The Governance Transformation Blogspot

NOMAD - Research in text analysis for policy making

2012-02-03T22:00:00.000+02:00

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

2012-01-31T18:27:00.001+02:00

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

2012-01-07T05:16:00.000+02:00

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

2012-01-07T03:29:00.000+02:00

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

2012-01-06T03:06:00.001+02:00

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

2011-12-06T12:17:00.000+02:00

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

2011-11-17T19:05:00.000+02:00

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

2011-11-17T18:49:00.000+02:00

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

2011-11-17T16:40:00.001+02:00

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

2011-11-04T17:24:00.001+02:00

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

2011-10-14T20:58:00.000+03:00

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

2011-10-10T19:51:00.000+03:00

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

2011-09-29T20:52:00.002+03:00

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

2011-09-19T14:33:00.000+03:00

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)

2011-09-12T12:54:00.000+03:00

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

At the International eGOV IFIP Conference in Delft, 29 Aug - 02 Sep 2011

2011-09-07T18:49:00.003+03:00

The AULA Conference Centre at TU Delft

The International eGovernment Conference (IFIP eGOV) took place in pleasant Delft, between Monday 29/8 and Friday 2/9, 2011.

Hosted in the main Conference Hall (Aula Building) of the spacious TU Delft campus, the conference attracted almost 200 participants from academia, policy and industry. Main topics of the discussions for more than three days have been Open Data, Policy Modelling, Social Media applications in governance, electronic participation and more theoretical stuff in evaluation and assessment of e-governance status.

With Nitesh Barosa, at TU Delft - TPM Buildings

We had the chance to host the first Workshop on Open Data, opening the programme on Monday morning 09:00, with 30 participants. A few hours after, I had the chance to visit the Technology - Policy - Management Group, whereour collaborating team from TU Delft is based, including Marijn Janssen, Nitesh Barosa, Anne-Fleur van Veenstra and more.

Visiting TU Delft even so early in the semester was a nice inspiration - seeing how students work and relax in a nice surrounding. The town has also been a nice pair to the conference site: easy, small enough to walk all over, full of bicycles and low buildings.

Maybe ideal for studying and teaching in Europe, I think.

Work and coffee, at Technology Policy and Management building

Workshop on Open Data in the IFIP eGOV Conference

2011-08-30T01:00:00.000+03:00

10th International IFIP eGOV Conference

The ENGAGE Workshop on Open Data

Monday 29th August, 09:00 - 13:00

Delft, The Netherlands

Open Governmental Data - From Governments to Science and Society: The ENGAGE project

More than 30 high level eGovernance, ICT and Policy Experts participated in the ENGAGE Open Data Workshop in Delft, the Netherlands. Open data has been recognized as a strategic tool for Governments all over the world, in their efforts to increase citizen trust, engagement and collaborative action. Despite its significance and the political support at EU level, many challenges remain open for member states, in their effort to provide on-line services for the discovery and use of public sector datasets, especially towards scientists of non-ICT domains.

The workshop focused on discussing the scientific base of ICT-enabled governance for open data, thus harnessing open data sources and methodologies for annotating, visualising and making open data available to scientists and citizens. Participants will present innovative approaches and provide their view on open data, including value-adding examples and best practices.

The ENGAGE project
The main goal of the ENGAGE project (ENGAGE, 2011) is 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.

Agenda
The main topics of the workshop were structured around the state of the art, the visionary scenarios, the research gaps and the future research challenges in the area of ICT for governance and public sector’s open data. The following presentations inspired constructive dialogue:

Yannis Charalabidis, University of Aegean & Marijn Janssen, Delft University of Technology: “Open Data Sources, Resources, Annotation Mechanisms and On-line Services Outlook from the ENGAGE project”
Timo Wandhoefer & Mark Thamm, GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences: “Public Politician Profiles on Facebook and the gap of Authenticity: WeGov interview results with the German Bundestag”
Sicco Verwer, Susan van den Braak & Sunil Choenni, Research and Documentation Centre (WODC), Dutch Ministry of Security and Justice: “Sharing data using multiple imputation”
Nils Barnickel, Matthias Flügge, Jens Klessmann, Fraunhofer FOKUS:"Provision of public sector information at the local level. Practical experiences from the State of Berlin”

The second half of the workshop was dedicated to gahering ideas from the audience on open data sources and curation. The following usage scenaria were deliberated with the workshop audience:

ENGAGE Usage Scenario	Stakeholder
Storing or linking (making accessible), Annotating and Visualising a PS data set	Public Servant
Getting the ENGAGE metadata specifications (for applying them in my systems)	Public Servant
Getting useful information (through browsing datasets or visualisations)	Citizen, Public Servant
Getting data for my research work	Researcher
Linking my system with ENGAGE, for uploading data	Public Servant
Linking my system with ENGAGE, for downloading data	Researcher
Storing data in draft from (to be further curated)	Citizen
Put research-oriented data and annotate them	Researcher
Put my needs for Public Sector data	Citizen / Researcher

Finally more than 15 key challenges and research objectives for Open Data and Linked Data were collected and prioritised.

