ENGAGE Project call on Open Data

 CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS ON

Open Data for Science and Society

Forward-Looking, Visionary Approaches for Public Sector Information Sharing and Utilisation

AN INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION

Open data provide an unprecedented opportunity for societies to move towards transparency, evidence-based decisions, enhanced cohesion, public engagement and trust. Public sector information may be offered as ”open data” in many forms and through different media: from simple datasets describing traffic or unemployment, to web services linking and mashing information from different sources, to interactive visualization of complex phenomena, to citizen-based data gathering and transmission. This way, new information is made available to scientists, citizens and enterprises for developing and offering value-adding services, thus forming a supply chain around publicly available open data.

In this context, the ENGAGE project (http://www.engage-project.eu ), funded by the European Commission under the e-Infrastructures Programme, aims at the deployment and use of an advanced service infrastructure, incorporating distributed and diverse public sector information resources as well as data curation, semantic annotation and visualisation tools, capable of supporting scientific collaboration and governance-related research from multi-disciplinary scientific communities, while also empowering the deployment of open governmental data towards citizens.

Objectives of the Call:

With this call for contributions, ENGAGE aims to attract high-quality innovative contributions, in the form of short papers that depict sound positions and views for advancing the provision, usage and final utilization of open data by scientists of all scientific domains, citizens and businesses. Topics of this call include but are not fully limited to the following:

·         Justification of requirements for public sector information, orienting from any scientific domain

·         Examples and best practices of open data utilization for scientific purposes

·         Visionary ideas on open data utilization within society

·         Metadata schemas for open and linked data management

·         Methods and tools for open data acquisition, curation, management and publication

·         Methods and tools for integrating and combining open data from distributed heterogeneous sources

·         Methods and tools for combining linked open data with in-house or open structured information systems in the ‘deep web’

·         Information systems and services for open data gathering and provision

·         New approaches for public sector information visualization

·         Collaborative governance approaches involving the use of open data

·         Open data and citizen participation in information gathering / crowdsourcing

·         New governance and business models for open data

·         Legal provisions and open issues at national and European level, regarding re-use of governmental data

·         International cooperation in the field of open and linked data

Excellent contributors should provide multi-disciplinary approaches, possibly combining information science with social sciences, management, finance, engineering or law, to allow uptake of open data by diverse scientific domains, for modeling or solving complex societal problems.

Award Scheme:

Up to 5 authors of the best papers submitted under this call will be invited to join the ENGAGE Experts Scientific Committee. Members of this committee have a key role in providing their expertise in specific research areas, in participating in the workshops that will be conducted during the project, and in presenting their comments and feedback to the project deliverables.

Beside the prestige and the opportunity to shape the EU research agenda on Open Data, each member of the Expert Scientific Committee will receive a sum of 2,500 EUR to fund participation in the activities of the project.

Submission Guidelines:

All submissions must be between 2,000 and 3,000 words, following the LNCS format: http://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/word.zip?SGWID=0-0-45-72919-0

Submissions by more than one author are welcome; however only the coordinating author (as indicated in the submission) of the selected paper will be invited to join the ENGAGE Expert Scientific Committee.

Please submit your contribution via e-mail to contact@engage-project.eu together with a short biography of 150 words for each of the authors. All selected contributions will be published in the ENGAGE website after the announcement of results.

Important Dates:

Deadline for submission of position papers: 15^th March 2012

Announcement of results and best papers: 15^th  April 2012

More information can be found at www.engage-project.eu

CFC Editing and Review Committee

Yannis Charalabidis, University of Aegean, Greece

Matthias Fluegge, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Germany

Marijn Janssen, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Keith Jeffery, Science and Technology Facility Council, UK

Nikos Houssos, EuroCRIS, The Netherlands

Fotis Karayannis, Microsoft Innovation Centre, Greece

Euripidis Loukis, University of Aegean, Greece

Spyros Mouzakitis, National Technical University of Athens, Greece

John Psarras, National Technical University of Athens (coordinator), Greece

Antonis Ramfos, Intrasoft International, Belgium

Avi Yaeli, IBM Research Haifa, Israel

Anneke Zuiderwijk, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

More information can be found at www.engage-project.eu

NOMAD - Research in text analysis for policy making

University of Aegean and Google in a new research project

The NOMAD project “Policy Formulation and Validation through non-Moderated Crowdsourcing” is an FP7 project started January 2012, aiming to stimulate significant progress in the domain of ICT-enabled policy making.  NOMAD aims to assist policy makers, organizations and citizens to compose and validate new policy through analyzing information available in the cloud.  NOMAD uses intelligent text acquisition and processing tools, new visualization methods and an overall collaborative framework, going beyond the currently available platforms and services.

