Electronic government and electronic participation are continuously transforming the public sector and society worldwide and are constantly being transformed themselves by way of emerging information and communication technologies.

The International Federation for Information Processing Working Group 8.5 Information Systems in Public Administration (IFIP WG 8.5) organizes every year two leading conferences in the field.

The international conference on electronic government (EGOV) is one of the first conferences focusing on electronic government. Since 2001, it provides a forum for scholars to present and discuss their research work.

The international conference on electronic participation (ePart) is probably the only scientific conference focusing exclusively on electronic participation. Since 2009, ePart has emerged from the strand of EGOV as a sister conference.

Through the years both conferences established themselves as leading scientific events in their fields. At the same time, they continue innovating in an attempt to increase the value each provides to its attendees. In this respect, this year, for the first time, the conferences are organised around tracks.

More specifically, five tracks were introduced, namely:

• The General E-Government Track

• The General eParticipation Track

• The Open Government & Open and Big Data Track

• The Policy Modelling and Policy Informatics Track

• The Smart Governance, Smart Government, & Smart Cities Track

The five tracks of the dual IFIP EGOVePart conference highlight core areas of importance for the domains of study. The overall objective of the dual conference remains to attract scholars coming from different academic disciplines to present and discuss their latest research and to shed light on advancements in the field from different, sometimes even diverse, perspectives. With the introduction of a new organisational model of the dual conference, we are also happy to have in the co-chairing a number of distinguished scholars who provide fresh insights to the conferences and who bring in new relevant communities.

Papers at IFIP EGOV and ePart aim to combine scientific credibility and rigor with 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.

The dual IFIP EGOV and ePart 2015 “Call for Papers” for all five tracks attracted a wide range of topics with 117 submissions, which included 37 accepted completed research papers (published in separate EGOV and ePart volumes of Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science), 31 accepted ongoing research papers, 5 accepted posters, 3 workshops, 6 PhD colloquium papers and 1 PhD presentation. The latter are being included for the first time in the IOS Press proceedings along with the ongoing research papers, workshops and posters. The papers of this volume were grouped under the following headers:

• eParticipation

• Policy Modelling

• Open Government and Smart Cities

• General e-Government

• E-Government Services

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's conference. The names of the award winners can be found on the conference web page: http://www.egov-conference.org/egov-conf-history/egov-2015/.

This year, EGOV and ePart were organised in Thessaloniki, Greece under the aegis of the University of Macedonia. The University of Macedonia has long been active in research in the areas of eGovernment and eParticipation. However, the success of a conference takes much more. We would therefore like to thank the team of the University of Macedonia and particularly Eleni Panopoulou but also Maria Zotou, Elina Nanopoulou and Eleni Kamateri for their efforts in the excellent organisation of the dual conference.

The University of Macedonia is a relatively new and small university. Its departments of Applied Informatics and Business Administration have worked together for these conferences. The University of Macedonia is located in Thessaloniki, Greece; a city with 2,500 years of history and at the same time a lively, artistic city and one of the largest student centres in South-Eastern Europe. The conference dinner was held at the Byzantine museum and was preceded by an exclusive museum tour especially organised for conference participants. It could not have been more appropriate!