Assessing and explaining local e-government maturity in the Iberoamerican community

This paper assesses local e-government maturity in the Iberoamerican community. Sixty Andorran, Argentinian, Brazilian, Chilean, Colombian, Costa Rican, Mexican, Portuguese, Spanish, and Uruguayan cities were considered in this study. A demographic criterion was adopted to define the municipalities observed within those countries and a three-dimensional model was used to evaluate each municipal website. Then, we conclude that local e-government still has a substantial room for improvement in the region and that population density is relevant to explain local e-government maturity, albeit only in its intrinsic Information and Participation dimensions.publishe

ARE WE PROVIDING SERVICE QUALITY WITH IS? EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM THE JUSTICE SYSTEM OF TWO DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Little is known about Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) im-pacts in Latin America justice system and few theoretical advances were done on this topic. This pa-per aims to propose a model grounded in Task-Technology Fit theory and explore its rationality in the justice system of two developing countries: Brazil and Argentina. Interviews with public managers and employees were conducted, and content analysis was applied to examine ICT4D impact on individual performance and public service quality. Our research makes several contributions by proposing a model on how ICT4D intervention can be assessed in an application area like the justice system. We examine the effectiveness of two national ICT4D endeavours, represented by the electronic lawsuit, thus showing how government can lead successful ICT4D implementations in developing countries. The practical value of this research rests on clarifying how ICT4D impacts public employees’ perfor-mance and public service quality. The results should help managers reduce gaps between policy and design of electronic lawsuits, thus guiding ICT4D endeavours by practitioners in other developing countries

Discursive Practices in the Digital Public Sphere of Modern Russia: Results and Directions of Research

The article is devoted to the study of digital discursive practices in the context of processes occurring in modern Russian politics. The author concludes that the digital public sphere of modern Russia is changing that was foreseen by J. Habermas. In the first part of the article classical approaches to the concept of “the public sphere” are analyzed and functional models of the public sphere and political communication are examined. In the second part of the article the author reveals the position of researchers in relation to the transformations of the public sphere caused by the active development of the Internet and social media and offers his own scheme for the functioning of the public sphere in a digital society. The third part focuses on discursive practices in the digital public domain. The results of author’s research using a special discourse analysis technique are presented. The advantages of this technique are revealed being based on the analysis of online discussions on the topic of raising the retirement age. At the end, discussion points and directions for further research in the field of digital public interaction between the state and citizens are indicated

Digital governance for sustainable development

Author ProofThis lecture discusses the impact of digital transformation of governance mechanisms as a tool to promote sustainable development and more inclusive societies, in the spirit of the United Nations 2030 Agenda. Three main challenges are addressed: the pursuit of inclusiveness, trustworthiness of software infrastructures, and the mechanisms to enforce more transparent and accountable public institutions.NORTE-01-0145- FEDER-000037. project SmartEGOV - Harnessing EGOV for Smart Governance (Foundations, methods, Tools)/NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000037, supported by Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (EFDR

Citizen Empowerment on the Basis of the new Freedom of Information Act in Austria - Make Information Freedom Great Again

Austria is the only country in Europe that has official secrecy, so called “Amtsgeheimnis”, as a constitutional principle. In contrast to other countries, this has consequences for citizens in their dealings with the authorities. Information is therefore not free per se, but is only released under certain conditions. These are severely restricted. This leads to a number of problems, for example, Austria is already among the worst 10 countries in terms of freedom of information. A new Freedom of Information Act is intended to change this. In this paper, the authors present a prototype that enables query processing between citizens and government agencies. Cloud services are used, and the data does not leave the respective data sovereignty

Whole of government critical success factors towards integrated E-government services: a preliminary review