The NOMAD consortium, lead by the Information Systems Laboratory of the information and Communications systems department of the University of Aegean, comprises Google, Fraunhofer IGD, Athens Technology Centre, NCSR Demokritos, Critical Publics, Qwentes and the Greek and Austrian parliaments as final users.

In today’s public internet, where collaboration and crowdsourcing are becoming realities, NOMAD will use novel methods to analyse internet data, giving insight to information at multiple stages of the policy-life cycle, thus supporting the definition of the political agenda, the creation, the implementation and the monitoring of policy proposals.

With NOMAD developments, modern politicians could test, detect and understand how citizens perceive their own political agendas, and also stimulate the emergence of discussions and contributions on the informal web (e.g. forums, social networks, blogs, newsgroups and wikis), so as to gather useful feedback for immediate action. In this way, politicians can create a stable feedback loop between information gathered on the Web and the definition of their political agendas based on this contribution. The ability to leverage the vast amount of user-generated content for supporting governments in their political decisions requires new ICT tools that will be able to analyze and classify the opinions expressed on the informal Web, or stimulate responses, as well as to put data from sources as diverse as blogs, online opinion polls and government reports to an effective use.

To this end, NOMAD aims to introduce these different new dimensions into the experience of policy making by providing decision-makers with fully automated solutions for content search, selection, acquisition, categorisation and visualisation that work in a collaborative form in the policy-making arena.

PADGETS project supports the Greek open governance initiative Labs.OpenGov.gr

Labs.OpenGov.gr is the first Greek web laboratory for e-Governance. It is an action, held under the aegis of the Greek Ministry of Public Reform and e-Government which aims to bring out creative ideas, inspire people and introduce innovation in the relations of citizens and businesses with the state. It has a dual presence, both physical and digital. In its physical form, Labs.OpenGov operates through open workshops that allow for the exchange of views and the synthesis of different proposals. In its digital form, the Forum operates through a platform where every citizen can submit proposals and participate in a virtual dialogue by using the most modern tools of networking.

Labs OpenGov action is organised in recurring thematic cycles. During each cycle, any citizen who visits Labs.OpenGov.gr can submit ideas and suggestions via an open call. Afterwards, the suggestions and ideas on the open calls are published on the platform enabling the rest users to comment or rate the proposals in a forum like rationale. The accumulated content is subject to moderation and part of it is presented in a public event.

The fifth thematic cycle that is currently in progress is devoted to proposals aiming to reduce the operational costs of public bodies and to improve administrative procedures relating to transactions between government and citizens or businesses. Under this effort the implementation of the first PADGETS pilot has been integrated, extending the action in the Social media platforms, going directly where users are on the web. During the first phase of the fifth Labs cycle any citizen can submit proposals not only, on the Labs platform but also via the Social media accounts that Labs use.

PADGETS is an EU research project in the domain of ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling on “social media” policy gadgets or simply “padgets”, implemented by a consortium of twelve leading research organisations and enterprises (National Technical University of Athens, Fraunhofer FOKUS, ISMB, University Regensburg, Google, Whitehall Srl, ATC SA, Tech4i2, etc.), coordinated by the Information Systems Laboratory of the University of the Aegean. The objective of PADGETS is to implement a prototype service for policy makers that utilizes social media technologies and techniques to boost public engagement, enable cross-platform publishing and content tracking and provide decision support. Through the PADGETS platform, policy makers are capable of disseminating their policy messages through multiple social media simultaneously, using a single integrated interface. They are able to reach large user groups in these platforms and collect their feedback, by keeping track of and analyzing users’ reactions to the policy message.

The added value that PADGETS aspires to offer to the Lab concept is the advantage of engaging users within their preferred and familiar social media environments. Through PADGETS, the Labs Scientific Committee can make a step further towards the citizens by migrating public deliberation from the Labs.Opengov.gr website in places where users already feel comfortable to communicate, collaborate and express opinions. Thus, anyone who wishes to participate in the current thematic cycle can use the Labs accounts on Facebook and Τwitter (using the hashtag #labs5).

The aforementioned pages allow users to be informed for the proposals, to submit new ones, to provide ideas or comments, to suggest improvements and finally evaluate all proposals. By utilising the advanced PADGETS tools and the capabilities of user interactivity within social media, the Scientific Committee intends to retrieve citizen’s feedback on the submitted proposals and to encourage the emergence of new ideas.