A view from the audience at the ENGAGE Open Data Workshop

Workshop Chairs
Yannis Charalabidis, University of Aegean, Greece, yannisx@aegean.gr
Sunil Choenni, Ministry of Justice, the Netherlands, r.choenni@minjus.nl
Marijn Janssen, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, m.f.w.h.a.janssen@tudelft.nl

For more information on the ENGAGE project: http://www.engage-project.eu

Join the ENGAGE group on Open Data, in Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/groups/ENGAGE-eInfrastructures-Project-3867416

More information on the egov IFIP Conference: http://www.egov-conference.org/egov-2011/programme/programme-overview

What if Google search was running on humans ?

2011-08-29T18:24:00.000+03:00

When discussing process automation with public sector officials and practitioners, I always stress that importance of solving semantic interoperability issues: this will allow services to be executed at machine time (milli-seconds) than at human time (hours or even days). This way, your new building permit might be issued (or rejected) within a couple of seconds.

But sometimes the message does not go through: people tend to take everything achieved as granted - not realising the difference that technology brought, in some cases. So, I had to devise this simple benchmark:

What if Google search was running on humans ?

Let's tackle this small problem in five steps:

1. How many sites do exist ?

According to the Netcraft January 2011 Web Server Survey, there are globally almost 300 million hostnames and almost 100 million active web sites.

2. How many web pages exist ?

According to a comparison between Yahoo indexed web pages and Netcraft reports in 2005, there were globally around 270 pages per web site (active or not). That index would give a total of 270 X 300 mio = 81 billion web pages. According to a report by Google in late 2008, there were almost 1 trillion web pages indexed by Google at that time, including a big percentage of duplicates or automaticly generated pages, that could amount to even 90%, yielding less than 100 billion web pages. According to http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/ a search algorithm returns approximately 50 billion web pages, indexed by Google, Bing and Yahoo. As the above three three estimations are of the same "order", we will adopt the smallest number: appr. 50 billion web pages exist.

3. How many person hours would be needed for one (manual) search ?

If we suppose that we could have an infrastructure able to distribute web pages to humans, in order to search for a specific word, we estimate 10 seconds to judge if a specific word is contained in each page. Not much you might say (try to locate a specific word in 10 pages and you will see the issue). However, we need 500 billion person - seconds to complete one search over the total 50 billion pages. So, if you need the answer within 10 seconds (the best this system can do) you still need 50 billion humans to complete one search in 10 seconds. And this does not even have ranking ...

4. So ?

According to a 2010 report by Search Engine Land, Google caters for 34,000 searches per second (or appr. 3 billion searches per day). So, every 10 seconds, we need to cater for almost 340,000 searches, yielding a total number of needed humans to 50 bil X 340,000 = 17,000,000,000,000,000. As this number is quite big, we divide by the population of earth (6,9 billion people), and we reach a conclusion:

If Google Search ran on human power, we would need almost 2,5 million times the global earth population (or 17 quadrillion people) to reach an average response time of 10 seconds.

Think again before saying that "we do not need machines" in the public sector ...

MIT Sloan Management experiences shared at NTUA

2011-07-27T16:54:00.000+03:00

Post-doc researcher Dimitris Ptochos, shared some experience from attending a two-year executive management course at MIT - Sloan Management School. In the picture below, Dimitris shares his experience with NTUA DSS Lab researchers and staff.

Main points of the discussion and leasons learned: specialisation, professionalism, market orientation, global coverage, american standards, european and asian students, extremely high costs.

Deliberation of the Greek “Ontology for Reorganisation of the State”, July 21, 2011

2011-07-22T21:13:00.000+03:00

More than 30 experts from Greek Public Sector organisations, ICT industries and research laboratories joined the public deliberation on the Greek Governance Transformation Ontology. The presentation and discussion was held in National Technical University of Athens, which together with ITMC Consulting are implementing the project “Taxonomies for the Reorganisation of State, on behalf of the Greek Ministry of Administration Reform and Electronic Governance.

Yannis Charalambous from ITMC, and the administrative manager of the above project presented the overall scope and objectives, focusing at the ontology methodology and proposed management processes. Yannis Charalabidis, Assistant Professor at University of Aegean and scientific manager of the Taxonomies project on behalf of NTUA/ICCS gave a full view of the ontology, which includes more than 300 classes and 700 definitions.

Specific attendance was given to the proposed codelists which cover a part of Greek Public sector, coming from different actors including the Greek Ministry of Finance, the Greek Statistics Office, the Ministry of Administration Reform and Electronic Governance. The need for further standardization and promotion of codelists for the public sector was emphasized.

In an one-hour workshop session, participants contributed useful innovative ideas on issues of the ontology, the governing processes and the next needed steps in scientific and governmental collaboration.

View of the audience at NTUA

Find the presentation on the ontology here: http://bit.ly/ndvnDr

AEGEAN Startups 2011

2011-07-22T20:49:00.001+03:00

Aegean Startups is the 1^st Panhellenic Competition on e-Entrepreneurship, giving the opportunity to Greek citizens and students to get initial financing for their business plans. Organised by the University of Aegean / Department of Information and Communication Systems Engineering in Samos, with the exclusive financial support of TANEO New Economy Fund the competition takes place in September and October 2011.

