From Alibaba to Youtube: User Search for Digital Democracy Topics in Switzerland

Digital Democracy tools such as e-consultation, e-petitions or internet voting play an increasing role and are part of the digitalisation process in politics and government. Digital life styles in general and during the pandemic in particular might have pushed for an increasing demand for so called civic tech tools. Digital democracy search terms were monitored across multiple digital channels for several months in the year 2021 and contrasted to the offer for such tools in the German, French and Italian speaking part of the country. To measure the offer for digital participation tools an index per canton established in 2021 is being used

A Method to Screen, Assess, and Prepare Open Data for Use

Open data's value-creating capabilities and innovation potential are widely recognized, resulting in a notable increase in the number of published open data sources. A crucial challenge for companies intending to leverage open data is to identify suitable open datasets that support specific business scenarios and prepare these datasets for use. Researchers have developed several open data assessment techniques, but those are restricted in scope, do not consider the use context, and are not embedded in the complete set of activities required for open data consumption in enterprises. Therefore, our research aims to develop prescriptive knowledge in the form of a meaningful method to screen, assess, and prepare open data for use in an enterprise setting. Our findings complement existing open data assessment techniques by providing methodological guidance to prepare open data of uncertain quality for use in a value-adding and demand-oriented manner, enabled by knowledge graphs and linked data concepts. From an academic perspective, our research conceptualizes open data preparation as a purposeful and value-creating process

Increasing transparency through the open city toolkit

Degbelo, A., Granell, C., Trilles, S., Bhattacharya, D., & Wissing, J. (2020). Tell Me How My Open Data Is Re-used: Increasing Transparency Through the Open City Toolkit. In S. Hawken, H. Han, & C. Pettit (Eds.), Open Cities, Open Data: Collaborative Cities in the Information Era (pp. 311-330). [Chapter 14] Springer Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6605-5_14The Open Data movement has been gaining momentum in recent years, with increasingly many public institutions making their data freely accessible. Despite much data being already open (and more to come), finding information about the actual usage of these open datasets is still a challenge. This chapter introduces two tools of the Open City Toolkit (OCT) that tackle this issue: a tool to increase transparency and interactive guidelines. Interviews with city council employees confirmed the utility of the transparency tool. Both tools can be used by city councils (for planning purposes) and by users interested to know more about the value of current open datasets (for information purposes).authorsversionpublishe

Comparing "challenge-based" and "code-based" internet voting verification implementations

Internet-enabled voting introduces an element of invisibility and unfamiliarity into the voting process, which makes it very different from traditional voting. Voters might be concerned about their vote being recorded correctly and included in the final tally. To mitigate mistrust, many Internet-enabled voting systems build verifiability into their systems. This allows voters to verify that their votes have been cast as intended, stored as cast and tallied as stored at the conclusion of the voting period. Verification implementations have not been universally successful, mostly due to voter difficulties using them. Here, we evaluate two cast as intended verification approaches in a lab study: (1) "Challenge-Based" and (2) "Code-Based". We assessed cast-as-intended vote verification efficacy, and identified usability issues related to verifying and/or vote casting. We also explored acceptance issues post-verification, to see whether our participants were willing to engage with Internet voting in a real election. Our study revealed the superiority of the code-based approach, in terms of ability to verify effectively. In terms of real-life Internet voting acceptance, convenience encourages acceptance, while security concerns and complexity might lead to rejection

Modeling of open government data for public sector organizations using the potential theories and determinants-A systematic review

Open government data (OGD) has huge potential to increase transparency, accountability, and participation while improving effciency in operations, data-driven and evidence-based policymaking, and trust in government institutions. Despite its potential benefits, OGD has not been widely and successfully adopted in public sector organizations, particularly in developing countries. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore the theories/frameworks and potential determinants that influence the OGD adoption in public sector organizations. To ascertain the various determinants of OGD adoption in public sector organizations, this study involved a systematic review of already established theories and determinants addressed in the public sector open data domain. The review revealed that the TOE (technology, organization, environment) framework was dominantly employed over theories in the earlier studies to understand organizational adoption to OGD followed by institutional theory. The results, concerning potential determinants, revealed that some of the most frequently addressed determinants are an organization's digitization/digitalization capacity, compliance pressure, financial resources, legislation, policy, regulations, organizational culture, political leadership commitment, top-management support, and data quality. The findings will enrich researchers to empirically investigate the exposed determinants and improve the understanding of decision-makers to leverage OGD adoption by taking relevant measures