Electronic Government (E-government) becomes one of the key elements for sustainable development of the country. Previous studies on E-government indicate that most governments are performing well in E-government implementation. However, the issues of process duplication and bureaucracy in services should be addressed to build trust and increase citizens’ satisfaction. Currently, there is a necessity to focus on the development of integrated and tailored-made services that suit with citizens’ needs. This initiative entails high commitment and collaboration from agencies, which can be achieved through the whole of government (WoG) approach. This study aims to identify the critical success factors of WoG towards the development of integrated E-government services. A preliminary review was conducted on previous studies and reports to get some insights of the subject being studied. The identified data were coded and analysed using content analysis method. The findings demonstrate that there are a number of critical success factors for WoG, which consist of technical and non-technical aspects. The findings act as a theoretical framework for better understanding about WoG approach for integrated E-government services

Strategies and Approaches for Exploiting the Value of Open Data

Data is increasingly permeating into all dimensions of our society and has become an indispensable commodity that serves as a basis for many products and services. Traditional sectors, such as health, transport, retail, are all benefiting from digital developments. In recent years, governments have also started to participate in the open data venture, usually with the motivation of increasing transparency. In fact, governments are one of the largest producers and collectors of data in many different domains. As the increasing amount of open data and open government data initiatives show, it is becoming more and more vital to identify the means and methods how to exploit the value of this data that ultimately affects various dimensions. In this thesis we therefore focus on researching how open data can be exploited to its highest value potential, and how we can enable stakeholders to create value upon data accordingly. Albeit the radical advances in technology enabling data and knowledge sharing, and the lowering of barriers to information access, raw data was given only recently the attention and relevance it merits. Moreover, even though the publishing of data is increasing at an enormously fast rate, there are many challenges that hinder its exploitation and consumption. Technical issues hinder the re-use of data, whilst policy, economic, organisational and cultural issues hinder entities from participating or collaborating in open data initiatives. Our focus is thus to contribute to the topic by researching current approaches towards the use of open data. We explore methods for creating value upon open (government) data, and identify the strengths and weaknesses that subsequently influence the success of an open data initiative. This research then acts as a baseline for the value creation guidelines, methodologies, and approaches that we propose. Our contribution is based on the premise that if stakeholders are provided with adequate means and models to follow, then they will be encouraged to create value and exploit data products. Our subsequent contribution in this thesis therefore enables stakeholders to easily access and consume open data, as the first step towards creating value. Thereafter we proceed to identify and model the various value creation processes through the definition of a Data Value Network, and also provide a concrete implementation that allows stakeholders to create value. Ultimately, by creating value on data products, stakeholders participate in the global data economy and impact not only the economic dimension, but also other dimensions including technical, societal and political

A Government Decision Analytics Framework Based on Citizen Opinion

This ongoing research aims to develop a Government Decision Support Framework that employs citizen opinions and sentiments to predict the level of acceptance of newly proposed policies. The system relies on a knowledge base of citizen opinions and an Ontological Model comprising aspects and related terms of different policy domains as an input and a Bayesian predictive procedure. The work proceeds in four basic steps. The first step involves developing domain models comprising aspects for different policy domains in government and automatically acquiring semantically related terms for these aspects from associated policy documents. The second step involves computing citizen sentiments and opinions for the different policy aspects. The third involves updating the ontology with the computed sentiments and the last step involves employing a Bayesian Predictive Process to predict likely citizen opinion for a new proposal (policy) based on information available in the ontology. We provide some background to this work, describe our approach in some detail and discuss the progress mad

Poslovna inteligencija i otvoreni podaci: Mogućnosti za izvođenje vrednih informacija u oblasti turizma

This paper aims to introduce the concept of data analysis which could easily be implemented by anybody involved in the subject matter with basic IT knowledge and skills. The paper is divided into two parts, the first of which presents an overview of related research from two points of view: (1) publications which refer to the analysis, or the overall use of open data from the tourism domain and (2) publications which use business intelligence tools to analyse tourism data. Results indicate that there is a significant number of publications but none of them combines the two issues in the field of tourism (open data and business intelligence). The second part refers to the possibilities of using Power BI, the business intelligence tool for analysing available open data about tourism in Serbia.Publishe