The eGovernment Symposium at HICSS, Maui: New Challenges for eGov Research

The eGovernment Track is one of the most successful tracks in HICSS conference, held for more than 10 years in the Hawaiian islands.  For 2012, the 45th HICSS conference was held at the Grand Wailea Hotel, in the island of Maui, US.

View of the Symposium, Gordon Bruce presenting

On the first day of the conference, the eGovernment Symposium was held, among distinguished participants from research, academia, industry and government sector.  Keynote speaches included Sonny Baghowalia (Hawaii State CIO) and Bruce Gordon (Honolulu CIO).

During the discussion, several new research challenges arose, depicted in the following mindmap:

For more information on HICSS eGov Track, visit: http://faculty.washington.edu/jscholl/hicss45/Welcome.html

HICSS presentation on eGov Research Roadmap

During the 45th HICSS conference on 6th January 2012, held in Maui, US, the paper "ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling: Research Challenges and Future Prospects in Europe", that we wrote together with Fenareti Lampathaki, David Osimo and Gianluca Misuraca.

The paper discusses the changing role of the government in the Information Society, also proposing some elements for a conceptualisation of ICT for governance and policy modelling. It further presents the evolving debate on the e-Government and e-Governance agenda developments, as well as the state of the art and the limitations of research in these fields. Main emerging trends and future prospects within the evolving public sector are then anticipated in order to draw some preliminary conclusions outlining the challenges ahead and future research in the field of ICT for governance and policy modelling.

The presentation is available here:  https://pithos.grnet.gr/pithos/rest/yannisx@aegean.gr/files/Shared/eGovernence+Research+Grand+Challenges.pdf

Greek Interoperability Days on Open Data - WeGov Awards

The Greek Interoperability Days were held at National Technical University  of Athens (NTUA) premises, on December 1st, 2011.  The information day, co-organised by the Greek Interoperability Centre, Microsoft Innovation Centre and Oracle Hellas, focused on the objectives and challenges of the opendata movement in Europe and internationally. Key presentations included:

Dejan Cvetkovic, Microsoft

Dejan Cvetkovic, Regional Technology Officer, Central and Eastern Europe, Microsoft
Microsoft Open Data strategy

Frangiskos Zervos, Technology Sales Consulting Director, Oracle Hellas S.A
Oracle Strategy for Public Open Data

Theodoros Karounos, Opengov Labs, Greece 
Greek Government open data initiatives

The ENGAGE project on open data was extensively presented and discussed, as a major European approach for open data standardisation and promotion, under the e-Infrastructures EU Programme.

The information day also included the final stage of the Greek eGovernment Competition WeGov Awards, co-organised by University of Aegean, NTUA and University of Pireaus.

More information, presentations and i available at: http://www.iocenter.eu/news--events/events/open-data-day.aspx

Lisbon, at Nova University

Visiting Lisbon at times of financial crisis - well it looked like the "last" visited the one before the end.  But Lisbon   was a pleasure both from the artistic and sociological side of things.  As a city lying in two coasts, it kept being interesting and innovative while also easy to find your way within, apart from one issue: the crossing of the bridges to get from one side of Tago river to the opposite.

The impressive Vasca de Gama bridge, at left, with a length exceeding 15 Km over the river must have been an engineering challenge, when built a few years ago.



Visiting Nova University Lisbon and especially the UNINOVA research centre within FCT (Technical Sciences Faculty) was also a pleasure, joining together NTUA, CNR, Intrasoft International and Uninova teams to work on Interoperablity Scientific Approaches and Future Internet Researcch Roadmapping.

At Nova University Lisbon with friends and colleagues from Italy, Greece, Portugal

AEGEAN Startups - A Greek startups competition

The final phase of the first National eBusiness Entrepreneurship Competition - AEGEAN Startups - was held in Karlovasi, Samos, on 5th and 6th November 2011. The final phase involved the presentation of 9 proposals that were selected from a total of 35 originally submitted. The presentation of proposals and the final selection and award of the teams were held at the Ceremonial Hall of the Municipality of Samos, in Karlovassi.

