"This book provides the latest research findings such as theoretical foundations, principles, methodologies, architectures, technical frameworks, international policy, standardization and case studies for the achievement of interoperability within the provision of digital services, from administration and businesses toward the user citizens and enterprises"--Provided by publisher
The use of information and communication technologies to support public administrations, governments and decision makers has been recorded for more than 20 years and dubbed e-Government. Moving towards open governance roadmaps worldwide, electronic participation and citizen engagement stand out as a new domain, important both for decision makers and citizens; and over the last decade, there have been a variety of related pilot projects and innovative approaches. With contributions from leading researchers, Charalabidis and Koussouris provide the latest research findings such as theoretical foundations, principles, methodologies, architectures, technical frameworks, cases and lessons learnt within the domain of open, collaborative governance and online citizen engagement. The book is divided into three sections: Section one, Public Policy Debate Foundations, lays the foundations regarding processes and methods for scoping, planning, evaluating and transforming citizen engagement. The second section, Information and Communication Technologies for Citizen Participation, details practical approaches to designing and creating collaborative governance infrastructures and citizen participation for businesses and administrations. Lastly, the third section on Future Research Directions of Open, Collaborative ICT-enabled Governance provides a constructive critique of the developments in the past and presents prospects regarding future challenges and research directions. The book is mainly written for academic researchers and graduate students working in the computer, social, political and management sciences. Its audience includes researchers and practitioners in e-Governance, public administration officials, policy and decision makers at the local, national and international level engaged in the design and creation of policies and services, and ICT professionals engaged in e-Governance and policy modelling projects andsolutions.
One of the most critical issues relating to smart cities is the selection of the most suited interventions, among numerous available options. Especially when medium-sized municipalities are concerned that typically have less capabilities and available expertise, the need for a methodological framework for supporting the selection of possible interventions is profound. The aim of this article is to propose such a participative method for investigating the sectors in which a municipality could take actions, and for deciding on possible interventions. The approach includes citizens' opinion, municipality policy, and the organizational, technological and economic status of the municipality, as well as best practices from other smart cities. This way, a multi-criteria decision support model was developed, in order to select the best application scenarios for a medium-sized municipality. The model was applied in Samos Island in Greece, revealing that citizens show great interest in the development of smart applications. The whole approach can be easily applied, with the proper modifications, in a large variety of cities, offering a useful tool to decision makers and societies.
Research shows that e-Government projects have higher failure rates than similar approaches in the private sector indicating the lack of a method to transfer knowledge and apply best management practices in an effective way. After stating the fundamental principles of project management and performing an identification of shortcomings of existing methodologies, that apply to public administration IT projects, the paper presents a conceptual model for e-Government project management that can be structured and adapted to cover all types of relevant projects in an out-of-the-box approach. Being goal oriented and supported by relevant tools, this knowledge base of predefined project components can then be populated and utilised in making more informed decisions for effective project management of e-Government initiatives. This way, the proposed method supports public officials and practitioners in learning from past experience projects and in designing and running e-Government projects in a more systematic manner, thus significantly increasing the likelihood of project success.
Social Media have been initially used by government agencies for general public oriented -˜citizen-sourcing'. Though this enabled the collection of useful policy relevant information and knowledge from the general public, and provided valuable insights into their relevant perceptions, it would be quite useful if this could be combined with the collection of policy relevant information and knowledge from experts as well (-˜expert-sourcing'). In this paper, a passive expert-sourcing method based on social media, which has been developed in a European research project, is evaluated from a fundamental perspective: the wicked problems theory perspective. In particular, we investigate to what extent this method enables government agencies to collect high quality information concerning the main elements of important social problems to be addressed through public policies: particular issues posed, alternative interventions/ actions, and advantages/disadvantages of them; as well as to what extent there is consensus about these elements among different stakeholder groups. For this purpose data are collected through interviews with Members of the Greek Parliament. From their analysis interesting conclusions have been drawn about the strengths and weaknesses of this expert-sourcing method, as well as required impro-vements of it.
Part 3: Policy Modeling and Policy Informatics ; International audience ; In order to address the complexity of the modern social problems and needs through effective public policies, government agencies have started experimenting with policy informatics methods, adopting various approaches that increase citizens' and stakeholders' participation in the public policy formulation processes. Such approaches allow the exploitation of their opinions, which incorporate valuable perceptions of them, as well as knowledge, proposals and ideas. This paper outlines three advanced methods of social media (SM) exploitation in public policy making processes for citizen-sourcing, which are based on the concepts of active citizen-sourcing, passive citizen-sourcing and passive expert-sourcing respectively, as well as the conclusions from some first applications of them. Based on them a comparison of these methods is conducted, and then a maturity model is developed concerning the use of SM for citizen-sourcing in order to support policy making.
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 2: eParticipation Implementations ; International audience ; Previous political sciences research has highlighted the importance of both 'democracy' (democratic processes and consultation with stakeholder groups) and 'technocracy' (specialized knowledge of experts) as main foundations for the development of effective public policies, and the need for balance as well as interaction between them. The use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for supporting this exchange can be highly beneficial. Our paper makes a contribution in this direction, by evaluating an ICT-based 'expert-sourcing' method that has been developed for supporting the transfer of knowledge from 'technocracy' (i.e. knowledgeable experts) to 'democracy' (i.e. participants of the democratic processes, such as citizens' representatives, elected officials and various public policies' stakeholder groups). This method exploits policy-related content that has already been published by experts in numerous social media, adopting a selective approach (filtering this content in order to extract the highest quality parts of it that have been authored by the most knowledgeable experts) based on reputation management techniques. From the evaluation of this ICT-based 'expert-sourcing' method useful conclusions have been drawn concerning its strengths and weaknesses, as well as directions for the improvement of it and the enhancement of its value.