Exploring the Ethics of Digital Government: How Will Emerging Technologies Impact Society and Human Rights?
Half-Day Workshop

Government agencies across the globe continue to utilize technological advancements to provide services and increase operational efficiency. Public sector initiatives supported by advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics and IoT are constantly transforming the way government interacts with its stakeholders. This workshop will explore the challenges associated with the diffusion of these innovations across society. Presenters and panelists from diverse backgrounds will discuss a variety of emerging issues such as, privacy concerns introduced by IoT and big data analytics or potential algorithmic bias generated by AI-based systems. As the impact of digital government continues to grow, it is imperative for researchers and practitioners to explore the challenges of innovation in addition to the opportunities. This workshop will explore these challenges and identify a research agenda for addressing them.

The workshop will explore several key questions:

• What are the ethical challenges associated with the diffusion of digital government initiatives?
• What ethical challenges will emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, big data analytics, and wearable technology introduce to digital government initiatives?
• What are the societal challenges and opportunities of digital government?
• What are the broader implications of digital government initiatives for society?
• How will digital government initiatives impact citizen privacy and trust?
• What are some of the unintended consequences of technology adoption and how can the public sector address them?
• How will emerging technologies impact society and human rights?
• What is the role of the human decision maker in a data-driven government? What are the challenges?  

Workshop Lead and Co-Chairs:

Lemuria Carter (Lead) is the Head of School of the School of Information Systems and Technology Management at the University of New South Wales. Her research interests include technology adoption, digital government and privacy. She has published in several top-tier journals including the Journal of the Association for Information Systems, European Journal of Information Systems, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Information Systems Journal and Decision Support Systems. She currently serves as an e-government track for the Americas Conference on Information Systems and mini-track chair for digital government theory at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Her research has been funded by the Institute for Homeland Security Solutions and the Southeastern Transportation Institute in the United States.

Elin Wihlborg, PhD, has been a professor since 2013 in Political Science at the Department of Management and Engineering, Linkoping University, Sweden. She received her PhD in Technology and Social change. Her areas of interest cover local and multi-level governance, legitimacy, e-government policies, public administration and digital transformation, digital inclusion and e-democracy. She works in inter-disciplinary research groups on digital government as well as on urban planning and sustainable development. She has initiated a summer school for young professionals on e-government - Sustainable e-government for Resilient and Innovative Democratic Public administration (SeGRID). She is vice head of the department and manager of the inter-disciplinary research school at the department.

Anne Washington is an Assistant Professor of Data Policy at the NYU Steinhardt School, as of Spring 2018. Her expertise on public sector information currently addresses the emerging governance needs of data science. The National Science Foundation has funded her research multiple times including a prestigious 5-year NSF CAREER grant on open government data. Her data-intensive projects draw on both interpretive research methods and computational text analysis.

Ludwig Christian Schaupp is a Professor in the Department of Accounting in the College of Business and Economics at West Virginia University. His primary research interests include e-government adoption, and website success metrics. He has published in several top-tier journals including Communications of the ACM, Journal of Information Systems, and Information Systems Frontiers.