Introducing the DigiPart-Index

Digital political participation increasingly complements analogue forms of political participation. Elements of the political process such as dialogue, consultation, participation as well as voting have received a further digital boost in the COVID-19 pandemic. Because they reflect the new digital experiences of ever broader sections of the population, using digital means to participate in the political process will play an increasingly important role in the future. The DigiPart-Index (DPI) measures three dimensions of digital political participation for all cantons in Switzerland. The first dimension reflects how political decision-making in democracies is preceded by an opinion-formation phase. It covers tools for e-deliberation, digital political education and e-transparency. The second dimension, co-creation, maps the exchange between government agencies and civil society. The two components, e-consultation and e-demand, are surveyed for this purpose. Thirdly, in addition to public debate and an exchange between the state and society, digital tools can also be used to enable the act of voting. To this end, the foundations must be laid in the form of electronic identification, i.e. an e-ID, so that it can then be used for e-voting and e-collecting, among other things. The values for the DigiPart-Index Switzerland range from 0 to 100 points. Results show that the differences between the cantons are considerable, ranging from a minimum of 6 to a maximum of 55 points. The mean value is 31 points. The ranking tends to be led by cantons with greater financial resources. However, even the cantons at the top range of the index still have room for considerable improvement in all dimensions

Perspectives on Digital Sustainability

This habilitation thesis presents perspectives on digital sustainability, a novel concept connecting digitalization with sustainability. It explains why digital artifacts such as software or data have to meet technical characteristics of quality, transparency, semantics and multiple locations in order to serve society in the long term. However, these requirements are just necessary but not sufficient preconditions to consider digital artifacts sustainable. Their associated ecosystem of businesses, governments, and individuals must also meet the legal and organizational characteristics of open license, shared tacit knowledge, participation, good governance, and diversified funding. And, finally, sustainable digital artifacts must lead to ecological, societal and economical benefits. This thesis statement is discussed in the introductory chapter of the habilitation. It connects and summarizes 13 refereed publications clustered in five perspectives on digital sustainability: In the first perspective, the path of defining the concept of digital sustainability is summarized. This part starts with a publication that introduced an initial set of characteristics for digital sustainability (Stuermer, 2014). The following article connects digital sustainability with digital preservation (Stuermer and Abu-Tayeh, 2016). These studies have eventually led to an extended publication in a sustainability journal elaborating the basic conditions of digital sustainability in detail (Stuermer et al., 2017a). The second perspective includes recent publications on open source software (OSS) research scrutinizing how patterns of digital sustainability are applied within the software development industry. One publication analyzes feature requests within the Eclipse OSS community (Heppler et al., 2016). The following article develops a maturity model of Inner Source, a special form of OSS development practices in an organization (Eckert et al., 2017). And one study in a computer science journal addresses different types of OSS governance by comparing independent and joint communities (Eckert et al., 2019). The next perspective focuses on the procurement of information technology (IT) which involves critical topics of knowledge management and governance related to digital sustainability. Analyzing data crawled from the Swiss public procurement platform Simap.ch exposes lock-in effects, outsourcing decisions as well as multisourcing within the software industry. One article in this perspective introduces the methodology and the dataset pointing out the high level of direct awards within the IT sector (Stuermer et al., 2017b). Another publication tests hypotheses on contract choice in regard to knowledge specificity and task scope (Krancher and Stuermer, 2018a). And one study explains multisourcing decisions using a large dataset on public procurement of IT in Switzerland (Krancher and Stuermer, 2018b). The subsequent perspective highlights open data and linked data as another form of sustainable digital artifacts. One publication proposes a framework permitting the measurement of the impact of open data (Stuermer and Dapp, 2016). Another article introduces linked open government data (LOGD), a kind of graph-structured open data stored in different kinds of platforms (Hitz-Gamper et al., 2019). The final perspective extends the phenomenon of open data into the area of governmental services. By linking the concepts of public governance and open government one article shows how transparency and participation are achieved with digital tools (Stuermer and Ritz, 2014). Another publication includes an empirical analysis of the FixMyStreet open government platform in Zurich called “Züri wie neu” using open data and a user survey to identify the motivation of citizens using this digital tool (Abu-Tayeh et al., 2018)

Evaluation of engagement with hyperlocal e-participation systems by citizens and representatives

This work is concerned with the information practices associated with hyperlocal representation. The findings derive from an evaluation of a portfolio of ten previously published papers covering the period 2010-2020.The main contributions are: (a) The development of the concept of hyperlocal representation as a domain with its own challenges; (b) The characterisation of hyperlocal representatives as stakeholders in the participation process; and (c) Expansion of the existence and nature of lurkers as passive participants in the participation process, and the responses seen in the information sharing practices of the hyperlocal representatives, including use of information sharing by proxy. These contributions are significant because they are the first to consider community councillors as information actors in their own right, and their response to lurking behaviours in their community. This is in contrast with previous research at this level of government, which has focussed on the activities of citizens, and local government administration staff. The portfolio demonstrates the application of frameworks derived from information science to the field of e-participation. It identifies the impact of the project- and information systems-based nature of much e-participation research, and proposes an information-centric perspective from information science to support a new analysis, through application of theoretical approaches derived from everyday life information practice, information literacy, activity systems and communities of learning. An additional contribution is the creation of a new model of the transition from lurking to participation based on social-cognitive theory. A further contribution of the thesis is to methodologies in information science, in particular through the design of questionnaires and supporting interviews as data collection instruments in this context. This thesis adds to understanding of information sharing in a quasi-work context where there are limited expectations of interaction. It could support future research into the information practice of representatives in (a) the choice of channels for communication with citizens, (b) the information communities involved in the representation role and (c) the impact of the policy cycle on information practices