How to Implement the European Digital Single Market: Identifying the catalyst for digital transformation

COVID-19 is regarded as a major driver for digital transformation of our society and, potentially as a boost for further digital single market integration. From the current perspective, pandemics cannot be avoided, but fully enabled digital societies will be better prepared to cope with them in future. This will, however, require reliable digital infrastructures to be put in place and further developed. Member States of the European Union and the European Commission have worked for more than 30 years to realise a European Digital Single Market. One key element in this development has been the so-called 'Large Scale Piloting' (LSP) approach. This paper will focus on implementation of the 'Once-Only Principle' Pilot (TOOP) as part of LSP and the adjoint Single Digital Gateway Regulation (SDGR). This paper will examine whether, and how these initiatives can foster further integration into a digital single market

Ver-/Misstrauen Schaffende Maßnahme beim e-Voting

Eine wichtige Voraussetzung für die Einführung von e-Voting und insbesondere von Online-Wahlen ist die Transparenz und das Vertrauen in das eingesetzte System. Durch die Verlagerung der Kontrolle vom Wahlvorstand zur Technik werden zusätzliche Verifikationsmöglichkeiten gefordert, damit sich der Wahlvorstand, die Wähler sowie die Kandidaten davon überzeugen können, dass die Wahl ordnungsgemäß abgelaufen ist. Dieser Beitrag zeigt, dass einige der Überprüfungstechniken zwingend eingesetzt werden müssen, andere sinnvoll sind aber wieder andere zu Misstrauen schaffenden Maßnahmen werden können und auch aus Benutzerfreundlichkeitsgründen indiskutabel sind.&nbsp

Internet Voting in Austria: History, Development, and Building Blocks for the Future

This dissertation aims to investigate the origins of Internet voting, analyze several deployments of Internet voting technology in Austria and identify - based on these accumulated experiences - building blocks that can be useful in decision-making on and planning of future uses of Internet voting technology within Austria and throughout the world. In line with the goals of this thesis, it will address the following research questions: - How did Internet voting originate? - What experiences were noted in the process of implementing Internet voting in Austria? - What building blocks can be identified for developing future Internet voting both inside and outside Austria? Internet voting is part of a transformational movement that applies information and communication technologies to daily business activities. It is only logical that elections are also considered for applying electronic (remote) communication technologies. While early efforts were driven by the belief that elections could make easy use of the Internet, it was shown that while the principles have to be interpreted and consequently applied in a different way, the same principles can still be derived for Internet voting, like integrity, secrecy, transparency, accountability and public confidence. The need to have forms of decision making in electronic networks has been identified in its beginnings and has received continuous attention throughout its development. At the height of the excitement about the possibilities of the Internet, countries raced to become the first to run a legally binding election using electronic voting systems. While several candidates emerged (e.g., Costa Rica, Bosnia Herzegovina, Germany, United States), Estonia was victorious in 2005. To date, Estonia is the only country that has introduced this form of voting without any preconditions or other limitations. In Austria, the intentions to use information and communication technologies (ICT) in elections concentrated on parliamentary affairs. Spurred by the efforts around student elections in Germany, Austria sought to conduct Internet voting in 2000. In the years thereafter, considerable progress was made at WU Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU), and this progress spearheaded the debate in the early 2000s. At the beginning in the years 2001-2003, technical solutions were sought to verify voter eligibility and maintain voter privacy. Later, more sophisticated algorithms were developed, and functionalities like quotas in election commissions were added. The Federation of Students' elections in 2009 were a remarkable event that demonstrated highly contentious political debate around the topic. This debate continued after the elections, which were held in May 2009 and suffered from the intense debate and protests and consequential organizational shortcomings. The experiences also showed that accurate legal regulations are needed to show interaction with the constitutional legal texts and to ensure accountability to a remote electronic voting channel through legal means. International standards were a first step, but regulations based on actual experience were needed to show how remote electronic voting channels could be realized and how to avoid problems identified in pilot implementations. This practical knowledge also shows that sophisticated algorithms are not always the key to success. Rather, several key implementations make use of very basic technical means to realize the tasks given by law. One should not forget about the voters. They not only need to use such systems, but they also need to understand the processes in order to build trust. The constitutional court ruling lifted the election and ruled that the respective ordinance was not in line with the requirements of the law. Hereby, the court established higher requirements resulting barriers for offering Internet voting channels in future elections. While the election administration system, which was a pre-requisite for the Internet voting system, was discontinued in the election thereafter, it returned in recent elections where postal voting was offered. On the basis of the aforementioned experiences, twelve building blocks were compiled discovered. These include design decisions, such as the following: the form of electronic voting, adaptations of the legal base, the technical means for identification and secrecy, observation, control functions for the electoral commission, evaluation processes, transparency functions, ballot sheet designs, controlling the organizational context as well as providing options for planning and implementation. This framework therefore facilitates and eases the generation of feasibility studies and other analyses and decision making ahead of using Internet voting in an election. With little adaption it can also be used for the use of other voting technologies. This work utilizes theoretical work and knowledge from adaptations of legal texts. These texts cover a wide range of topics, including methods for implementing identification and anonymity functions in remote electronic voting as well as testing and certifying systems that require transparent procedures. The findings also show that implementing remote an electronic voting system is a complex topic. It requires trust in the election administration; otherwise, suspicion will arise when more technology is introduced and implemented in an election process. Remote electronic voting is one of the most challenging information technology (IT) projects

