[AISWorld] The contents of the latest issue of: International Journal of Electronic Government Research (IJEGR)

[Vishanth Weerakkody]

Dear All

The contents of the latest issue of: International Journal of Electronic Government Research (IJEGR)
Official Publication of the Information Resources Management Association
Volume 8, Issue 3, July-September 2012
Published: Quarterly in Print and Electronically
ISSN: 1548-3886 EISSN: 1548-3894
Published by IGI Publishing, Hershey-New York, USA
www.igi-global.com/ijegr

Editor-in-Chief: Vishanth Weerakkody, Brunel University, UK

GUEST EDITORIAL PREFACE

Open Government: An Overview of Current EU Funded Projects on Citizen Participation, Good Governance and Collaborative Policy Development

Maria Wimmer, University of Koblenz-Landau, Koblenz, Germany
Vishanth Weerakkody, Brunel University, UK
Marijn Janssen, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

To read the preface, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-global.com/Files/Ancillary/d419e66d-66ce-4a15-bff0-4a214be0bfe3_1548-3886_8_3_Preface.pdf

PAPER ONE

Policy Testing in Virtual Environments: Addressing Technical and Legal Challenges

Magdalini Kardara (National Technical University of Athens, Greece)
Omri Fuchs (IBM Research - Haifa, Israel)
Eleni Kosta (K.U. Leuven, Belgium)
Fotis Aisopos (National Technical University of Athens, Greece)
Ilias Spais (Athens Technology Center, Greece)
Theodora Varvarigou (National Technical University of Athens, Greece)

Governments want to improve their policy making process by being able to accurately predict the impact of prospective policy measures to the community. Current e-government tools fail to capture the public opinion as they lack in mass participation. Instead of relying on outdated methods of communicating with the public, governments should embrace Web 2.0 technologies and take advantage of the vast the flows of information available online. In +Spaces, the authors introduce a novel way of accessing and evaluating public opinion by using popular virtual spaces, i.e., 3D Virtual Worlds and Social networks, as testing environments and developing an interface that would allow applications to operate inside them, capturing the reactions of citizens to prospective policies. They present the +Spaces platform giving emphasis on technical challenges such as Virtual Spaces interoperability as well as legal requirements related to processing user created data and how the authors addressed them.
 To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-global.com/article/policy-testing-virtual-environments/70073

To read a PDF sample of this article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-global.com/viewtitlesample.aspx?id=70073&ptid=59437&t=Policy%20Testing%20in%20Virtual%20Environments:%20Addressing%20Technical%20and%20Legal%20Challenges

PAPER TWO

Engaging Politicians with Citizens on Social Networking Sites: The WeGov Toolbox

Timo Wandhöfer (GESIS-Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany)
Steve Taylor (IT Innovation Centre Southampton, UK)
Harith Alani (The Open University, UK)
Somya Joshi (Gov2u, Greece)
Sergej Sizov (Gov2u, Greece)
Paul Walland (IT Innovation Centre Southampton, UK)
Mark Thamm (GESIS-Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany)
Arnim Bleier (GESIS-Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany)
Peter Mutschke (GESIS-Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany)

Governmental policy makers can use social networking sites to better engage with citizens. On the one hand social networking sites are well accepted by citizens and a familiar environment where discussions are already taking place and social networking sites are also more important for politicians. Thus, a need for information retrieval (the policy maker gathering information), dissemination (the policy maker broadcasting information) and two-way dialog between the policy maker and citizens over these platforms. The idea is to connect both the policy makers and the citizens. In fact social media is a mass medium and it's difficult to sieve through multitudes of comments to get to the crux of a debate. The authors' approach to address this is to use automatic analysis components to summarise and categorize text. To be able to place successful tools that can be used in the policy maker's everyday life within the design process is important. This paper describes the phase of combining the policy makers' requirements with the technical feasibility to develop a software prototype, where the analysis tools can be validated within the domain of policy makers and policymaking. This paper sets up the environment for evaluating this approach and to address the question of usefulness with respect to a dialogue with citizens.
 To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-global.com/article/engaging-politicians-citizens-social-networking/70074

To read a PDF sample of this article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-global.com/viewtitlesample.aspx?id=70074&ptid=59437&t=Engaging%20Politicians%20with%20Citizens%20on%20Social%20Networking%20Sites:%20The%20WeGov%20Toolbox

PAPER THREE

Citizens Collaboration and Co-Creation in Public Service Delivery: The COCKPIT Project

