Transforming Transparency into Trust: An Analysis of the European Commission’s E-Government and Citizen Trust

Transparency and openness are given a new platform by the internet, allowing “government and citizens [to] more finely manage information” in an easier and cost effective way (Stiglitz, 1999). In our age of modernity and technological progress, this form of online governance, known as ‘e-government’, has been heralded by some as having the possibility of “revolutionaliz[ing] the relationships between citizens and governments” (Hinnant and Welch, 2002, p.1). In 2006, following the finding that “65% of respondents to the Commission’s public consultation on eGovernment [believe] that eDemocracy can help reduce Europe’s democratic deficit”, the European Commission launched its e-government action plan, trying to increase transparency via its website (European Commission, 2006, p.2). This objective was to be achieved by 2010, but it appears not to have been completely successful as indicated by the January 2011 Eurobarometer report, which reveals that only 44 percent of European citizens trust the European Commission (Eurobarometer, 2011a, p.41). This paper aims to address the European Commission’s problem as to the ways of how transparency through e-government can and should be used to enhance citizen trust – as a factor of democratic legitimacy – in the European Commission. Claiming that transparency through e-government in order to increase citizen trust in the European Commission cannot only involve the dissemination of information but rather has to be informed by other standards expected by citizens, this paper investigates factors which have to be present along with basic transparency so as to build up trust. Initially, three aspects of communication are proposed to play an important role in transforming transparency into trust. These are accessibility, interactivity and publicity.

European Regions Financing Public e-Services: the Case of EU Structural Funds.

EU Structural Funds represent by far the main source of funding for innovation in general and for eservices in particular in the lagging regions of Europe classified into the “Convergence” objective. The paper explores the amount of resources dedicated to public e-Services and Information Society by elaborating European Commission data on programmed resources for the 2007-13 period. Moreover, the paper represents the first attempt to use a quantitative approach – i.e. a principal component analysis and a cluster analysis – in order to identify the different strategies adopted by European Regions for Information Society development. The results shows that in the “Convergence” Regions, a specific “public e-services strategy” emerges. Regions investing in public e-services tend to concentrate available resources to e-government or e-health, while very low percentage of total funding is dedicated to the other categories such as broadband or infrastructural services.Information society, regional policy, Cohesion Policy, Structural Funds, e-Services, e-Government, Cluster analysis.

INTERNET ENABLED PUBLIC SERVICES AS A DRIVER OF ECONOMIC GROWTH -CASE STUDY ECROATIA 2006 -

The Barcelona European Council called on the European Commission to draw up an eEurope Action Plan in order to widespread penetration of ICT, as powerful driver of growth and employment. Availability of modern on-line public services through e-Government, e-Learning, e-Health and e-Business is to be secured by the Action Plan. The eEurope 2005 is succeeding eEurope 2002 Action Plan which comprises four separate but interlinked tools: policy measures, exchange of good practices, monitoring and benchmarking and overall co ordination of existing policies. Croatia is candidate for accession to EU by 2009, which means that Croatian Government has to implement eEurope Action plan 2005 and Commission\u27s new strategic framework, i2010 - European Information Society 2010. In first part of the paper authors are presenting overall framework of eEurope Action Plan 2005 as well i2010 strategic framework. For the purposes of the paper, authors have conducted a research availability of on-line public services through government, e-Learning, e-Health and e-Business in Croatia 2006.The results of the survey has been benchmarked to the results of similar surveys in New Europe countries

E-GOVERNMENT: A DRIVING FACTOR FOR STIMULATING INNOVATION PERFORMANCE IN ROMANIA?

The development of public services is one of the priorities on the agendas of all policies, both national and European. One of the most recent concerns of the European Commission, as shown in the 2010 Innobarometer, is to find ways and develop strategies to support the innovation in the public administration sector, in the context of the continuously changing economic background. In this paper, we'll investigate the relationship between e-Government, and the overall innovation performance at national level, for some European Union countries. e-Government is already a known concept, widespread in the world, promoting the implementation of information and communication technologies in the public administration, in order to provide better public services to citizens and businesses. A main component of the e-Government concept is the "counter reform", aimed to streamlining administrative act quickly in order to respond to the demands of citizens, businesses and government structures. Innovation in e-Government will be measured with two Eurostat indicators - "e-Government on-line availability" and "e-Government usage by individuals" - while for the overall innovation performance we'll use a composite indicator - the Summary Innovation Index (SII) - from the Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS). In Romania, even if the values of these indicators are not at the level of other EU countries, we can say that the situation has improved and electronic public services are being used increasingly often. The study also includes a comparison between two "modest innovators": Romania and Bulgaria. Regarding the overall innovation performance, according to the 2010 Innovation Union Scoreboard ranking, Romania is the leader of the "modest innovators" countries, overcoming Latvia, Bulgaria and Lithuania. However, in the field of e-Government our country has major shortcomings. Romania has registered a significant progress in the years after the EU integration, followed by a setback in 2009, still having values below those of other EU countries, including Bulgaria.innovation, e-Government, public sector, SII, correlation