The three proposals that were selected at the final stage and will be awarded with 15,000 euros each, are:

Empires At War 1805
An original, international online strategy game

Parking Defenders
Application for sharing public parking space via mobile devices

Personalization-as-a-service, Infolytics

Consumer Behaviour analysis and recommendation system  

The Agean Startups Finalists in Karlovassi, Samos

The Aegean Startups competition is co-organised by the University of Aegean, the Athens University of Economics and Business and the National Technical University of Athens, under the exclusive sponsorship of TANEO fund.

The PADGETS project: Google engagement in Social Media based policy campaigns

It was a great pleasure to have a plenary meeting of the PADGETS research project at Google premises in Zurich, Switzerland. The PADGETS project develops a revolutionary platform for politicians and policy makers, allowing them to publish information, interact with citizens, monitor and analyse citizen opinion.

The padgets project is being implemented by a consortium of leading research centres (University of the Aegean, National Technical University of Athens, Fraunhofer FOKUS, ISMB, University Regensburg)  enterprises (Google, Whitehall Srl, ATC SA, Tech4i2) and administrations from Greece, Italy and Slovenia.

The PADGETS team at Google Zurich

Within the project, several new technologies are for the first time combined, tested and optimised in the electronic governace context, incuding:

• Web and Mobile Dashboards for implementing policy campaigns on-line, allowing for automatic communication with multiple Social Media platforms
• Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis of citizen interactions in blogs and social media, such as facebook, twitter, youtube. 
• Modelling and Simulation of citizen awareness, interest or involvement in public policy
• Visualisation of policy discussions, citizen interaction and trending.

PADGETS project includes one of the first applications of Google Chart Tools in policy visualisation.

Left: visualising tweets concernign a specific policy campaign using Google Map gadget.








Right: visualising different group interactions in Facebook, on a specific subject

A new book from IGI Global on social and semantic web. The PADGETS project presented

A new book has recently been published by IGI Global, in the area of customer relationship managent (CRM).  Titled "Customer Relationship Management and the Social and Semantic Web: Enabling Cliens Conexus" the book provides an overview of the field of the Semantic Web, the social Web, and CRM through a careful collection of various research studies from different subfields.

Edited by Ricardo Colomo-Palacios (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain), João Varajão (University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Portugal) and Pedro Soto-Acosta (University of Murcia, Spain), the book provides a forum for the exchange of research ideas and practices, while being a reference point for professionals, managers, and researchers in the CRM, ICT and management fields.  The book also aims to explore the opportunities and challenges for organizations in the light of citizens having augmented presence in Web 2.0, by utilising new technologies, including those of the semantic web. 

Within this framework, together with colleagues from University of Aegean and Fraunhofer FOKUS, we present the recent developments and propositions for utilisation of Social Media within the governance context.  Our chapter "Systematically Exploiting Web 2.0 Social Media in Government for Extending Communication with Citizens" presents the perspective and offerings of the PADGETS project - an innovative attempt to combine Social Media, Text Analytics and Simulation in collaborative public policy making.  

An Interview on Interoperability Standards and Digital Agenda 2020

It was a great pleasure to have a film-making team from the oncoming Danish EU presidency, in the Greek Interoperability Centre premises at NTUA, to record a small interview on interoperability and standardisation issues of the EU Digital Agenda.

The interview revolved around ICT standardisation in the Public Sector and respectice challenges for the ICT industry, especially SME's, touching upon:

- The need for timely evolution and adoption of ICT standards by the public sector

- The innovative nature of ICT SME's and how they can be of use to a legacy-based public sector

- The evolving standardisation at EU and National levels.

The final edited video clip will be available in a couple of months.

With Rasmus (director) and Ralf (cameraman) at the GIC premises

New Book on Organisation Interoperability from Springer

I had the pleasure to read the newly published Springer book on "Organisational Interoperability in e-Government", by esteemed colleagues Herbert Kubicek, Ralf Cimander and Hans Jochen Scholl.

This authored book contains draws many important practices from the MODINIS study on eGovernment Interoperability, giving a plethora of ideas and methods pm how to tackle organisational and operational issues in the public sector, with the use of interoperable systems and services.  The book is a well written, coprehensive approach to classify critical shortcomings and respective succesful solution paths, delivering real value to the reader.  Excellent for public policy makers, e-government consultants and innovative researchers, this is also a worthy companion in the university class, especially at post-graduate lessons on information systems.

Not least, the book provides a carefully made selection of the core references in this domain  - I was happy to see our work on National Interoperability Frameworks and Interoperability Science Base, among cited methods and guidelines of almost 20 well known e-Government scientists.

A must read for the period.

Find more on the book here.