User Acceptance of Multifunctional Smart Cards

The introduction of smart cards in the Austrian public sector has been discussed since the late 1980s. Public organisations including the national health insurance institute and the national citizen registration office are in the conceptual phase of the introduction. One of the pilot projects was the roll-out of the multifunctional student ID card to the students of the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration (WU Vienna) in autumn 2000. To assess the pilot and to gain insight into further projects, it is necessary to investigate the students’ point of view and their acceptance of the WU smart card. Furthermore it would be interesting to gain knowledge about the integration of further functionalities such as payment services or health insurance data. In this paper, which is a co-operation of three departments at the WU Vienna, we want to give a report on the current status of the research project focused on investigating the issues affecting the introduction of new functionalities of the multifunctional student ID card at the WU Vienna. While the research reported here is still at an early stage of analysis, we have already gained significant findings on students’ attitude towards usage of current as well as of potential extended functionalities of the student ID card. The main focus of our research is to gain knowledge about the general students’ acceptance. The data collection was carried out through an online questionnaire and the data analysis was based on a sample of 417 students. Evaluating the findings of the first phase of our research project, we have been able to draw implications for the next stage of our investigation

Data-Driven Personalized E-Government Services: Literature Review and Case Study

Better targeted and more personalized service offering to citizens has the potential to make state-citizen interactions more seamless, reduce inefficiencies in service provision, and lower barriers to service access for the less informed and disadvantaged social groups. What constitutes personalization and how the service offering can be customized to meet individual user demand is, however, much less clear and underdeveloped partially due to the technical and legal dependencies involved. The paper gives an overview of how personalization and customization of digital service offering have been discussed in the literature and systematizes the main strand emerging from this. It follows up with a case study of the Estonian X-road log data as one potential way to detect latent user demand emerging from an experienced life-event that could form a basis for letting users define their service needs as holistically as possible. The results show the existence of distinct service usage clusters, with specific user profiles behind them, a clear indication of latent demand that leads to a simultaneous consumption of otherwise independent digital services

On State-Level Architecture of Digital Government Ecosystems: From ICT-Driven to Data-Centric

The \digital transformation" is perceived as the key enabler for increasing wealth and well-being by politics, media and the citizens alike. In the same vein, digital government steadily receives more and more attention. Digital government gives rise to complex, large-scale state-level system landscapes consisting of many players and technological systems { and we call such system landscapes digital government ecosystems. In this paper, we systematically approach the state-level architecture of digital government ecosystems.We will discover the primacy of the state's institutional design in the architecture of digital government ecosystems, where Williamson's institutional analysis framework supports our considerations as theoretical background. Based on that insight, we will establish the notion of data governance architecture, which links data assets with accountable organizations. Our investigation results into a digital government architecture framework that can help in large-scale digital government design e_orts through (i) separation of concerns in terms of appropriate categories, and (ii) a better assessment of the feasibility of envisioned digital transformations. With its focus on data, the proposed framework perfectly _ts the current discussion on moving from ICT-driven to data-centric digital government

Co-creating an Open Government Data Driven Public Service: The Case of Chicago’s Food Inspection Forecasting Model

Large amounts of Open Government Data (OGD) have become available and co-created public services have started to emerge, but there is only limited empirical material available on co-created OGD-driven public services. To address this shortcoming and explore the concept of co-created OGD-driven public services the authors conducted an exploratory case study. The case study explored Chicago’s use of OGD in the co-creation of a predictive analytics model that forecasts critical safety violations at food serving establishments. The results of this exploratory work allowed for new insights to be gained on co-created OGD-driven public services and led to the identification of six factors that seem to play a key role in allowing for a OGD-driven public service to be co-created. The results of the initial work also provide valuable new information that can be used to aid in the development and improvement of the authors’ conceptual model for understanding co-created OGD-driven public service