of such data pipeline/CBM innovations by identifying four type of alignments processes involving businesses and government actors nationally and internationally. As such the paper contributes to the body of research on DI and more specifically DTI. Form a point of view of practice, the insights from our analysis can be used to better understand other data pipeline/CBM innovation alignment processes in other domains as well.

Part 2: Service Delivery; International audience; There are various models and frameworks describing the nature of e-services in the public sector. Many of these models are based on previous conceptualizations and have evolved over time, but are first and foremost conceptual creations with weak empirical grounding. In the meantime, practitioners in the field have continued to further develop e-services, and new advancements in technology have enabled new solutions for e-services. In the light of advancements in practice, and the limitations seen in current conceptual work concerning public e-services, we identify a need to refuel the conceptual discussion on e-services in the public sector by empirically investigating how e-services can be manifested in practice. The aim of this paper is to illustrate the possible variations of e-services in practice, and to discuss this variation in relation to the conceptual representation of the phenomenon. Based on qualitative interviews with employees involved with e-service development and provision at a large governmental agency, we illustrate that an ‘e-service’ can take on many different forms within an organization; ranging from downloadable forms, to complicated self-service systems that require expertise knowledge and IT-systems with specific processing capacity. The notion that all services mediated through a website can be understood under one general umbrella term, without further categorization, needs to be challenged.

Part 4: Infrastructures; International audience; Advanced architectures for business-to-government (B2G) information sharing can benefit both businesses and government. An essential choice in the design of such an architecture is whether information is shared using a thick or a thin information flow. In an architecture with a thick flow, all information is shared via a shared infrastructure, whereas only metadata and pointers referring to the information are shared via the shared infrastructure in a thin flow architecture. These pointers can then be used by parties to access the information directly. Yet, little is known about what their implications for design choices are. Design choices are influenced by the properties of the architecture as well as the situation in which B2G information sharing takes place. In this paper, we identify the properties of architectures with a thin and thick flow. Next, we determine what this implies for the suitability of the architectures in different situations. We will base our analysis on the case of the Shipping Information Pipeline (SIP) for container transport. While both architectures have their pros and cons, we found that architectures with a thin flow are more suitable when non-standardized, and flexible sharing of sensitive information is required. In contrast, we found that architectures with a thick flow are more suitable when in-depth integration is required.