Ebook: Electronic Government and Electronic Participation

Each year, scholars from all over the globe present their research and share their experiences in the fields of e-government, e-participation, and ICT supported policy and governance of state under the umbrella of the two working conferences the International Federation for Information Processing Working Group 8.5 (Information Systems in Public Administration), or short, IFIP WG 8.5, is organizing. Since 2001, IFIP WG 8.5 runs the EGOV (international conferences on Electronic GOVernment) series of conferences, which has solidly established itself as one of three core conferences in the research domain of e-government, e-governance, and e-participation. Since 2009, ePart, the International Conference on eParticipation, has emerged from the strand of EGOV as a sister conference focusing on the domain of e-participation. Henceforth, EGOV concentrated more on e-government-related topics. The common strands of ICT-enabled public governance, ICT-enabled policy making and public service provision strongly unites these two conferences. Accordingly, the chairs of both conferences maintain close links and are committed to co-locating the two events also in the years to come. Co-location intentionally allows for exchange and cross-fertilization between the two communities.

Papers at IFIP EGOV and ePart shine through scientific credibility and rigor as well as through high relevance to practice. Likewise the keynote speakers come from both practice and academia, which presents a fruitful combination as practice can drive research, and research is needed by practice.

Like its predecessors, IFIP EGOV 2014 and ePart 2014 conferences attracted scholars from around the world as a venue of high reputation. The IFIP EGOV 2014 “Call for Papers” attracted a wide range of topics with 70 submissions, which included 27 accepted full research papers and 27 posters and ongoing research papers. In addition, a workshop about “Critical Success Factors for Open Data – From Policy to Participation and Innovation” was organized. The papers of ongoing research were grouped under the following headers:

• Stakeholders and participation

• Open data and interoperability

• ICT-enabled policy-making

• Services

• Design, architecture and processes

• Evaluation and public values

The IFIP ePart 2014 “Call for Papers” attracted a wide range of topics with 22 submissions, which included 11 accepted full research papers and 5 ongoing research papers. In addition a workshop about “eParticipation for Slum Upgrading in Mtwapa, Kenya” was organized. The papers were grouped under the following headers:

• Social media

• Review and Analysis

• Engaging citizens online

• Software platforms and evaluation

• eConsultations

The Paper Awards Committee of IFIP EGOV and IFIP ePart was again led by committee chair Olivier Glassey of IDHEAP, Lausanne/Switzerland. The organizing Committee carefully reviewed the accepted papers and granted outstanding paper awards to the winning authors. The winners were awarded in the ceremony during the conference dinner, which has become a highlight of each year of conference. The names of the award winners of IFIP EGOV were announced on the conference web page: http://www.egov-conference.org/egov-conf-history/egov-2014/. The names of the award winners of IFIP ePart were announced on the conference web page: http://www.epart-conference.org/.

Many people make large events like this conference happen. We thank the members of the IFIP EGOV 2014 and IFIP ePart 2014 program committees and the additional reviewers for their great efforts in reviewing the submitted papers. Frank Bannister and his team of Trinity College Dublin, Republic of Ireland were a major contributor who tirelessly organized and managed the zillions of details locally. They hosted the IFIP EGOV and IFIP ePart conferences 2014 on shortest notice and managed everything in time.

The conference was held at the heart of Dublin, the Trinity College with its magnificent buildings and beautiful campus spanning 47 acres. Trinity College Dublin was created by royal charter in 1592. There were 16,646 registered students in 2012/13 and over 100,277 alumni (source: www.tdc.ie). Trinity College has a long history, whose ongoing traditions and enduring artifacts we were able to enjoy. The conference dinner was held in the marvellous 18th century Dining hall. The welcome drinks were held in the Atrium, which has a modern structure and is an obvious contrast to the more traditional Dining Hall.

August/September 2014

Marijn Janssen

Frank Bannister

Olivier Glassey

Hans J. (Jochen) Scholl

Efthimios Tambouris

Maria A. Wimmer

Ann Macintosh

Mobile participation has been studied, so far, mostly from the perspective of emphasising human interaction with technology. The research question of our paper is, instead, how to support the ‘participation’ in mobile participation. We tackle this question by reviewing literature on inclusive participation and motivation in general, and discussing the significance for mobile participation. We begin the review with inclusiveness challenges of technology-mediated participation, followed by theories on motivation to participate and requirements of participation practices, and finally give our account of three ways in which mobile participation is already transforming the realm of participation. We conclude with concrete advice for those who seek to develop or implement mobile participation practices for citizen engagement.

