Special Topics in Digital Government Minitrack

Description

The Special Topics in Digital Government Minitrack provides a home for incubating new topics and emergent technologies in Digital Government research. Digital Government as an academic field has evolved and matured over more than two decades. While many subjects have become foundational, the field is also substantially shaped by ever evolving new directions of research and practice. The developments take place at the crossroads of different academic disciplines and in close connection to the practices in governments around the globe.

This minitrack invites papers positioned in relation to the foundations of Digital Government and contributing to the evolution of the field, to clarifications and conceptualizations, or to addressing novel issues, innovative trends, and emerging technologies that support Digital Government for a Better Society along the overarching theme of the Digital Government Track. Submissions must specifically tackle the emerging nature of a technology or a specific topic and how the research presented builds new understanding. Submitted research needs also to relate to the central developments in the field of Digital Government. Topics and research areas include, but are not limited, to:

• Emergent technologies and Digital Government
• Digital transformation and agile government practices
• Digital identity ecosystems in Digital Government
• Data platforms, data trusts and data spaces for sharing sensitive data in digital government
• Technology stacks and GovTech for digital sovereignty
• Digital Twins and other computational models in Government decision-making
• Metaverse in Digital Government
• Design Science in Digital Government
• Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) in Digital Government: applications, legislation, benefits and risks
• Internet of Things (IoT) in the public sector: applications, regulation, social impact, security and data analytics
• Cross-border Digital Government / Interoperable Digital Government
• Business Process Management (BPM) and Rapid Process Automation (RPA) in Digital Government
• Ethics of Digital Government from theoretical and practical views, privacy concerns, and the right to know
• Potential threats from technology-enabled government, including lack of transparency and digital divide issues, as well as ways to avoid them
• Legal implications towards Next Generation Digital Government
• Digital Government skills and competences
• Cross-organizational collaboration and sharing of sensitive data in Digital Government ecosystems
• Conceptual and practice-based boundaries and foundations of the field of Digital Government
• Other topics as appropriate to the purposes of the minitrack

The papers submitted to this minitrack must be new and unpublished. We welcome papers from different settings and sectors in digital government and look more for innovative and creative analyses than best practices. We also give precedence to strong conceptual and empirical analysis (both qualitative and quantitative) over descriptive cases or opinion pieces.

The Digital Government track will select the most relevant papers for a special section in Information Polity titled “Best papers on Digital Government from HICSS 2027.” Papers from contributing minitracks will be selected based on the quality of their contribution to advancing academic scholarship in the field. This provides authors with an exceptional opportunity to extend their conference presentation into a prestigious journal publication.

Minitrack Leaders

Andriana Prentza, PhD, is Full Professor of Software Engineering at the Department of Digital Systems of the University of Piraeus, Greece. Andriana is very actively involved in a number of European and National R&D programs focusing on Information Communication Technologies (ICT) projects and she serves as expert evaluator and reviewer for the European Commission and national R&D programmes. Andriana’scurrent research interests include Software Engineering techniques and methodologies for the development and evaluation of interoperable software systems and services in heterogenous environments across different countries, domains, and actors, based on open standards in the areas of eGovernment and eHealth. She is a Senior Member of IEEE and a member of the Technical Chamber of Greece. Between 2010 and 2021, Andriana participated with workpackage leading role in Large Scale Pilot projects (LSPs) in the area of eProcurement and eGovernment (PEPPOL, e-SENS, TOOP) focusing on interoperable building blocks for public services, and since 2023 Andriana has a workpackage leading role in EWC, an LSP in the area of digitalization of government and public administrations, focusing on preparing a European Identity and Trust Ecosystem. Since 2017, Andriana is a member of the Change Management Board (CMB) of OpenPEPPOL in the pre-award procurement community, which is responsible for introducing new specifications and maintaining the existing ones. In December 2020, Andriana was appointed in the Board of Directors of OASIS Open Europe Foundation. 

J. Ramon Gil-Garcia, PhD, is a Full Professor of Public Administration and Policy and the Director of the Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). Dr. Gil-Garcia is a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and of the Mexican National System of Researchers. In 2009, Dr. Gil-Garcia was considered the most prolific author in the field of digital government research worldwide and in 2018 and 2019 was named “One of the World’s 100 Most Influential People in Digital Government” by Apolitical, which is a nonprofit organization from the United Kingdom. More recently, in 2021, Dr. Gil-Garcia was one of the recipients of the two inaugural Digital Government Society (DGS) Fellows Awards, which recognize “distinguished scholarly achievements and sustained accomplishments and contributions to the research or practice of digital government as a field of study.” Currently, he is also a professor of the Business School at Universidad de las Américas Puebla in Mexico. Dr. Gil-Garcia is the author or co-author of articles in prestigious international journals in Public Administration, Information Systems, and Digital Government and some of his publications are among the most cited in the field of digital government research worldwide. His research interests include collaborative electronic government, inter-organizational information integration, smart cities and smart governments, adoption and implementation of emergent technologies, information technologies and organizations, digital divide policies, new public management, and multi-method research approaches.

Maria A. Wimmer, Dr. rer. techn., is a Full Professor of Electronic Government at the University Koblenz, Germany, Department of Computer Science. Maria chairs the research group E-Government with a team of more than ten doctoral and post-doctoral researchers in the field. Her main research focus is on designing, implementing and evaluating socio-

technical information systems for digital government, including the use of disruptive technologies. Key research encompasses stakeholder participation, holistic design of complex information systems, qualitative data analyses, interoperability, as well as analysis, modeling and simulation of public policy and decision-making. She is a member of IEEE, ACM and the German Computer Society. Since 2005, Maria is PI or lead partner in a number of R&D projects at European, national and regional level. Examples are PEPPOL, e-SENS, ESPDint, Interplat or Interproc on cross-border public e-procurement and interoperability; TOOP and SCOOP4C on the realization of the once-only principle across Europe; OCOPOMO, eGovPoliNet, AI and COVID on data-driven policy analysis and modelling; and BKS-Portal.rlp, Data2Health, EG-DAS, Gov 3.0, KleBe.digital, NoLa, Smart Region Linz am Rhein and Smart Vinery on leveraging disruptive technologies. In 2018, Dr. Wimmer was named “One of the World’s 100 Most Influential People in Digital Government” by Apolitical (United Kingdom)