The Institutional Dimension of e-Government Promotion: A Comparative Study on Making ‘Business Reference Model (BRM)’ in the U.S. and Korea

Why do e-government initiatives which are commonly implemented to achieve similar policy goals produce different outcomes in different nations? To answer this question, this paper examines e-government policy structure, which has been regarded as one of the most important institutional arrangements for e-government promotion (European Commission, 2007; Park, 2006; OECD, 2005; Eifert and Puschel, 2004). Specifically, the legal framework, the managerial tools for coordination and control, and the organizational arrangements of the e-government policy structures of the Bush administration in the U.S. and of Roh administration in Korea are compared. Based on such a comparative analysis, this study demonstrates how different institutional arrangements of e-government policy structure influence the different outcomes of BRMs in the two nations

May the four be with you: novel IR-subtraction methods to tackle NNLO calculations

In this manuscript, we summarise all discussions originated as a result of the WorkStop/ThinkStart 3.0: paving the way to alternative NNLO strategies that took place on 4.-6. November 2019 at the Galileo Galilei Institute for Theoretical Physics (GGI). We gratefully acknowledge the support of GGI and the COST Action CA16201 PARTICLEFACE. We wish to thank toW.M. Marroquin and M. Morandini for their help in organising the workshop. P. Banerjee acknowledges support by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 701647. A.L. Cherchiglia, B. Hiller and M.Sampaio acknowledge support from Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia (FCT) through the projects UID/FIS/04564/2020 and CERN/FIS-COM/0035/2019. The work of L. Cieri has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 754496. The work of F. Driencourt-Mangin, G. Rodrigo, G. Sborlini and W.J. Torres Bobadilla is supported by the Spanish Government (Agencia Estatal de Investigacion), ERDF funds from European Commission (Grant No. FPA2017-84445-P), Generalitat Valenciana (Grant No. PROMETEO/2017/053) and from the SpanishGovernment (FJCI-2017-32128). T. Engel acknowledges support by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) under contract 200021_178967. C. Gnendiger, R. Pittau, A. Signer and D. Stockinger wish to thank B. Page for his help in establishing (2.60). The work of R. J. Hernandez-Pinto is supported by CONACyT through the Project No. A1-S-33202 (Ciencia Basica) and Sistema Nacional de Investigadores. G. Pelliccioli was supported by the Bundesministerium fur Bildung und Forschung (BMBF, German Federal Ministry for Education and Research) under contract no. 05H18WWCA1. J. Pires was supported by Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia (FCT, Portugal) through the contract UIDP/50007/2020 and project CERN/FIS-PAR/0024/2019. The work of R. Pittau has been supported by the SpanishGovernment grant PID2019-106087GB-C21 and by the Junta de Andalucia project P18-FR-4314 (fondos FEDER). M. Sampaio acknowledges a research grant from CNPq (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico 303482/2017-6). C. Signorile-Signorile was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Grant no. 396021762 - TRR 257.In this manuscript, we report the outcome of the topical workshop: paving the way to alternative NNLO strategies (https://indico.ific.uv.es/e/WorkStop-ThinkStart_3.0), by presenting a discussion about different frameworks to perform precise higher-order computations for high-energy physics. These approaches implement novel strategies to deal with infrared and ultraviolet singularities in quantum field theories. A special emphasis is devoted to the local cancellation of these singularities, which can enhance the efficiency of computations and lead to discover novel mathematical properties in quantum field theories.European Commission 701647Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology European Commission UID/FIS/04564/2020 CERN/FIS-COM/0035/2019European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant 754496Spanish Government (Agencia Estatal de Investigacion)ERDF funds from European Commission FPA2017-84445-PGeneralitat Valenciana European Commission PROMETEO/2017/053Spanish Government European Commission FJCI-2017-32128 PID2019-106087GB-C21Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) 200021_178967Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia (CONACyT) A1-S-33202Sistema Nacional de InvestigadoresFederal Ministry of Education & Research (BMBF) 05H18WWCA1Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology UIDP/50007/2020 CERN/FIS-PAR/0024/2019Junta de Andalucia P18-FR-4314Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico (CNPQ) 303482/2017-6German Research Foundation (DFG) 396021762 - TRR 257GGIEuropean Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) CA16201 PARTICLEFAC

Changes in PRC1 activity during interphase modulate lineage transition in pluripotent cells