We report first results of a joint research project of Vienna University of Economics and Business and Cbase GmbH on the design and impact of eConsultations. Using real-world data collected via the cbased platform it is found that one can expect to obtain 11 votes and 1 comment per participant and 1,6 votes per paragraph discussed. In the case of a private eConsultation one can additionally expect 0,6 comments per paragraph. We then discuss the implications of these findings for system design and give an overview over the planned next steps in the project.

Over the past decade, the inclusion of citizens in political decision-making through electronic participation (e-participation) has received much attention. Many projects have been, and are continued to be executed at different levels of government. E-participation projects aim at providing a facilitating online environment, where citizens and other relevant actors can be involved in the processes of public decision-making. Up to now, the evaluation of the success and impact of such projects has not been addressed widely in research. This paper studies existing evaluation approaches and details the EF³-framework, which was developed to assess effectiveness, efficacy and efficiency of e-participation experiences. The EF³-framework has been reviewed, revised and applied to the e-cognocracy real-life experience of the municipality of Cadrete (Zaragoza) to provide a proof of concept for assessing impact of e-participation via the EF³-framework. Also, the EF³ framework has been validated by international experts, who also assigned weights to individual indicators for each of the three criteria. The revised model with details of indicators, the proof of concept of Cadrete, and the results of expert reviews and assignments of weights to criteria are summarised in this paper.

Participatory Budgeting (PB) is an yearly deliberative process for citizens to decide directly over the public expenditures. It was born in 1989 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and awarded in 1996 by the United Nations as one of the world's best practices of local governance. ICTs have been used to support PB initiatives and increase citizens participation. However, the so called Digital Participatory Budgeting (DPB) so far mainly focused to share information on the ongoing process and to carry on the voting phase. The paper outlines the evolution of BiPart, a software platform designed for accompanying the overall PB process, and strengthening the social ties. It also presents its application in seven instances of PB in four municipalities in Italy along five years, to test its actual use and its impact on citizens' participation.

There have been very few attempts so far to develop a comprehensive and rigorous conceptualization for deliberations in e-participation. Without a rigorous and formal conceptualization of deliberation, consistent content descriptions creation, deliberation records sharing and seamless exploration is difficult. In addition, no e-participation deliberation ontology exists to support citizen-led e-participation particularly when considering contributions made on the social media platforms. This work bridges this gap by providing a rich conceptualization and corresponding formal and executable ontology for deliberation in the context of e-participation. The semantic model covers the core concepts of technology-mediated political discussion and explicitly supports the integrated citizen- and government-led model of e-Participation enabled by social media. Results from the use of the ontology in describing e-Participation deliberation information at Local Government projects are also presented.

This paper discusses internet voting in Estonia on the basis of rational choice perspectives. It emphasizes particularly the importance of “bounded rationality” with emphasis on the Estonia – specific context in understanding the adoption of internet voting in the last seven elections. The key to the adoption process has been diffusion of ID card, which crucial for using wide range of online services offered by private and public sector organizations. Despite constantly increasing turnout the nature of internet voting is transactional. It has not made substantial contribution to online democratic participation other than making voting more convenient for certain segments of society.

This paper concerns the construction of the individuals to whom public e-services are aimed, and who are expected to participate in demands driven development of public sector. The argument is that these individuals are differently positioned in relation to and have different prerequisites to participate in demands driven development processes, and that this has to be taken into account by practitioners who are working demands driven development of public sector. The aim of the paper is thus to address the need to acknowledge differences in individual users' possibilities to participate in the development of public sector through opening up and critically analyze categories indicating participants – e.g. ‘users’, ‘citizens’ or ‘practitioners’. This is done through a discourse theoretical analysis of a text; the Swedish Guidelines for Demands Driven Development. The analysis of the text shows that the dominant category signifying a participatory subject is ‘target group(s)’, which is articulated according to four different themes. However, none of these themes articulates an unpacking of the category ‘target group(s)’, and the term is instead used to signify everyone as if these were alike and had the same prerequisites and possibilities to participate in demands driven development processes – in discourse theoretical terms ‘target group(s) works as an empty signifier. In this way differences between the individuals who are included in the category are hidden, and practitioners are left with no guidelines for how to deal with these.