After a written competition and final live presentation in front of the Aegean Startups Scientific Committee, 3 winning teams will each be funded with 15,000 EUR for realizing their business idea. The funding is provided as a prize, not in exchange of company shares or other contribution by the enterprise.

The Aegean Startups 2011 organisation is supported by National Technical University of Athens, Athens University of Economic and Business, Microsoft Innovation Centre Greece and VirtualTrip group.

More information on the terms of the Aegean Startups 2011 Competition at: http://aegean-startups.blogspot.com

The Samos 2011 Summit on Future Internet, 4-7 July 2011

2011-07-22T20:46:00.000+03:00

More than 80 high-level ICT experts and decision makers from 20 countries participate in the international Samos 2011 Summit on “Future Internet: The Power to Change Society”, that takes place from 4th -6th July 2011 in the island of Samos. The Samos Summit is being held with the support of the European Commission – DG Information Society and Media and is co-organised by the University of Aegean, the Greek Interoperability Centre of the National Technical University of Athens and the ENSEMBLE FP7 project – a supportive action to the EC Future Internet Enterprise Systems (FInES) Cluster. The Samos Summit is supported by research and development centres of Google, IBM, Microsoft, Intrasoft International, Engineering, Whitehall Reply and Athens Technology Centre.

Mr. Bernard Barani, representative of the European Commission, Directorate - General for Information Society & Media and a keynote speaker at the Summit, outlined the current status of Future Internet Enterprise Systems research as well as the preparation for the next research period and the HORIZON 2020 programme, spanning over 2013 to 2020.

Professor Socratis Katsikas, Greek State General Secretary of Telecommunications, made an intervention on «The Greek Digital Agenda in times of crisis: How next generation networks can change the landscape», presenting the planned actions and the envisaged impact for telecommunication infrastructures and digital services.

Samos Summit participants at the Karlovassi Town Hall

(Uni Aegean students - dancers in the front)

Yannis Charalabidis, Assistant Professor at the University of the Aegean in the Department of Information and Communication Systems, located in Karlovasi, and chair of the Samos Summit, commented on this high-level meeting: “We are particularly pleased that Samos will for a few days be at the centre of developments for the Future Internet and its applications for enterprises, governments and citizens, internationally. In the framework of the Samos Summit, important statements and presentations are being made from leading enterprises, research centres and collaborative ICT projects. The contribution of Greek scientists, researchers and enterprises will be essential in this sector but also reciprocal for society, towards open and effective governance.”

More information about the Samos 2011 Summit, including photos, videos and all the presentations of the event, at: http://samos-summit.blogspot.com

Metteg Gonference in Camerino, June 30 2011

2011-07-22T20:40:00.000+03:00

It was on June 30 and July 1^st 2011 that the 5th International Conference on Methodologies, Technologies and Tools enabling e-Government took place in lovely Camerino, Marche Region, Italy. Being almost 100 km from Ancona Airport, Camerino is a place that really worths the extra effort to getting there. Peaceful but energetic, beautiful enough but getting better, this post-medieval village provided the place for one of the oldest Universities in Italy. Within the computer science faculty of Camerino University is where MetteG gets its resources for this year.

Invited for the Opening Keynote speech on the Future Research areas of Electronic Governance, I spent some lovely hours at the …. Hotel, right at the top of a neighboring hill. The conference was a gathering of not too many but dedicated researchers from Europe, providing a very nice ground for discussing new opportunities in the domain of ICT-enabled Governance.

With Barbara Re, the heart of the 2011 MetteG organization and fellows from Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Sweden

Find more on MetteG 2011 here:http://www.cs.unicam.it/home/bachelor-degree/40-metteg2011

See my presentation on the Future Research Areas in ICT-enabled Governance here: http://slidesha.re/keuKki

The Future Internet Enterprise Systems Hype Curve

2011-07-04T16:21:00.000+03:00

This is the Future Internet Enterprise Systems Hype Curve, depicting the main technologies and offerings for enterprises for the next years, from inflated expectations to disillusionment, to productivity.

The Future Internet Enterprise Systems Technologies Hype Curve

(as presented in the Samos Summit on Future Internet, on July 4th 2011)

eGov Technologies Hype Curve

2011-06-30T16:35:00.000+03:00

This visualisation is stemming from the work of the CROSSROAD project on eGovernance Research Roadmap, with additions from recent developments and tries to show the status of various ICT-enabled Government technologies and applications in a Gartner-like methodology of hype curve. I have included most developments, research areas and even ideas around the 3 Grand Challenges for ICT-enabled Governance.

The eGovernance Hype Curve, by Yannis Charalabidis

(as presented in the MetteG Conference, 30th June 2011,Camerino,Italy)

You may find more info on the CROSSROAD project at: http://www.crossroad-eu.net

Find more on Hype Curve / Cycle methodology at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

You may also provide comments or new areas below.

