South American Expert Roundtable : increasing adaptive governance capacity for coping with unintended side effects of digital transformation

This paper presents the main messages of a South American expert roundtable (ERT) on the unintended side effects (unseens) of digital transformation. The input of the ERT comprised 39 propositions from 20 experts representing 11 different perspectives. The two-day ERT discussed the main drivers and challenges as well as vulnerabilities or unseens and provided suggestions for: (i) the mechanisms underlying major unseens; (ii) understanding possible ways in which rebound effects of digital transformation may become the subject of overarching research in three main categories of impact: development factors, society, and individuals; and (iii) a set of potential action domains for transdisciplinary follow-up processes, including a case study in Brazil. A content analysis of the propositions and related mechanisms provided insights in the genesis of unseens by identifying 15 interrelated causal mechanisms related to critical issues/concerns. Additionally, a cluster analysis (CLA) was applied to structure the challenges and critical developments in South America. The discussion elaborated the genesis, dynamics, and impacts of (groups of) unseens such as the digital divide (that affects most countries that are not included in the development of digital business, management, production, etc. tools) or the challenge of restructuring small- and medium-sized enterprises (whose service is digitally substituted by digital devices). We identify specific issues and effects (for most South American countries) such as lack of governmental structure, challenging geographical structures (e.g., inclusion in high-performance transmission power), or the digital readiness of (wide parts) of society. One scientific contribution of the paper is related to the presented methodology that provides insights into the phenomena, the causal chains underlying “wanted/positive” and “unwanted/negative” effects, and the processes and mechanisms of societal changes caused by digitalization

Reference Model and Method of Evaluation for Smart Cities in Government Portals: a study of the Portuguese and Brazilian reality

The urban issue is currently of great inter-est. The cities and its multiple socio-cultural and political manifestations have been acquiring, from the technological changes of Information Society, new in-struments for ensuring the quality of the future life of most of the world population, and this subject has been named in doctrine as Smart Cities. According to this, several organizations have been gathering efforts in order to monitoring the different dimensions of smart cities. It is thus of utmost importance to analyse the main (inter) national metrics and indicators for evaluating the levels of smartness of cities, with special focus in governance. For this, and based in bibliographic revision and realizacao of conceptual proof, it is proposed an evaluation method that expresses the variables capable of enhancing the intelligent governance in Govern-ment portals. From the research undertak-en, it may be verified that studies in this field are still incipient. On the other side, in spite of the knowledge of the limits of such approach, this method will serve as a new focus on the fiability of the communication process between government and society and as source of consultation and evaluation of the intelligent governance. Finally, it is believed that tha periodical application of this method will allows, besides the monitoring and control of public policies, also the opening up of new ways of citizen's participation.Our thanks to the CAPES Foundation, Ministry of Education of Brazil, and also to the CIIDH-Interdisciplinary Research Center in Human Rights, and to the Algo-ritimi Centre, both at University of Minho. The work of Marciele Berger has been supported by CAPES under Grant nr. BEX - 1788/15-9. The work of Paulo Novais has been supported by COMPETE Pro-gramme (operational programme for com-petitiveness) within project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043, by National Funds through the FCT (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) within the Projects UID/CEC/00319/2013. The work of Nuno Lopes has been supported by Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020) whithin the pro-ject "SmartEGOV: Harnessing EGOV for Smart Governance (Foundations, methods, Tools) / NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000037", under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the Euro-pean Regional Development Fund (EFDR)

The countryside in urbanized Flanders: towards a flexible definition for a dynamic policy

The countryside, the rural area, the open space, … many definitions are used for rural Flanders. Everyone makes its own interpretation of the countryside, considering it as a place for living, working or recreating. The countryside is more than just a geographical area: it is an aggregate of physical, social, economic and cultural functions, strongly interrelated with each other. According to international and European definitions of rural areas there would be almost no rural area in Flanders. These international definitions are all developed to be used for analysis and policy within their specific context. They are not really applicable to Flanders because of the historical specificity of its spatial structure. Flanders is characterized by a giant urbanization pressure on its countryside while internationally rural depopulation is a point of interest. To date, for every single rural policy initiative – like the implementation of the European Rural Development Policy – Flanders used a specifically adapted definition, based on existing data or previously made delineations. To overcome this oversupply of definitions and delineations, the Flemish government funded a research project to obtain a clear and flexible definition of the Flemish countryside and a dynamic method to support Flemish rural policy aims. First, an analysis of the currently used definitions of the countryside in Flanders was made. It is clear that, depending on the perspective or the policy context, another definition of the countryside comes into view. The comparative study showed that, according to the used criteria, the area percentage of Flanders that is rural, varies between 9 and 93 per cent. Second, dynamic sets of criteria were developed, facilitating a flexible definition of the countryside, according to the policy aims concerned. This research part was focused on 6 policy themes, like ‘construction, maintenance and management of local (transport) infrastructures’ and ‘provision of (minimum) services (education, culture, health care, …)’. For each theme a dynamic set of criteria or indicators was constructed. These indicators make it possible to show where a policy theme manifests itself and/or where policy interventions are possible or needed. In this way every set of criteria makes up a new definition of rural Flanders. This method is dynamic; new data or insights can easily be incorporated and new criteria sets can be developed if other policy aims come into view. The developed method can contribute to a more region-oriented and theme-specific rural policy and funding mechanism

