Digital Government: Social and Service Innovation

Description

Digital government technologies, practices, and service provision offer substantial opportunity to innovate how governments, citizens, and communities engage in governing and governance; collaborate to resolve societal, community, and global challenges; and foster new forms of deliberative and data-driven processes. Both practice and research communities suggest that the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in governments and societies at large has substantial innovation potential. Further, Digital Social Innovation (DSI) provides new ways of empowering citizens and engaging them in civic action, they provide new ways of building social movements, delivering public services and creating social impact in fields as diverse as education and training, governance and democracy, energy and environment, transport and housing, healthcare and social services.

Phenomena like the sharing economy, big or open data, automation, robotization, social media, low-cost open hardware, crowdsourcing, artificial intelligence, just to mention a few, significantly impact government organizational structures, managerial and financial practices, and overall culture. These technologies provide the potential to transform the way we work, live and interact with one another, address the challenges ahead for our governance systems, achieve progress and well-being for citizens and society, and create efficiencies within governments as they meet community and citizen needs.

Areas of focus and interest include but are not limited to the following topics:

• Government innovation through digital technologies - conceptual and critical perspectives.
• Policies, strategies, culture and value foundations for ICT-enabled government innovation.
• Theoretical foundations and perspectives on digital government.
• The role of ICT, people and processes of digital government.
• The introduction and use of new and emerging technologies on digital government service development, provision, and citizen engagement.
• Integration of government data (big, open etc.), services, and/or processes.
• The use of emerging technologies to improve design of policies and services, or as an answer to current and future societal challenges.
• Governance, accountability, and transparency in digital government.
• Service transformation, innovation and multi-channel service delivery.
• Specific technological solutions to introduce innovative user-oriented approaches or new practices in existing processes, resulting in new forms and mechanisms of delivery, with a specific focus on co-design, co-production and co-provision of services.
• Change management in e-Government initiatives focusing on continuous improvement and radical change/innovation.
• Political, economic, legal, and social aspects of emerging digital government.
• Organizational, managerial, and governance aspects of government transformation through digital technologies.
• Reflections on the nature and dimensions of social innovation and contributions on the debate on its relationships with other types of innovation, mainly technological, organizational and open innovation; as well as the debate on its role at the crossroads between private and public sector innovation.
• Specific applications of Social Innovation on major challenges such as healthcare and active and healthy aging, and to services targeted at disadvantaged groups, including innovation in designing and implementing new social services to face new or unmet needs.
• The role of Social Innovation as catalyst to facilitate the operationalization of ´open innovation ecosystems´, facilitating the experimentation, development and emergence of new products, services and structures which may have, a beneficial effect on growth and wellbeing.
• Case studies focused on innovative technology implementations, social innovation, engagement, and digital government service provision.

Minitrack Leaders

Ulf Melin Professor in Information Systems and Head of division of Information Systems at Linköping University in Sweden. He is active in the e-government research area and has published in several e-government journals and conferences (e.g. Government Information Quarterly, Transforming Government - People, Process and Policy (TGPPP), International Journal of Electronic Governance, International Journal of Public Information Systems; and e.g. ECIS, AMCIS, ACIS, IFIP e-government). Ulf serves in several programme committees and e.g. as a member of the editorial board for Government Information Quarterly and Journal of Enterprise Information Management. His research interests within the e-government area is oriented towards management of digitalization within the public sector, e-service development, stakeholder involvement and participation, research methodologies and more recently also open government data.

Gianluca Misuraca is a Senior Scientist at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre where, since 2009, he is conducting research in the area of ICT for governance and social inclusion. Before joining the European Commission Gianluca was a Research Associate at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) where between 2005 and 2008 he has been the Managing Director of the Executive Master in eGovernance conducted by EPFL in collaboration with prestigious institutions worldwide. Gianluca's background is economics with focus on the interface between ICTs and public sector innovation. He holds a Diploma of Specialisation in European Union Economics and Law, and in Security Management, an Executive Master in eGovernance and a Ph. D in Management of Technology from EPFL. He is a recognised scholar with many publications in the field of Information Society development.

Shuhua Monica Liu is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Public Administration, Fudan University, Shanghai. She is also the Director of the Research Institute of Intelligent Complex Systems (RIICS) at Fudan University. Her current research projects focus on interdisciplinary applications of dynamic system analysis to the broad areas of technology innovation and risk management. Her areas of expertise include Innovative Technology and Emergency Management, Electronic Governance and Urban Management. She has coauthored a number of journal publications, conference articles and book chapters in the aforementioned topics, and has received several grants from various funding agencies including The United Nations Development Program, China National Social Science Foundation, China Ministry of Science and Technology, China Earth Administration and Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Commission.