Web 2.0 in Education - 10 Ways to make the "cloud" work for you

2011-06-25T13:44:00.001+03:00

As students and professors get more acquainted with Web 2.0 and collaborative tools, a new set of possibilities is arising that can change provided education for the better. The "cloud" is currently offering myriads of opportunities for enhancing collaboration, providing instant information flow and promoting student creativity.

So, if you think it is about time to go beyond the "powerpoint/projector - email - university web site" era, here is my top-10 list of advice for university teachers and students:

1. Create a Linked-in Group for each of your lessons and have students enroll
This group can act as the main "meeting point" for students and professors. Being much more instant than any of the standard university systems, this group can be used for announcements, discussions, comments on the lessons, assignment of work, etc. Through the profile photos you will now be able to recognise each of your students in the class. Semester by semester and year by year, this group will gather together old and new students, nicely blending alumni and rookies. I personally prefer LinkedIn to Facebook, as the latter usually is used by students for informal, personal communications.

2. Use Twitter for instant messaging and organising external information
Twitter can be extremely fast in sharing information on external events, such as relevant conferences, student competitions or lectures. While away from the class, this will give you the opportunity to your students to follow on your activities and find relevant projects or publications to enroll at. Twitter can also help you in effectively propagating last-minute changes in lesson plans. Agreeing on a few #hashtags for your lesson will give you the opportunity to quickly organise information. Then, have your students create one or more Paper.li weekly papers on the subject of the lesson, just by managing twitter lists.

3. Use and promote the use of Cloud storage
As information to be passed towards the students (slidesets, additional material, photos and video) and by the students (essays, additional work, lesson projects results) may amount to several gigabytes, find a place to easily upload and download big files that cannot be send via email. In Greece, Pithos Storage System provides 50 GB storage for every professor or student (thanks, GRNET). If you do not have something like that, you may still use free services such as Rapishare, Sendspace, Filehosting or other.

4. Use the power of Blogs and RSS for channeling relevant information to students
As you cannot create so much up-to-date content for your students, try to leverage on the created relevant knowledge by others: for every of your lessons find a handful of relevant, serious blogs and link them through RSS to the Linked-in group of the lesson. This way, your students will get up-to-date information that will give them new ideas, questions and answers. Do not overdo: a couple of good, to the point blogs and forums can do the job of providing fresh info.

5. Create a lesson blog and encourage students to write
This is a real "web 2.0" treatment to your students. Learn and show them how to create a blog in 5 minutes, through Blogspot or WordPress. Then, make a blog for your lesson and encourage students to write their own articles, reporting their lesson achievements (small prototypes, essays, papers). This will immediately change their attitude towards being active creators of knowledge and not mere listeners.

6. Go beyond words: Photographs and Video can do the difference
The well-known blackboard (or whiteboard) can be unbeatable for sketching new examples, answering student questions and discussing them. However, important information can be erased for ever when cleaning the board. Before you do that, take a picture and post it through Twitter (I use my smartphone for that). Be careful not to discourage students taking notes: some people only learn through writing. A nice next step is to use a small videocamera with a tiny tripod to video (all ?) your lectures. Then you can upload the videos in the cloud storage and voila: your students can view them at any time, before exams.

7. Virtual classes through remote meeting: be there any time
As life becomes more complicated, tele-working and e-education is rapidly becoming a trend. Without being yet an 100% alternative of actual presence in the class (we need some more Virtual Reality features for that), using tools like Skype can provide a good alternative. Then, for the "real thing", you have to use a more sophisticated service such as GoToMeeting or LiveMeeting, that will allow you to have 50 students connected via internet in a virtual class, listening to you, speaking, sharing your screen or their screens, chatting in parallel and getting the lesson recorded, while being at home or at any campus spot. In a recent poll, 75% of my students preferred this lesson to the ordinary "show, speak and forget" ones. And a hint to teachers: by browsing these lessons at the end of the semester, you can have proofs of student participation for your grades.

8. Use Google docs for promoting collaboration
This rapidly expanding set of cloud-based, collaborative editing documents can solve most of your typical problems on how to have students enroll to project teams, propose their own essay subjects, work together on a deliverable, etc. Possibilities are unlimited, including (MS word-like) documents, spreadsheets and presentations that can be edited by hundreds of students in parallel (keeping editing rights to avoid mal-practice if needed), and also interactive forms for putting up polls or data-entry in seconds! Is you still need to send out emails, you may also use a Google Group (although the Linkedin Group will render that unnecessary)

9. Invite externals and make your lesson "open" to society
Now that you have set up the basic infrastructure of your Web 2.0 lesson, you can make use of it for the good of students: invite other professors from neighboring domains, researchers and practitioners, company engineers and even high-level executives to see and interact. You will be amazed on how this act can turn a "boring" university lesson into a vivid interaction between the academic world and the market, if you need that. You may even end-up with instant problem solving by experts, collaboration or job offers, continuing education for graduates or other citizens.