Building a National IoT Plan: Policy Recommendations and the Case of Brazil

The Internet of Things (“IoT”) is an expression that refers to a whole set of new services and devices that includes at least three fundamental aspects: connectivity, use of sensors or actuators, and computational capacity for data processing and storage. The Internet of Things goes beyond connecting objects to each other; it also gives them the power to process data (thereby making them "smart"). For developing countries such as Brazil, the opportunities offered by the Internet of Things can compensate for shortcomings in infrastructure and services, and can improve innovation, quality of life, productivity, and even the economic complexity of our basket of export products. However, the way in which each country will seize this opportunity will depend on its specific aspirations and strategies. The broader economic, social, political, and legal context of the country should be considered, as well as the local development of information and communication technologies. For this reason, the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES), in partnership with the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation and Communications (MCTIC), has commissioned this study, "Internet of Things: An Action Plan for Brazil." This study, mapped by a consortium comprised by McKinsey & Company, the CPqD Foundation, and Pereira Neto | Macedo Law Firm, outlines the local technological and economic challenges related to the topic, as well as well as how to address legal issues inherent to the development of IoT in Brazil

Using multi-criteria analysis for smart city assessment

Urban centers have been under a new concept of city. Smart Cities are, in a nutshell, organized communities that feature high communication technology and conscious investments in sustainability, providing dynamic and safe environments. This paper presents a methodology to assess and rank Smart Cities based on a multi-criteria decision-making process. Methodologies that do not consider a pondered approach and filter for specific goals are commonly found in the literature, once there is a great number of criteria involved in these analyses. This work proposes filtering the criteria, considering each specific evaluation and its objectives. Our methodology is based on a multi-criteria analysis and uses AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) to support the process of weights definition and MACBAC (Multi-Attributive Border Approximation Area Comparison) in an application with compensatory characteristics. Through this study, it is possible to conduct the assessment of Smart Cities according to its multiple contexts, viz. its location, decision-makers and the objectives of the analysis. All in all, this research presents novelty related to the organization of the evaluation in accord to the expected resolution and a pondered approach with reduced number of criteria, making the analysis very straightforward.publicad

Policies for capacity development

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Digitising the Industry Internet of Things Connecting the Physical, Digital and VirtualWorlds

This book provides an overview of the current Internet of Things (IoT) landscape, ranging from the research, innovation and development priorities to enabling technologies in a global context. A successful deployment of IoT technologies requires integration on all layers, be it cognitive and semantic aspects, middleware components, services, edge devices/machines and infrastructures. It is intended to be a standalone book in a series that covers the Internet of Things activities of the IERC - Internet of Things European Research Cluster from research to technological innovation, validation and deployment. The book builds on the ideas put forward by the European Research Cluster and the IoT European Platform Initiative (IoT-EPI) and presents global views and state of the art results on the challenges facing the research, innovation, development and deployment of IoT in the next years. The IoT is bridging the physical world with virtual world and requires sound information processing capabilities for the "digital shadows" of these real things. The research and innovation in nanoelectronics, semiconductor, sensors/actuators, communication, analytics technologies, cyber-physical systems, software, swarm intelligent and deep learning systems are essential for the successful deployment of IoT applications. The emergence of IoT platforms with multiple functionalities enables rapid development and lower costs by offering standardised components that can be shared across multiple solutions in many industry verticals. The IoT applications will gradually move from vertical, single purpose solutions to multi-purpose and collaborative applications interacting across industry verticals, organisations and people, being one of the essential paradigms of the digital economy. Many of those applications still have to be identified and involvement of end-users including the creative sector in this innovation is crucial. The IoT applications and deployments as integrated building blocks of the new digital economy are part of the accompanying IoT policy framework to address issues of horizontal nature and common interest (i.e. privacy, end-to-end security, user acceptance, societal, ethical aspects and legal issues) for providing trusted IoT solutions in a coordinated and consolidated manner across the IoT activities and pilots. In this, context IoT ecosystems offer solutions beyond a platform and solve important technical challenges in the different verticals and across verticals. These IoT technology ecosystems are instrumental for the deployment of large pilots and can easily be connected to or build upon the core IoT solutions for different applications in order to expand the system of use and allow new and even unanticipated IoT end uses. Technical topics discussed in the book include: • Introduction• Digitising industry and IoT as key enabler in the new era of Digital Economy• IoT Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda• IoT in the digital industrial context: Digital Single Market• Integration of heterogeneous systems and bridging the virtual, digital and physical worlds• Federated IoT platforms and interoperability• Evolution from intelligent devices to connected systems of systems by adding new layers of cognitive behaviour, artificial intelligence and user interfaces.• Innovation through IoT ecosystems• Trust-based IoT end-to-end security, privacy framework• User acceptance, societal, ethical aspects and legal issues• Internet of Things Application