Greek Tax Offices productivity visualisation

Tax offices productivity in Greece during summer 2011: Aegean Islands productivity rises during summer

Continuing the visualisation of Greek Tax Offices productivity a new map is provided below, depicting the number of cases handled during the summer period. Each spot indicates the percentage of cases processed  by the tax office of the specific location in the interval between June and September of 2011, in relation with the total pending ones in the beginning of summer.

Three different colors displayed on the map represent the three levels of completion:

• Red (153 Tax Offices): minimum productivity (less than 20% of open cases were processed within summer). 
• Yellow (111 Tax Offices) : medium productivity (between 20% and 40%) 
• Green (23 Tax Offices): higher productivity (more than 40% of all open cases)

The visualisation shows that certain touristic destinations (e.g. Aegean Islands or Crete) tend to be more productive during summer period.  See the before summer status here.

The global average for the efficiency of Tax Offices in the summer period is 22% in terms of completion of cases. What is remarkable is that there are still tax offices that have not resolved a single case since the beginning of the year. The last update of data taken into consideration was published by the Ministry of Finance / General Secretary of Information Systems (http://www.gsis.gr/doyaudit/) on September 30, 2011.

The EU Digital Agenda discussion on Interoperability, Cloud and eID

My colleague David Osimo asked me, an assistant professor of eGovernance Systems in Aegean University, in Samos, to moderate an on-line discussion on Digital Agenda 2020 issues around Interoperability, Cloud and eID. This on-line group of experts and citizens will produce a  report on findings and actions proposed, including on-line contributions.

When I accepted the task, the first suggestion was to list a few sources of relevant background material and gather some existing on-line discussion forums.

So here we are:

Area I : Online material

• The basic definitions of Digital Agenda 2020 (on Pillar II: Interoperability and Standards): http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/newsroom/cf/pillar.cfm?pillar_id=44&pillar=Interoperability%20and%20Standards
• The DA2020 workshop report (on interoperability, eID, Cloud): http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/events/cf/daa11/workshop-results.cfm
• The EC/DIGIT ISA Web Site (on EU interoperability policy): http://ec.europa.eu/isa/

Area 2: On-line forums and communities

• CROSSROAD  Group on eGovernance (200+ members): http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=2594136
• FINES Group on Future Internet and Enterprise Interoperability (100+ members): http://www.linkedin.com/groups?viewMembers=&gid=3375465
• Enterprise Interoperability Group (150+ members): http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Enterprise-Interoperability-123301
• The SEMIC.EU group on Semantic Interoperablity Assets: http://www.semic.eu/idabcJForum/forums/list.page
• The ePractice.EU Group on eProcurement/eInvoicing (400+ members): 
• The ePractice.EU Group on eID (150+ mbrs): http://www.epractice.eu/en/community/eureid 
• The ePractice.EU Group on Governance and Policy Modelling (150+ mbrs): http://www.epractice.eu/en/community/egovernance

 Also, check some more interoperability and cloud related sites: http://bit.ly/oE1S65 

Area 3: On-line discussion initiation
By looking at the main topics of the online discussion, we could depict Interoperablity (as a framework) and

e-Invoicing (as a specific interoperability and organisational challenge for enterprises). A classification of topics would yield:

Interoperability 

- standards

- frameworks

- national status

- approaches for eBus and eGov

- Break-through approaches

e - invoicing
- status, barriers,technical implementations
- feedback form practice
- Break-through ideas

Then, on a more national level at local events in Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, the discussion will evolve around cloud, eID and internet of things, to be integrated at a later stage:

• e - Identity (frameworks, technical implementations, barriers, best practices)
• Cloud Computing (typology, status for public, private and hybrid, PaaS-SaaS orientation, cloud interoperability)
• Internet of things (standards, status of adoption, outlook)

It is easy to join the discussions at: http://linkd.in/n1rdIP 

Greek - Ukrainian delegation meeting on FP7 Research

A meeting of a Greek and Ukrainan delegation on research and development projects and initiatives was held on  9th September 2011, at NTUA premises in Athens.  Several Ukrainian State University and the Ukrainian Academy of Science were represented in this high-level meeting.

Projects presented in detail include:

- The PADGETS FP7 project on social-media based policy making

- The ENGAGE eInfrastructures project on Open Data

- The Greek National Interoperability Framework and the initiatives of the Greek Interoperability Centre

The two delegations agreed to proceed in strengthening the scientific collaboration between Greece and Ukraine in the areas of ICT, electronic Government and Interoperability.