10. Plan, provide incentives, gradually upgrade
If many of the above sound difficult to set-up and manage, you might be right: you need to carefully plan what you can achieve within a semester, as there is nothing worse than starting and then "let-die". But, if you provide the right incentives to your students, you will be amazed on how much they can achieve on their own. And then, you will have most of the work done for the next semester for your lesson, to continue optimising.

And one advice more:
Last but not least, although web 2.0 and cloud services can solve a lot of problems and provide amazing opportunities, please do not get "lost in translation": internet (at least at this point) is more of a medium than a destination. There is no tool that can turn an indifferent, poorly educated, not loving teacher, into a successful one / or at least not for long ...

Greek Budget Visualisation: Where does the money go ?

2011-06-23T21:11:00.000+03:00

Although the Greek national budget (in Greek, only) is available online, its presentation and format (PDF) makes it difficult to draw a conclusion on the allocation of spending. In the web site of Greek Ministry of Finance there exists an allocation of the spending, though the taxation system. Also, as of this year, every Greek citizen gets an analytical report on how his taxes contribute to the country budget. From these sources, we can draw a safe conclusion on how spending is allocated:

The main categories of the 2011 Greek Budget spending

Payment of interest amounts to almost 20% of the total expenses.

From the same source, we also get data for the 2010 income and expenses allocation, as a split between internal and external sources and destinations.

2010 Greek Income and Expenses, in billion Euros

(it shows that Greek EBIT was -10 bn EUR)

For more informaton on the Greek Budget (in Greek only), visit: http://www.minfin.gr/budget/2011/

For more information on budget allocations (in Greek, only) visit: http://www.minfin.gr/content-api/betacms/repository/minfin/binaryChannel/banner-forolOdig2011/content

The ENGAGE Project on Open Data started in Athens

2011-06-23T14:14:00.000+03:00

An Infrastructure for Open, Linked Governmental Data Provision towards Research Communities and Citizens

The Kick-off meeting of ENGAGE eInfrastructures Research Project on Open Data was held in NTUA, Athens on 20-21 June 2011. The Kick-off meeting was held in the form of open workshop, also attended by European Commission representatives and Public sector officials from Greece.

The main goal of ENGAGE project is 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.

The ENGAGE consortium comprises of 9 partners from Luxembourg, Germany, Greece, Israel, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, with an excellent track record both in the eInfrastructures and the Governance domain (NTUA, Fraunhofer FOKUS, STFC, University of Aegean, TU DELFT) including world leaders in cloud infrastructures (IBM, Microsoft, Intrasoft International) and a large network of scientific data diffusion (EUROCris). Following on Open Data initiatives throughout Europe, ENGAGE has established links with numerous National and International public sector organisations, research communities, open data experts and standardisation fora. The project is supported by the Greek GEANT node GRNET, providing the infrastructure for service provision.

The ENGAGE Project core team, in NTUA

How to get involved ?

Join the ENGAGE project group at: http://www.linkedin.com/groups/ENGAGE-eInfrastructures-Project-3867416 and declare your Public Sector information sources, follow the discussions and meet other Open Data Experts

Find more about the project at: http://www.engage-project.eu

Tax offices productivity in Greece for 1st half of 2011

2011-06-12T15:11:00.000+03:00

Completion of cases by tax offices across Greek regions

The following map visualises data on the efficiency of tax offices across Greece in handling cases assigned to them by the central offices of the Ministry of Finance for the first six months of 2011. These cases are related to natural and legal persons that have been identified through intersections, tax delinquent behavior and other targeted actions.

Each spot indicates the percentage of cases closed after the completion of the above steps by the tax office, of each specific location. Three different colors displayed on the map represent the three discrete ranges of percentages that have been set, as levels of completion:

Red (107 Tax Offices): minimum productivity (less than 33% of all open cases were processes within 6 months).
Yellow (162 Tax Offices) : medium productivity (between 33% and 66%)
Green (18 Tax Offices): higher productivity (more than 66% of all open cases)

The global average for all 287 Tax Offices is 36%, which means that it takes on average 18 months for the completion of a case.

The percentages of completion have been published on the website of the General Secretary of Information Systems and are updated on a daily basis: http://www.gsis.gr/doyaudit/

Uni Aegean and Fraunhofer FOKUS collaborate on Mobile Development

2011-06-07T17:35:00.000+03:00

It all started within the "Software Engineering" class of 2010-2011, where we set the goal to develop e-Government apps for Mobile Platforms, the prize for the best project being a visit to FOKUS premises in Berlin, in cooperation with the FAME group.

Two members of the winning team, with the Greek Municipalities for Windows Phone 7 application,

(http://social.zune.net/redirect?type=phoneApp&id=664febdd-b22f-e011-854c-00237de2db9e ) visited Berlin, on May 2011. You may see all the applications at http://www.icsd.aegean.gr/is-lab.

Ilias Dimopoulos and Thanassis Garaliakos, reported from Berlin:

"At Fraunhofer Fokus - it’s one of the buildings that you rarely see. At the western suburbs of Berlin, Fraunhofer Fokus cooperates with famous universities around the world developing on several projects. PADGETS (www.padgets.eu) is one of them, run by Information and Communication Systems Engineering Department of the University of Aegean.

