Towards stakeholder governance on large e-government platforms:a case of Suomi.fi

Abstract E-government evolves towards large-scale software platforms that integrate access to and information exchange among public services. Governance of large-scale e-government platforms is challenging because of the large number of stakeholders with diverging needs, agendas, and changing service portfolios. This paper presents a revelatory case, the e-government platform Suomi.fi, its stakeholders and stakeholder interactions related to development and governance of the platform. Our stakeholder analysis of Suomi.fi identified 15 stakeholder interaction types and related issues regarded as important for governance of large-scale e-government platforms. The results contribute by addressing the importance of stakeholder identification and continuing governance beyond individual development and implementation projects. Such a large-scale platform involved additional stakeholder types of external influencers (including media, other countries, the European Union, third party software integrators) and other external platforms, compared to the project-centric stakeholder models. Hence, we argue for extended stakeholder governance models and practices for large-scale e-government platforms

Blockchain and initial coin offerings: blockchain's implications for crowdfunding

Interest in Blockchain technology is growing rapidly and at a global scale. As scrutiny from practitioners and researchers intensifies, various industries and use cases are identified that may benefit from adopting Blockchain. In this context, peer-to-peer (P2P) funding through initial coin offerings (ICOs) is often singled out as one of the most visible and promising use cases. ICOs are novel forms of crowdfunding that collect funds in exchange for so-called Blockchain tokens. These tokens can represent any traditional form of underlying asset and have already been used, among others, to denote shares in a company, user reputations in online systems, deposits of fiat currencies, and balances in cryptocurrency systems. Importantly, ICOs allow for P2P investments without intermediaries. In this chapter, we explain the fundamentals of ICOs, highlight their differences to traditional financing, and analyze their potential impacts on crowdfunding

Distributed Governance in Multi-Sided Platforms

Over the last decade, blockchain technology has facilitated a method by which a network of equipotent and equally privileged peers can jointly maintain and edit databases in an entirely decentralized manner, without any kind of an intermediary exhibiting unilateral control. As a consequence it has enabled the creation of a new type of multi-sided platform architecture with distributed governance. As the different platform provision functions are opened to free market competition rather than monopolized by a single entity, the monopoly-like pricing structure typical of platforms is overhauled. Instead, blockchain-enabled distributed platforms appear to share value more evenly between the all the different market sides connected to the platform. Our analysis reveals that blockchain technology adds new considerations to how multi-sided platform architectures should be perceived and analyzed.Peer reviewe