Methods and Technologies of e-participation are an important component of Information society and e-governance development programmes. E-petitions portals are one of the mechanisms of e-participation. They provide the opportunity for citizens to influence the process of decision making at federal, regional and municipal levels. At the same time issues of the impact of e-petitions on traditional way of political decision making still remain unexplored. The article describes the practical case of an official e-petition portal development in Russia. The study aims at identifying the demand for electronic petitions portal in Russia in three main areas: 1) the dynamics of initiatives' publishing across federal districts; 2) citizens' discussion on Russian e-petition portal in social media; 3) correlation analysis of citizens' demand indicators and citizens' satisfaction with authorities work and openness, as well as other economic indicators.

This paper investigates if user involvement (UI) theory and theory on stakeholder theory (ST) can be merged to form a new theoretical entity that can inform whose voice should be heard in public e-service development. The investigation is based on a hermeneutic literature review and analysis. The result is a merger of ideas on who should be involved (extracted from stakeholder theory) with ideas on why this involvement should be organized (extracted from the user involvement literature). The paper presents research in progress, meaning that the merger presented is not particularly advanced. Still, this merger of ideas is substantial and important as it could function as the fundament for a more elaborate understanding of how to determine who should be involved in public e-service development. Involving the ‘right’ actors is believed to lead to higher quality in public e-services; therefore, advancement in our knowledge on how to identify these actors and finding better ways of involving these actors is needed.

This article presents a model to assess maturity and capabilities of public agencies (PAs) in pursuing the Open Government Data (OGD) principles and practices. The OGD maturity model, called OD-MM, was piloted in seven PAs from three Latin American countries (Chile, Colombia, and El Salvador), validating the web tool that operationalizes the model. The OD-MM is a valuable diagnosis tool for PAs, since it detects weaknesses and automatically generates a roadmap to evolve to higher maturity levels in the implementation of OGD. The automatic generation of optimal roadmap is detailed.

Interoperability of e-government systems is suggested to increase transparency, efficiency, effectiveness, and customer service in the public sector. Generic data models are often seen as a way for achieving especially semantic interoperability. To assess how the contemporary data models support semantic e-government interoperability, we reviewed literature on data models suggested for the public sector in light of four features: standard modelling language, entity-relationship modelling, vocabulary for data exchange and methodology. The review contributes previous research by introducing a four-feature framework for assessing capability of e-government data models to enhance interoperability and by providing an up-to-date review of the generic data models for this purpose.

Citizen-government interaction has been innovatively improved through the use of e-Government services. Such e-services provide governmental agencies with the opportunity to enhance their reputation and increase citizens' engagement with them. However, accomplishing this transformation will not be achieved without removing any impediments that affect citizens' trust in the provided e-services. This paper aims to understand the way social individual differences (age, gender, education level, and Internet experience) affect citizens' trust in e-Government services in developing countries. A survey, looking at people's perception of trust in e-Government, of citizens drawn from different geographical areas in Saudi Arabia, was conducted. The findings of this research indicate that out of the four factors investigated, only education level has a significant impact on citizen's trust in e-government services. Therefore, it appears that as educational level increases, so does citizen's trust in e-government and so they are more likely to engage with these e-government services.

The development of Internet and small scale computing created the belief that ICTs would help the development of rural areas. In retrospect, these visions turned out to be too optimistic. Today, we experience rather dramatic centralisation trends. This is not because of ICTs alone, but we have seen that ICTs often support centralizing forces, rather than help local development. However, the academic discourse on these issues suffers from the lack of clarity and precise understanding of the ICT artefact. We have therefor developed an analytical framework by conceptualizing ICTs along three dimensions; how it is viewed, its use and how it impacts development. Our main message is that ICTs have to be used locally to foster horizontal collaboration, innovation and knowledge creation activities.