In this visit we met up with Robert Kleinfield and after a long discussion, an analysis was made about PADGETS - an extensive update on the requirements of the project. It was required for us to develop ideas for mobile platform applications that will make it easy for citizens to link up to the PADGETS platform and participate in policy making.

After a few days of technology transfer, experimentation and idea exchange, we now have to further develop on mobile apps ideas and discuss with Fraunhofer Fokus. If these ideas satisfy the Fokus committee, then a new cooperation will be revealed for us and Uni Aegean !

Our days in Berlin came to an end with a visit to a traditional German restaurant, and after that a relaxing outing to a local bar, enjoying a local beer. The rest is now up to the committee.

However, our visit to Berlin and to the institute will be an unforgettable experience !"

Ilias Dimopoulos, Robert Kleinfeld (FOKUS) and Thanassis Garaliakos (Uni Aegean)

Uni Aegean IS Lab - Seeking for researchers

2011-06-07T13:30:00.000+03:00

IS Lab Request for Collaboration on RTD Projects

The Information Systems Lab of the University of Aegean is seeking for junior, senior and expert-level researchers, for collaborating under research and technological development projects in an international environment. Occupation types, areas of needed expertise and workplace locations cover a wide spectrum of opportunities. Areas of expertise are listed as:

Policy and Legal Modelling
Information Management and Visualisation
Electronic Governance models and systems
Future Internet (Internet of Things, Internet of Services)
Modelling and Simulation of complex phenomena in Businesses and Society
Web 2.0 technologies and services (Social Media, Semantics, Collaborative Services)
Mobile Devices
Service Enginneering
Unified Process and Data Modelling
Interoperability and Cloud Infrastructures
ICT policy and roadmapping
Data Mining and Text Mining Technologies
Specific Market / Country knowledge

For any information and contact details please see http://www.icsd.aegean.gr/is-lab

To indicate your interest please apply at: http://bit.ly/iZuzZy

Digital Agenda 2020 : Announcement of Action Plan in Athens

2011-06-03T21:24:00.000+03:00

The Greek contribution to the European Digital Agenda 2020 was announce in public, on 1st June 2011, in the DAIS Conference Centre in Athens. More than 30 actions in 6 main areas (infrastructures, security, education & research, interoperability and citizen participation) were presented. The Digital Agenda 2020 proposed actions will now enter into an electronic, nation-wide deliberation process.

You may download the proposed actions at: http://www.digitalgreece2020.gr

With Charis Alexopoulos and Aggeliki Androutsopoulou from Uni Aegean

ESWC 2011 Workshop on «Semantics in Governance and Policy Modelling»

2011-05-30T19:21:00.000+03:00

Extended Semantic Web Conference 2011

Workshop on «Semantics in Governance and Policy Modelling»
May 30, 2011 - Crete, Greece

Topics and Papers
The papers presented in this workshop are targeting novel approaches, methods, practices and tools for turning the public information overload into an opportunity for Governance and Policy Modelling with the help of semantics, open data and Public Sector Information reuse, linked data and visual analytics. Specific importance is placed in multidisciplinary approaches, combining theoretical policy making methodologies, advanced ICT and Government 2.0 collaboration practices.
The workshop provided a stand for real-life application examples, showing how stakeholders can gain insight and take action into complex and unpredictable real-life situations at international, national or local level, including: Semantic components for digital public service definition and provision; Semantics for policy modelling, including policy planning and policy impact assessment; Open, governmental data publication and promotion; Linking of open governmental data; Linked data in government data mash-ups; Collaborative analysis and collective intelligence for policy-making, Semantic annotation of public policy and citizen opinion; Semantic components for public deliberation and argument visualization.

The papers selected among submissions and made publishable in the workshop are following, organized under two sessions, as for presentation. The first session gathers papers in the areas of Open and Linked Data in Governance, including also structural components approaches:

· Fenareti Lampathaki, Yannis Charalabidis, Dimitris Askounis: “Open Linked Data and Visual Analytics in Electronic Governance: State of Play and Perspectives”

· Konstantin Hypponen, Miika Alonen, Sami Korhonen, and Virpi Hotti: “XHTML with RDFa as a Semantic Document Format for CCTS Modelled Documents and its Application for Social Services”

· Kelli de Faria Cordeiro, Maria Luiza Machado Campos, Marcos R. S. Borges: “Empowering Citizens and Government with Collaboration on Linked Open Data”

· Lucas de Ramos Araújo, Pablo N. Mendes, Jairo Francisco de Souza: “Publishing Linked Data from Brazilian Politicians on the Web”

The second part touches upon issues relative to more participative approaches, mainly at the policy support and deliberation areas. As such, Semantically-enriched Policy Making is a new direction for several existing categories of research artefacts, attracting papers such as:

· Riccardo Boero, Enrico Ferro, Michele Osella, Yannis Charalabidis, Euripidis Loukis: “Policy Intelligence in the Era of Social Computing: Towards a Cross-Policy Decision Support System”