We thank the core facilities at GENYO for excellent technical support. We also thank the genomics unit at the CRG for assistance with RNA-seq and ChIP-seq experiments. The Landeira lab is supported by the Spanish ministry of science and innovation (PID2019-108108-100, EUR2021- 122005), the Andalusian regional government (PIER-0211-2019, PY20_00681) and the University of Granada (A-BIO-6-UGR20) grants. Research in the Klose lab is supported by the Wellcome Trust (209400/ Z/17/Z) and the European Research Council (681440). A.F. was sup- ported by a Sir Henry Wellcome Post-doctoral fellowship (110286/Z/15/ Z). Work in the Rada-Iglesias lab is funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, the Agencia Española de Investigación and the European Regional Development Fund (PGC2018-095301-B-I00 and RED2018- 102553-T); by the European Research Council (862022); and by the European Commission (H2020-MSCA-ITN-2019-860002).The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-35859-9The potential of pluripotent cells to respond to developmental cues and trigger cell differentiation is enhanced during the G1 phase of the cell cycle, but the molecular mechanisms involved are poorly understood. Variations in polycomb activity during interphase progression have been hypothesized to regulate the cell-cycle-phase-dependent transcriptional activation of differentiation genes during lineage transition in pluripotent cells. Here, we show that recruitment of Polycomb Repressive Complex 1 (PRC1) and associated molecular functions, ubiquitination of H2AK119 and three-dimensional chromatin interactions, are enhanced during S and G2 phases compared to the G1 phase. In agreement with the accumulation of PRC1 at target promoters upon G1 phase exit, cells in S and G2 phases show firmer transcriptional repression of developmental regulator genes that is drastically perturbed upon genetic ablation of the PRC1 catalytic subunit RING1B. Importantly, depletion of RING1B during retinoic acid stimu- lation interferes with the preference of mouse embryonic stem cells (mESCs) to induce the transcriptional activation of differentiation genes in G1 phase. We propose that incremental enrolment of polycomb repressive activity during interphase progression reduces the tendency of cells to respond to develop- mental cues during S and G2 phases, facilitating activation of cell differentiation in the G1 phase of the pluripotent cell cycle.Ministry of Science and Innovation, Spain (MICINN) Spanish Government PID2019-108108-100, EUR2021-122005Andalusian regional government PIER-0211-2019, PY20_00681University of Granada A-BIO-6-UGR20Wellcome Trust 209400/Z/17/ZEuropean Research Council (ERC) European Commission 862022Wellcome Trust PGC2018-095301-B-I00Ministry of Science and Innovation, Spain (MICINN) Instituto de Salud Carlos III Spanish GovernmentEuropean Commission RED2018-102553-T, H2020-MSCA-ITN-2019-860002European Commission European Commission Joint Research Centre 681440Agencia Española de Investigación110286/Z/15/

European concept of e-government in the light of the indicators of the European Commission

Wypracowana w ramach Unii Europejskiej koncepcja elektronicznej administracji to jedna z propozycji wyjścia naprzeciw zmieniającym się tendencjom implikowanym przez rewolucję technologiczną. W skali zróżnicowanego unijnego organizmu to koncepcja polegająca na stworzeniu jednolitej transgranicznej i interoperacyjnej płaszczyzny komunikacyjnej, umożliwiającej każdemu obywatelowi UE skorzystanie z e-usług administracji publicznej w takim samym stopniu i na tym samym poziomie. Celem niniejszego artykułu jest próba weryfi kacji założeń Komisji Europejskiej z danymi empirycznymi wykazującymi faktyczny stopień rozwoju wspomnianej koncepcji.The concept of electronic government developed by the European Union is a proposal to help counter the continual changing trends in the technological revolution. The idea is to create a unified, inter-operable and cross-border communications platform that will give every EU citizen the opportunity to use e-government services at equal level. The purpose of this article is to try to verify the findings of the European Union with empirical data by showing the actual degree of development of the concept

EU’s antitrust policy against U.S. based big tech: Protecting European consumers from Google Search and Amazon e-books

The focus of this research paper is to address the state of competition in the European high-tech industry from the perspective of its main beneficiaries, the consumers. This is done by assessing the antitrust policy of the European Commission against U.S. based multinationals, the “big tech”. By choosing Google and Amazon as the representative firms, I draw upon recent antitrust cases and secondary literature related to the Android Operating system and Amazon e-books to examine whether the European Commission’s antitrust authorities have acted in a way that improves consumer welfare. The analysis of the arguments for and against government intervention is executed through competing antitrust doctrines: Chicago and Ordoliberal approach. I find that in both cases, the business practices under scrutiny have pro-competitive rationale that can bring benefits to consumers. I do not find direct evidence that the EU’s antitrust policy would be used to protect European companies from foreign competition

Training resources and e-Government services for rural SMEs : the rural inclusion platform

Rural Inclusion, a project supported by the Information and Communication Technologies Policy Support Programme of the European Commission, aims to adopt, adapt, and deploy a Web infrastructure, in rural settings, combining semantics with a collaborative training and networking approach, offering e-Government services that will be supported by a rigorous and reusable service process analysis and modeling, and facilitating the disambiguation of the small businesses needs and requirements when trying to carry out the particular transactions. This paper, presents an overview of the architecture of RuralObservatory2.0 which will play the critical role of training content and eGovernment services repository of the overall Rural Inclusion platform.</jats:p