Panagiotis Kokkinakos (National Technical University of Athens, Greece)
Sotirios Koussouris (National Technical University of Athens, Greece)
Dimitrios Panopoulos (National Technical University of Athens, Greece)
Dimitrios Askounis (National Technical University of Athens, Greece)
Antonis Ramfos (IntraSoft International, Luxembourg)
Christos Georgousopoulos (IntraSoft International, Luxembourg)
Erik Wittern (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)

Governments are striving to deliver more efficient and effective public services in order to achieve better public service quality, with reduced waiting times, improved cost effectiveness, higher productivity and more transparency. It's an issue of doing things in new ways that requires fundamental change in the provision of public services in the future and a complete new approach for Governments to work and interact with their citizens. Currently, Societies witness more than ever that Web 2.0 and social media in particular, constitute the emerging, if not already established, mass collaboration and cooperation platform between citizens and administrations, as the latter have started to realise the benefits of such applications. The COCKPIT project builds on these developments and based on a highly synergetic approach aims to define a new Governance model for the next generation public service delivery, by combining various research areas.
 To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-global.com/article/citizens-collaboration-creation-public-service/70075

To read a PDF sample of this article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-global.com/viewtitlesample.aspx?id=70075&ptid=59437&t=Citizens%20Collaboration%20and%20Co-Creation%20in%20Public%20Service%20Delivery:%20The%20COCKPIT%20Project

PAPER FOUR

Supporting Public Policy Making Processes with Workflow Technology: Lessons Learned From Cases in Four European Countries

Aggeliki Tsohou (Brunel University, UK)
Habin Lee (Brunel University, UK)
Karim Al-Yafi (Brunel University, UK)
Vishanth Weerakkody (Brunel University, UK)
Ramzi El-Haddadeh (Brunel University, UK)
Zahir Irani (Brunel Business School, Brunel University, UK)
Andrea Ko (Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary)
Tunc D. Medeni (Turksat, Turkey)
Luis Miguel Campos (PDM&FC, Lisbon, Portugal)

Workflow technology has been proven as an enabler for numerous benefits for private and public organizations. Including: cost reduction, efficiency savings in terms of time and cost, increased capability, faster processing, reductions in errors, and work iterations, service quality and customer satisfaction. Public sector has endorsed these benefits by adopting workflow management systems to support administrative processes, such as human resources management or claims processing. This technology is yet to be utilized to support the formulation of policy making processes to facilitate the participation of citizens in the policy making processes and increase their awareness on political issues. This paper Investigates the feasibility of adopting workflow tools for the support of decision making processes that lead to development of public policies, despite the variant institutional settings. To do so, public policy making processes from four countries were examined and analyzed. The results are explored further in the article.
 To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-global.com/article/supporting-public-policy-making-processes/70076

To read a PDF sample of this article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-global.com/viewtitlesample.aspx?id=70076&ptid=59437&t=Supporting%20Public%20Policy%20Making%20Processes%20with%20Workflow%20Technology:%20Lessons%20Learned%20From%20Cases%20in%20Four%20European%20Countries

PAPER FIVE

Participative Public Policy Making Through Multiple Social Media Platforms Utilization

Yannis Charalabidis (University of the Aegean, Greece)
Euripidis Loukis (University of the Aegean, Greece)

Described is the research concerning the systematic, intensive and centralized web 2.0 social media exploitation by government agencies for widening and enhancing participative public policy making, which is conducted as part of the research project PADGETS ('Policy Gadgets Mashing Underlying Group Knowledge in Web 2.0 Media') partially funded by the European Commission. The proposed approach is based on a central system, which publishes various types of policy-related content (e.g., short text long text, images, video) and micro-applications in multiple social media simultaneously, and also collects from them and processes data on citizens' interactions (e.g., views, comments, ratings, votes, etc.). Posing difficult research questions and challenges, both technical (analysis and exploitation of social media application programming interfaces (APIs), appropriate design of the central system architecture, processing and integrating the large amounts of collected citizens' interaction data) and also non-technical (investigation of the value generated by this approach, preconditions for its effective application by government agencies), which are researched in the above project. Some first findings on them are presented and discussed.
 To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-global.com/article/participative-public-policy-making-through/70077

To read a PDF sample of this article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-global.com/viewtitlesample.aspx?id=70077&ptid=59437&t=Participative%20Public%20Policy%20Making%20Through%20Multiple%20Social%20Media%20Platforms%20Utilization