· Christos Tsarouchis, Declan O’Sullivan, David Lewis: “Balancing system expressivity and user cognitive load in semantically enhanced policy modeling”

· George Anadiotis, Panos Alexopoulos, Konstantinos Kafentzis, Efrosyni Konstantinou, Milan Stankovic, and Manuel Waeckerle: “Semantics-powered Virtual Communities and Open Innovation for a Structured Deliberation Process”

· Alessio Gugliotta, Franco Alberti, Igor Jogan: “Comelicopedia: a Collaborative, Semantically-enriched Knowledge Base for the Sustainable Development in Mountain Areas”

All presentations and papers available at http://bit.ly/l0J3N6

The workshop speakers and chair, at the ESWC 2011, May 30th 2011

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

2011-05-18T14:29:00.001+03:00

Call for Papers

INFORMATION SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT

An ISI-Indexed Journal - Taylor & Francis Group

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

• 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

Submission

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

• Abstract (maximum of 75 words)

• At least 3 keywords

• Full author names and affiliations

• Brief author bios

• Email address of 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

• Full Paper Submission: September 30, 2011

• Notifications to Authors: November 30, 2011

• Camera-ready Submission: March 30, 2012

• Tentative Publication: Fall 2012

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

Workshop on Open Data in IFIP eGOV Conference

2011-05-15T23:27:00.000+03:00

Call for Contributions

IFIP e-government conference EGOV 2011

28th August – 2nd September 2011, Delft, The Netherlands

Workshop on

« Open Governmental Data: from Governments to Science and Society»

Background of the Workshop / The ENGAGE project

Information and Communication Technologies have an unprecedented potential to improve the responsiveness of governments to the needs of citizens and have long been recognized as a key strategic tool to enable reforms in the public sector. During the last years, this potential of ICT has started to be dealt with in a multi-disciplinary way, giving birth to new research communities dealing with governance and policy modelling, modelling and simulation of complex systems, public administration information systems, open governance and social media. However, to this day, this potential has been exploited only non-systematically, as there are significant barriers that hinder the effective exploration, management and distribution of the vast amounts of available public sector data towards the research communities.

The main goal of the ENGAGE project is 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.

Topics of the Workshop

The workshop is focussed on discussing the scientific base of ICT-enabled governance, based on open and linked data from the Public Sector. Various members will provide their view on open data and value-adding examples will be shown. Information and Communication Technologies have an unprecedented potential to improve the responsiveness of governments to the needs of citizens and have long been recognized as a key strategic tool to enable reforms in the public sector. New insights can be gained by combining data from different sources which are opened up. The opening of data and sharing of information from different sources can provide fresh insights and utilize the crowd not only in analyzing data, but also in interpreting it and creating original solutions. Yet, this potential is to this day non-systematically exploited, as there are significant barriers that hinder the effective exploration, management and distribution of the vast amounts of available public sector data towards the research communities. Governments at all levels are developing strategies that EU Regions and Member States are implementing when publishing public data on the web. The new European e-Government Action Plan 2011-2015 dedicates specific actions to Open Government and identifies two main sources of potential benefits: transparency and data re-use (Commission, 2010).

The main topics of the workshop are structured around the state of the art, the visionary scenarios, the research gaps and the future research challenges in the area of ICT for governance and public sector’s open data. Specific topics to be addressed are, but not limited to:

· Re-use of Public Sector Information

· Open and Linked Linked Data

· Open government information & intelligence for transparency

· Improvement of Transparency

· Citizens engagement and inclusion

· Future internet for collaborative governance

· Social networks and means of mass citizen participation

· Identity, privacy and trust in governance

· Collaborative Production of Services based on Open Data

· EU-wide implementation of cross-border services

· Other scientific approaches to ICT for governance and public sector’s open data

Target audience

· eGovernance Research Project Members

· European Commission, National Governments and Local Administration Officers

· Industry representatives, interested in cutting-edge advancements on eGovernance research

· Other registered participants from Industry and Academia

Submission and Selection Process

The workshop will accommodate both presentations and short position papers.

· Presentations should not exceed 12 slides, be delivered in MS Powerpoint and be accompanied by an 1 page text in MS Word (title, authors and abstract) in LNCS format guidelines available at: http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0. Open Data or relevant project presentations are welcome.

· Short position papers should not exceed 4 pages, including figures and references, and be delivered in MS Word (title, authors and abstract) in LNCS format guidelines available at: http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0.

All submissions should be made via email to the workshop corresponding chair, by 15th June 2011.

All accepted submissions to be published online by the ENGAGE project.