View of the Greek - Ukrainian delegations meeting

Call for Papers: Special Issue on eParticipation - ISM Journal (ISI)

INFORMATION SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT

An ISI-Indexed Journal / Taylor & Francis Group

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/10580530.asp

Special Issue on:

European Research on Electronic Citizen Participation and Engagement in Public Policy Making

Guest  Editors

Euripidis Loukis Assistant Professor University of the Aegean Greece email: eloukis@aegean.gr

Yannis Charalabidis Assistant Professor University of the Aegean Greece email: yannisx@aegean.gr

Jeremy Millard Senior Consultant Danish Technological Institute Denmark email: jrm@teknologisk.dk

Aims and Scope

The rapid development and the growing penetration of digital technologies provide rich opportunities for more extensive participation and engagement of citizens in public policy and decision making and in general for increasing the influence of society on government. They offer possibilities for strengthening political deliberation and establishing new participatory models of governance through electronic means which reduce existing limitations associated with time, location, cost and physical presence.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have the potential to support the provision of information concerning government activities, decisions and public policies, and also to increase both the quantity and quality of consultation with the citizens. Also, ICT has the potential to support both top-down government initiatives and ground-up civil society ones, both aiming at enhancing public participation in the decision processes and improving interaction between society and government. ICT enable the collection of huge amounts of citizens’ knowledge on the problems and needs that public policies attempt to address, and on proposed courses of government action and legislation. At the same time ICT also enable the exploitation of this knowledge for the assessment of the impact of various policy options on society, so that governments can make better and more informed decisions.

However, it is necessary investigate to what extent this potential is actually exploited, what is the impact of the existing exploitation, and which contextual factors affect positively or negatively this impact. Furthermore, it is important to discover new ways of exploiting this huge potential and using ICT for increasing citizens’ participation and engagement in public policy making, and to proceed to pilot applications of them in ‘real-life’ cases and conditions in order to assess their value, and if necessary improve and optimize them.

Especially in Europe, due to its long tradition of social state characterized by strong interaction with the society and intervention in order to secure social welfare and support of weak groups (European Social Model), there is a strong interest in the above ideas. For this reason in the last ten years there has been extensive financial support by several institutions, such as the European Commission and the National and Local Governments, of research in this domain of ICT-supported/mediated citizen participation and engagement in public policy making for investigating the above research questions. It is quite interesting to reflect on the results and conclusions of this research, and attempt to exploit them both in Europe and in other parts of the world, probably with adaptations to local histories and political traditions.    

This Special Issue of ‘Information Systems Management’ solicits original high quality papers presenting this ‘European Research on Electronic Citizen Participation and Engagement in Public Policy Making’. Topics of interest in this area include, but are not limited to:

•            Innovative forms of ICT use for supporting and enhancing citizens’ participation

•            Advanced systems for structured high quality deliberation

•            Social media platforms and their applications for supporting citizens’ participation

•            Textual analysis technologies, ontologies and taxonomies

•            Opinion mining and sentiment analysis

•            Data and argument visualization technologies

•            Federated content syndication systems for public participation

•            Trend monitoring and policy analysis

•            Policy modeling and impact assessment

•            Data-powered collective intelligence and action

•            Studying the impact and the overall value proposition of e-Participation

•      Methods for the evaluation of e-Participation      

•      Serious Games, simulation and virtual worlds for supporting policy making

•            Case studies from e-Participation and e-Consultation

•      Theoretical aspects towards a scientific base for ICT enabled Governance

Authors are invited to prepare original manuscripts of around 7500 words, exclusive of exhibits, according to the ‘Instructions for Authors’ web-page of the Journal:

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=1058-0530&linktype=44

At the end of each paper should be placed short biographical notes for all the authors, and also address for correspondence and e-mail address for the corresponding author.

Papers should be written in grammatically correct and coherent English. Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. All papers will be refereed through a peer review process. All submissions must provide:

- an abstract (max of 75 words)

- at least 3 keywords

- full author names and affiliations

- brief author bios

- an email address for the corresponding author

Prospective authors are welcome to submit an abstract to the Guest Editors for preliminary feedback on the appropriateness of their planned manuscript.

Send your manuscript to the corresponding Guest Editor, Prof. Euripidis N. Loukis (eloukis@aegean.gr)

Schedule

•            Submission deadline: November 15, 2011

•            Completion of first review: January 15, 2012

•            Revisions deadline: March 15, 2011

•            Camera-ready deadline: April 15, 2012

•            Tentative publication: Fall 2012