Paper Six

Method and Tools to Support Stakeholder Engagement in Policy Development: The OCOPOMO Project

Maria Wimmer (University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany)
Sabrina Scherer (University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany)
Scott Moss (Scott Moss Associates, UK)
Melanie Bicking (University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany)

Good governance and open government principles require more participative, open, transparent, accountable, and collaborative. However, in public policy development, the negligence of these principles loomed particularly large until recently. In consequence, citizens have taken action by forming protest activities or responding to current politics with election turnouts leading to drastic change in political directions. Lessons from such activities are that policy makers need urgently to respond to demands of citizens to engage more pro-actively with politics in policy decisions that heavily concern particular stakeholder groups and citizens. Both groups need reliable support and up-to-date information and efficient and effective interactions on emerging societal problems and public affairs. The authors introduce an innovative approach to collaborative policy development, integrating scenario development, and formal policy modelling via an ICT toolbox. To bridge the gap between narrative texts of stakeholder-generated scenarios and formal policy models generating model-based scenarios, introducing conceptual modelling, which supports the construction of conceptual models of the policy domain and which enables tracing inputs of stakeholders to inform the formal policy models. This way, policy makers and stakeholders are better supported to understand the policy context. The OCOPOMO (Open Collaboration in Policy Modelling) approach fully supports the implementation of good governance principles.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-global.com/article/method-tools-support-stakeholder-engagement/70078

To read a PDF sample of this article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-global.com/viewtitlesample.aspx?id=70078&ptid=59437&t=Method%20and%20Tools%20to%20Support%20Stakeholder%20Engagement%20in%20Policy%20Development:%20The%20OCOPOMO%20Project

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For full copies of the above articles, check for this issue of the International Journal of Electronic Government Research (IJEGR) in your institution's library. This journal is also included in the IGI Global aggregated "InfoSci-Journals" database: http://www.igi-global.com/EResources/InfoSciJournals.aspx. *****************************************************

CALL FOR PAPERS

Mission of IJEGR:

The mission of the International Journal of Electronic Government Research (IJEGR) is to supply academicians, practitioners, and professionals with quality applied research results in the field of electronic/digital government, its applications, and impacts on governmental organizations around the world. This journal effectively and positively provides organizational and managerial directions with greater use and management of electronic/digital government technologies in organizations. IJEGR epitomizes the research available within e-government while exponentially emphasizing the expansiveness of this field.

Coverage of IJEGR:

IJEGR encourages submissions that reflect the wide and interdisciplinary nature of e-government as a subject and manuscripts that integrate technological disciplines with social, contextual and management issues. Topics to be discussed in the journal include (but are not limited to) the following:

* Accessibility and usability of e-government Web sites
* Administrative reform through e-government
* Assessment of e-government projects
* Avoidance of technology pitfalls in e-government development
* Building government-to-government enterprises
* Citizen-centric services
* Cyber public relations
* Digital government and online education
* Digital rights management
* E-government and digital divide
* E-government databases
* E-justice, law enforcement, and cyber crime
* Electronic government-to-business collaboration
* Electronic government-to-government collaboration
* Electronic healthcare (e-health) services
* Electronic voting
* Enterprise architecture at various levels of government
* E-planning
* Evaluation of methodologies, approaches, tools, and techniques used for designing and implementing e-government systems
* Evaluation of public sector information systems
* Future directions of electronic government
* Governance and electronic democracy
* Identity management, data protection, and citizens' privacy
* Immigration and digital government
* Impacts/implications of electronic government
* Implementing e-government systems in transition economics
* Information availability and access in e-government
* Information security in e-government
* Innovative applications and best practices in e-government
* Inter-agency information sharing in e-government and shared services
* International integration/collaboration of e-government
* IT management issues in e-government
* Local e-government implementation and diffusion
* Organizational and human factors influencing e-government adoption and diffusion
* Public and private partnership management
* Public sector and social inclusion/exclusion
* Social issues and trust in e-government
* Socio-economic factors influencing e-government adoption and diffusion
* Strategic management of e-government
* Technology adoption and diffusion in the public sector
* Theories, conceptual models, and frameworks for public sector information systems
* Transformational government and ICT enabled change in the public sector

Interested authors should consult the journal's manuscript submission guidelines www.igi-global.com/ijegr.

All inquiries and submissions should be sent to:
Managing Editor: Ramzi El-Haddadeh at IJEGR at brunel.ac.uk