A key benefit of standards and commonly shared technical specifications in ICT is their role in facilitating interoperability. However, standards need to achieve market acceptance to create real impact. Underlying interoperability architectures need to be further developed, improved and maintained. The aim of this paper is to analyze, which dependencies exist between the conceptual design of standards on the one hand and their adoption on the other hand. Research has shown that dependencies between standard settings and adoption are not clearly described yet. Accordingly, this paper aims to investigate how standard-based interoperability architectures can encounter feedback of various implementations. The customization of V-Model as a development methodology shown in this paper aims to highlight lifecycle aspects between design and adoption phases. The concept of Business Interoperability Interface is integrated into the V-Model approach to demonstrate architecture demands during the architecture development. The case of E-Procurement in Europe is used to proof the concept of the proposed architecture and development methodology.

An OECD study of 2009 argues that open and inclusive policy making helps to improve policy performance and to meet citizens rising expectations. An important aspect shaping the success of policy making is the use of appropriate tools and instruments to model (public) policy, i.e. to use theories, methods and tools that support the process of transforming data and information inputs into conceptual and formal models, which contribute to transparency, a better understanding of policy options (the causes and effects), and better informed decision-making to improve public performance. Accordingly, policy modelling has recently emerged as a multi-disciplinary research domain advancing distinct approaches to policy development and governance through the use of innovative information and communication technologies (ICT). The complexity encompassed with modelling public policies demands for different – often distinct – political, economic, social and technical disciplines to work together to leverage the benefits of different approaches of understanding policy and designing innovative policy. This paper presents an approach to scientific collaboration in advancing the research field and in collaborating across distinct disciplines, while performing comparative analyses in the area of policy modelling. The comparative analyses are organised in the context of an international network of policy modelling called eGovPoliNet, whose aim is to overcoming the existing research fragmentation between disciplines, thereby driving evolution in the field.

Policy formulation is now increasingly dynamic where policy has to be agile to reflect the changing behaviour in an increasingly complex world. An increasing requirement is for policy formulation is to become more adaptive and increasingly include design as part of vision and strategy setting. This is particularly important in the emerging complex environments where changing values need quick response. Thus as community values evolve ways to satisfy them are continually identified to ensure that change can be easily accommodated. The focus is on developing policy in solution neutral but meaningful terms while providing ways to respond quickly to policy changes through evolving projects. This paper proposes business building blocks combined with design thinking as a way to support such flexibility. Building blocks are now increasingly accepted as a way to build businesses whereas design thinking is finding increasing importance as a design approach that emphasizes innovation. It requires visualizations to help designers and policy makers to make sense of the complex relationships that exist in complex environments. The paper proposes a set of building blocks for policy formulation and illustrates how they can be organized for policy formulation.

This paper introduces a novel and innovative approach for more factual, evidence-based and accountable policy analysis and evaluation, based on the pillars of open public data, prosperity indicators, fuzzy cognitive maps, argumentation technology, deliberation platforms and social media. The approach assumes making better use of Europe's open public data resources and aspires to enable both the lay public as well as domain experts to create, apply, annotate, share and discuss progress metrics and causal models of policies, with the view to support them in assessing the governments' course of actions, and enhance thereby the transparency and effectiveness of the policy analysis and monitoring phases of the policy cycle.

In the past few decades several developments have lead to a new view on the division of roles between the public and the private sectors when performing public tasks. Developments like the application of information technology on a large scale combined with the notions of new public management increased the involvement of the private sector in public service. Now it seems that the private sector is being granted a prominent role in one of the most public of public tasks, taxation, in particular free flow, GPS based, electronic road user tax. Next to various technical challenges this leads to new questions like how to get the levying of a tax financed by a private company. It appears that many factors play a role in the way the various actors, public authorities, toll charging companies and financers behave in this type of Public Private Partnership process. This particular type of charging, using an on-board-unit in the vehicle requires large investments in electronical equipment at the start of a project.

In this paper the arguments and considerations of the parties involved are being analysed. The unorthodox approach is not a technical one, focussing on systems and public administrative processes, how interesting they may be, but one that looks at the entire phenomenon of outsourcing a task so public as taxation to the private sector. The question is whether public electronic road user charges, levied as a tax, can be ‘designed, build, financed, maintained and operated’ as a PPP. In particular the focus of the analysis will be on the financing of the electronic road user tax. What are the issues when privately financing public electronic road user tax? In this paper the issues are being inventoried from different angles. The conclusion on how to establish the private financing of a public electronic road user charge is still evolving and it is too early to draw final conclusions on this research in this contribution.