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Disinformation campaigns have become a major threat to democracy and social cohesion. Phenomena like conspiracy theories promote political polarization; they can influence elections and lead people to (self-)damaging or even terrorist behavior. Since social media users and even larger platform operators are currently unready to precisely detect disinformation, new techniques for identifying online disinformation are urgently needed. In this paper, we present the first research insights of DeFaktS, an Information Systems research project, which takes a comprehensive approach to both researching and combating online disinformation with a special focus on enhancing media literacy and trust in explainable AI. Specifically, we demonstrate the first methodological steps towards the training of a machine learning-based system. This will be obtained by introducing the development and preliminary results of a taxonomy to support the labeling of a 'Fake News' dataset.

Citizen participation is a democratic practice that became, especially on a local level, an important mean for the public to be included in the development of their immediate surrounding. With the digitalization of work and social life also the digitalization of the public sector, including governmental action, began. This process, as a research discipline called digital government, includes addressing how the interaction between citizens and their state should be designed. A meaningful way to do so are digital platforms that enable participation in governmental action. Digital Citizen Participation, a concept introduced in this dissertation, tries to include recent technological innovations in e-Participation platform design. This dissertation argues that these innovations might help overcome general barriers in participation processes. When it comes to construction projects in urban environments for example, public debates and protests may arise if architectural plans remain unshared or are not sufficiently accessible for the citizens they might affect. To involve the public affected by urban planning, offering easily graspable visualizations for citizens is key. This dissertation deals with the participation of citizens in urban planning through an e-Participation platform that makes use of immersive technologies such as Augmented and Virtual Reality. In this work, this idea is investigated through a design science research approach that uses qualitative and quantitative methods. While the first qualitative study puts for-ward a set of meta-requirements and design principles based on interviews with 27 individuals, the second study (n=339) and third study (n=382) evaluate quantitatively a prototype based on those design principles. The used methods are adequately contex-tualized and, in the end, a final prototype of the platform is demonstrated. This allows to show findings concerning the forms and levels of participation citizens and initiators are interested in when using immersive systems for public participation, and how an ideal platform should be designed. Among many other findings, the studies show that citizens have a high interest in using immersive systems for public participation and find their qualities for visualization to be highly valuable.

Disinformation campaigns have become a major threat to democracy and social cohesion. Phenomena like conspiracy theories promote political polarization; they can influence elections and lead people to (self-)damaging or even terrorist behavior. Since social media users and even larger platform operators are currently unready to clearly identify disinformation, new techniques for detecting online disinformation are urgently needed. In this paper, we present DeFaktS, an Information Systems research project, which takes a comprehensive approach to both researching and combating online disinformation. The project develops a data pipeline in which (i) messages are extracted in large quantities from suspicious social media groups and messenger groups with the help of annotators. Based on this corpus, a Machine Learning-based System (ii) is trained that can recognize factors and stylistic devices characteristic of disinformation, which will be used for (iii) an explainable artificial intelligence that informs users in a simple and comprehensible way about the occurrence of disinformation. Furthermore, in this paper an interdisciplinary multi-level research approach focusing on media literacy and trust in explainable artificial intelligence is suggested in order to operationalize research on combating disinformation.

Mission statements are documents that summarize an organization's core values and strategies and are used to motivate employees by creating a common understanding among them. However, studies have shown that employees often seek more involvement in the development of mission statements in their organizations. Digitization pushes the implementation of new information and communication technology in the workplace. Therefore, we argue for the potential of using e-participation for the creation of a mission statement. With this paper, we contribute to digital government research by presenting a nominal group process consisting of eight activities, for the deployment of e-participation for the purpose of mission statement development. We evaluate the suggested process using an existing e-participation tool. Our evaluation results reveal challenges of implementing e-participation with the tested tool, especially regarding the usability. Therefore, we provide an overview of specific improvements in the design of e-participation platforms that should be considered in the further development of such platforms.

Mission statements are written declarations that summarize and communicate an organization���s core values and strategies and present managerial tools that can be used to motivate employees by creating a common self-understanding of an organization. With politics aiming to become ever more inclusive and participative ranging from the local to the global level, new technologies and findings about possibilities of self-determined, collaborative work from the field of e-participation emerge, which can be transferred onto organizational participation. We therefore present a procedure for incorporating e-participation approaches in mission statement creation processes to make place for more collaborative and open processes. This paper presents an eight-step nominal group process for the participative online creation of a mission statement. The process was tested and evaluated within three consecutive studies that surrounded different stages of a mission statement development, which relied on an existing e-participation platform. Our core findings show that (1) the participants of this initiative considered the use of e-participation to be helpful for mission statement creation and generally support the proposed process structure, (2) the platform���s suitability for developing mission statements was reviewed critically, making suggestions for important criteria of digital mission statement creation tools that should be met, and (3) participants could identify themselves with the final mission statement more strongly because of their own participation in the development process. While observing overall support for the suggested mission statement creation procedure, we build on the results of our studies to make suggestions for the design of e-participation platforms that will make them even more suitable for mission statement development.