An analysis on the implementation of secure web-related protocols in portuguese city councils

The services supporting the websites, both public and private entities, may support security protocols such as HTTPS or DNSSEC. Public and private entities have a responsibility to ensure the security of their online platforms. Entities in the public domain such as city councils provide their services through their websites. However, each city council has its systems, configurations, and IT teams, and this means they have different standings regarding the security protocols supported. This paper analyzes the status of security protocols on Portuguese city council websites, specifically HTTPS and DNSSEC. The study evaluated 308 city council websites using a script developed for the research, and data was collected from the website of Direção Geral das Autarquias Locais (DGAL) on December 14, 2022, and the websites were scanned on December 22, 2022. The results of this assessment reveal that around 97% of city council websites use RSA as their encryption algorithm and around 84% use 2048-bit length keys for digital certificate signing. Furthermore, about 53% of the city council websites are still supporting outdated and potentially insecure SSL/TLS versions, and around 95% of the councils are not implementing DNSSEC in their domains. These results highlight potential areas for improvement in cybersecurity measures and can serve as a baseline to track progress toward improving cybersecurity maturity in Portuguese city councils.A41D-7428-BA6C | Jackson Barreto Costa JúniorN/

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

E-government mechanisms to enhance the participation of citizens and society: exploratory analysis through the dimension of municipalities

The use of information technologies has been a window of opportunity for local governments to increase initiatives and instruments for citizen participation and interaction with society. The electronic interaction of municipalities with citizens may be different depending on the municipality. The objective of this study is to explore how the dimension of Portuguese municipalities can explain the implementation of participatory processes and channels through e-government initiatives to improve participation and interaction with society. Based on the analysis of the municipal information and interaction indexes, our results show that municipalities are increasingly committed to developing online initiatives for citizen participation in a significant way over the years, with the largest municipalities being the ones that implement the most mechanisms. The influence of population size occurs both for information dissemination and for the implementation of citizen participation mechanisms. This result is consistent with stakeholder theory and political cost theory. This paper contributes to the literature by offering a characterization of the municipalities and the mechanisms carried out to implement citizen participation and interaction initiatives according to the size of the municipality. It claims that policy makers need to pay attention to the capabilities of e-governments tools to better facilitate the e-participation process and provide the necessary channels to get citizens’ feedback.This study was conducted at the Research Center in Political Science (UIDB/CPO/00758/2020), and supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT

Public policy: turning open data into democratic data - Portal Quality Assessment - Comparative Analysis

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Knowledge Management and Business IntelligenceAs data, information, and their respective provisioning gets more and more ubiquitous, people start to look for - and even demand - transparency and data to support the policies in effect right now that, either directly or indirectly, affects them. There are many expectations related with Open Government Data initiatives, such as improving policymaking, increase in transparency of government spending, advance citizen engagement with the institutions, etc. This master’s proposal aims to offer research that pertains to this theme; including an in depth look into one of the most reputed OGD maturity report (EU Open Data Maturity Report), a systematic literature review of Open Data’s main objectives and goals, the influence on publication of scientific literature as well as the potential socio-economic and transparency impact they may have, in order to proceed to an assessment of the portal quality in Portugal by evaluating the usage of its data on scientific papers and articles; through the usage of bibliometrics and PRISMA methodology. My thesis research drills down on these topics: What are the most used Portuguese OGD portals in academic literature? What are the authors that make the most use of Portuguese OGD portals? What characterizes the authors and the publications

CMS in Public Administration: A Comparative Analysis

There is a wide variety of content management systems (CMS) available on the market, each with its characteristics, advantages and disadvantages, but the open source, such as Joomla, WordPress and Drupal are the ones who stand out, duo to characteristics such as: ease of use, possibility of customization, support, security, adaptability and amount of resources available (modules, components and plugins). These solutions are extremely relevant for public organizations, bringing citizens and businesses closer to their governments, by providing a more direct and intuitive access to government information and services (Fang, 2002). To achieve the benefits of its implementation, it is necessary an analysis of the solutions available on the market and which ones are best suited to certain management objectives. Through a comparison of data and information collected, it is highlighted the advantages and disadvantages of each of the three CMS mentioned, especially which one is most indicated for a specific context of application and project typology in public administration, using for these rankings of use and popularity on platforms such as W3Techs and BuiltWith, as well as a set of supporting documentation.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

SoResilere—A Social Resilience Index Applied to Portuguese Flood Disaster-Affected Municipalities

Decades of academic discussion on social resilience have led to the development of indicators, indexes, and different approaches to assessing it at national and local levels. The need to show real-world applications of such assessments is evident since resilience became a political and disaster risk reduction governance component. This article gives a full description of the methodology used to develop SoResilere, a new social resilience index applied to flood disaster-affected Portuguese municipalities. Study cases were selected according to historical databases, academic sources and governmental entities. Statistical methods for data dimension reduction, such as Factor Analysis (through Principal Component Analysis), were applied to the quantitative data and Optimal Scaling to the categorical data. SoResilere results were analyzed. Since SoResilere is a new tool, component weighting was applied to compare results with no weighting, although it did not affect the SoResilere status in 55.5% of the study cases. There is a tendency to look at the improvement of SoResilere results with component weighting due mainly to the quantitative subindex. There is no evidence of the benefits of component weighting, as no logical association or spatial pattern was found to support SoResilere status improvement in 22.22% of the study cases.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The good, the bad and the ugly: three faces of social media usage by local governments

This article explores the determinants of local governments' use of social networking sites. It does so by analysing the relative impact of institutional, political and social determinants, while controlling for the impact of mayors' traits and social characteristics of municipalities on local governments levels of activity on Facebook. Empirically, this article presents a within-case analysis of Portuguese municipalities' activity on social media, aiming to shed light on the strategic use of social media by local governments. A coherent picture associated with politically pro-active local governments emerges from the results: higher levels of social media activity appear in municipalities with more competitive local elections and higher commitment to transparency. Moreover, findings suggest that local governments tend to be concerned with the low levels of voter turnout, potentially resorting to social media as a powerful tool to increase civic engagement and (offline) political participation. Levels of Facebook activity are significantly higher in larger and wealthier municipalities. The results indicate that Facebook official pages of municipalities are part of a larger arsenal of tools to promote political engagement and activity levels signal a propensity to involve citizens pro-actively.This research received funding from the 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) and from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science through national funds [Grant No. UID/CPO/0758/2019]

People Power & Politics: Evaluating the impact of the Conselho de Cidadãos de Lisboa on climate policy and political efficacy in Lisbon

As the social and ecological effects of climate change intensify, governments across the globe must evaluate how best to deal with the climate crisis. Likewise, increasing citizen participation in decision-making processes has been a key strategy for dealing with such issues. Theories on the benefits of citizen participation inform real practices such as democratic mini-publics and citizens assemblies. In Lisbon, Portugal, the Câmara Municipal de Lisboa implemented the first edition of the Conselho de Cidadãos de Lisboa (CCL) in May 2022. The CCL is a citizens assembly designed to directly involve residents in city policy-making, with the first edition focusing on the climate crisis. This paper seeks to evaluate the CCL in two ways: how has the CCL impacted Lisbon climate policy, and how has it affected citizen’s internal and external political efficacy? Research conducted to answer these questions consist of interviews with government officials, personal surveys of Lisbon residents, and a survey of social media. The data collected shows that although small steps have been taken to implement CCL proposals, the council had no significant impact on Lisbon climate policy. The data also reveals that while citizens overarchingly support the CCL, it had little to no impact on their internal or external political efficacy due to a lack of concrete evidence of CCL influence