Ecology-based planning. Italian and French experimentations

This paper examines some French and Italian experimentations of green infrastructures’ (GI) construction in relation to their techniques and methodologies. The construction of a multifunctional green infrastructure can lead to the generation of a number of relevant bene fi ts able to face the increasing challenges of climate change and resilience (for example, social, ecological and environmental through the recognition of the concept of ecosystem services) and could ease the achievement of a performance-based approach. This approach, differently from the traditional prescriptive one, helps to attain a better and more fl exible land-use integration. In both countries, GI play an important role in contrasting land take and, for their adaptive and cross-scale nature, they help to generate a res ilient approach to urban plans and projects. Due to their fl exible and site-based nature, GI can be adapted, even if through different methodologies and approaches, both to urban and extra-urban contexts. On one hand, France, through its strong national policy on ecological networks, recognizes them as one of the major planning strategies toward a more sustainable development of territories; on the other hand, Italy has no national policy and Regions still have a hard time integrating them in already existing planning tools. In this perspective, Italian experimentations on GI construction appear to be a simple and sporadic add-on of urban and regional plans

Law in the present future : approaching the legal imaginary of smart cities with science (and) fiction

This doctoral research concerns smart cities, describing digital solutions and social issues related to their innovative technologies, adopted models, and major projects around the world. The many perspectives mentioned in it were identified by online tools used for the textual analysis of two databases that were built from relevant publications on the main subject by authors coming from media and academia. Expected legal elements emerged from the applied process, such as privacy, security, transparency, participation, accountability, and governance. A general review was produced on the information available about the public policies of Big Data in the two municipal cases of Rio de Janeiro and Montréal, and their regulation in the Brazilian and Canadian contexts. The combined approaches from science and literature were explored to reflect on the normative concerns represented by the global challenges and local risks brought by urban surveillance, climate change, and other neoliberal conditions. Cyberpunk Science Fiction reveals itself useful for engaging with the shared problems that need to be faced in the present time, all involving democracy. The results achieved reveal that this work was, in fact, about the complex network of practices and senses between (post)modern law and the imaginary of the future.Cette recherche doctorale centrée sur les villes intelligentes met en évidence les solutions numériques et les questionnements sociétaux qui ont trait aux technologies innovantes, ainsi qu’aux principaux modèles et projets développés autour d’elles à travers le monde. Des perspectives multiples en lien avec ces développements ont été identifiées à l’aide d’outils en ligne qui ont permis l’analyse textuelle de deux bases de données comprenant des publications scientifiques et des écrits médiatiques. De ce processus analytique ont émergé des éléments juridiques relatifs aux questions de vie privée, de sécurité, de transparence, de participation, d’imputabilité et de gouvernance. De plus, à partir de ces informations a été réalisée une revue des politiques publiques relatives aux mégadonnées dans les villes de Rio de Janeiro et de Montréal, ainsi que des réglementations nationales du Canada et du Brésil en lien avec ce sujet. Finalement, à travers l’exploration d’écrits scientifiques et fictionnels de la littérature, les principaux enjeux normatifs soulevés localement et mondialement par la surveillance urbaine, les changements climatiques et les politiques néolibérales ont pu être mis à jour. Le courant cyberpunk de la science-fiction s’est avéré particulièrement utile pour révéler les principaux problèmes politiques, en lien avec la préservation de la démocratie, auxquelles sont confrontées nos sociétés présentement. Les résultats de la recherche démontrent finalement la présence d’un réseau de pratiques et de significations entre le droit (post)moderne et les représentations imaginaires du futur