Important dates

Paper or presentation-abstract submission: 15th June 2011

Notification of acceptance: 1st July 2011

Days of the Conference: 28th August – 2nd September 2011

Workshop Chairs

Yannis Charalabidis (corresponding), University of Aegean, Greece, yannisx@aegean.gr

Sunil Choenni, Ministry of Justice, the Netherlands, r.choenni@minjus.nl

Marijn Janssen, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, m.f.w.h.a.janssen@tudelft.nl

Workshop Programme Committee

Peter Bak, IBM Research Israel, Haifa Research Lab
Nils Barnickel, Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems, Germany

Fotis Draganidis, Microsoft Innovation Centre, Greece

Matthias Fluegge, Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems, Germany

Christos Georgousopoulos, INTRASOFT International, Luxembourg

Dimitris Gkanatsios, Microsoft Innovation Centre, Greece

Thomas F. Gordon, Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems, Germany

Heiko Hartenstein, Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems, Germany

Marijn Janssen, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Keith Jeffery, Science and Technology Facilities Council, UK

Brigitte Jörg, Current Research Information Systems, Netherlands

Jens Klessmann, Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems, Germany

Harrie Lalieu, Current Research Information Systems, Netherlands

Fenareti Lampathaki, National Technical University of Athens, Greece

Euripidis Loukis, University of the Aegean, Greece

Lydia Morazzani, Microsoft Innovation Centre, Greece

John Psarras, National Technical University of Athens, Greece

Antonis Ramfos, INTRASOFT International, Luxembourg

Simon Robinson, INTRASOFT International, Luxembourg

Yao-Hua Tan, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Alexander Verbraeck, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Avi Yaeli, IBM Research Israel, Haifa Research Lab

Join the ENGAGE project group at:

http://www.linkedin.com/groups/ENGAGE-eInfrastructures-Project-3867416

See more on the IFIP EGOV 2011 conference at:

http://www.egov-conference.org/egov-2011

Antonis Ramfos visits Uni Aegean, in Samos

2011-05-10T10:15:00.000+03:00

One day in Samos, at the Information and Communication Systems Engineering Department

It was our pleasure at the department and the Information Systems lab, to host Antonis Ramfos, Principal of Research & Innovation Department at INTRASOFT International, for "One Day in Samos", to lecture and discuss with students.

Leaving with the early (06:00 AM) flight for Samos, Antonis arrived on time to have a breakfast at the main square of Karlovassi, set the agenda and then participate in the course "E-Business Technologies and Apps" - in the 4th of the 5 years pregraduate programme. Assessing progress and discussing students projects (around 30 innovative internet sites/prototypes expected), outlasted the 3-hour morning slot.

Then, at the ISLab we spent the rest of the afternoon doing work (connected via the Aegean 1-Gb GRNET node, with some issues concerning buidlings WiFi, though), reviewing students theses and discussing future collaboration opportunities, in the middle (or less ?) of the crisis, for Greece.

Afternoon was free for our guest, but a 2-hr dinner with MSc students with questions on carrier paths, market situation, research and development, employment tactics, ended the day. Another couple of diploma theses might be related to real-world problems, this summer.

Antonis, taking the early flight from Samos, arrived a little earlier than usual in the office, the next day.

ESWC Workshop on «Semantics in Governance and Policy Modelling»

2011-05-03T14:43:00.000+03:00

Extended Semantic Web Conference 2011
Workshop on «Semantics in Governance and Policy Modelling»
May 30, 2011 - Crete, Greece

Preface

Today, Governments struggle to regulate an increasingly interconnected, complex, fast-evolving and unpredictable world, as the recent financial crisis has shown. At the same time, the amount of data available to any interested stakeholder for making sense of the socio-economic environment has increased exponentially, provided either through sensors in the Internet of Objects and “crowdsourced” citizens’ reports in Social Media, or with the help of open government initiatives that have already started to emerge and impact governments’ operation, efficiency and reputation.

Moving in the strategic directions of the “Research Roadmap in ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling” prepared by the CROSSROAD Project (http://www.crossroad-eu.net), data-powered collective intelligence and action has been unanimously recognized as a key challenge towards a better, evidence-based, timely, truly transparent and participative decision making process. In such a Collaborative Governance vision, citizens are engaged in all the phases of policy making: in collecting available data through open linked data and participatory sensing techniques; in analyzing the data through data mining, information visualization and visual analytics tools; and in acting on relevant data upon conducting interactive simulations and serious games experimentations that accompany and stimulate government policies.

Semantics are bound to play an important role in these new governance grand challenges, supporting policy modeling, citizen opinion mining, data visualization, automated and personalized service provision.

Topics and Papers
The papers presented in this workshop are targeting novel approaches, methods, practices and tools for turning the public information overload into an opportunity for Governance and Policy Modelling with the help of semantics, open data and Public Sector Information reuse, linked data and visual analytics. Specific importance is placed in multidisciplinary approaches, combining theoretical policy making methodologies, advanced ICT and Government 2.0 collaboration practices.
The workshop provided a stand for real-life application examples, showing how stakeholders can gain insight and take action into complex and unpredictable real-life situations at international, national or local level, including: Semantic components for digital public service definition and provision; Semantics for policy modelling, including policy planning and policy impact assessment; Open, governmental data publication and promotion; Linking of open governmental data; Linked data in government data mash-ups; Collaborative analysis and collective intelligence for policy-making, Semantic annotation of public policy and citizen opinion; Semantic components for public deliberation and argument visualization.

The papers selected among submissions and made publishable in the workshop are following, organized under two sessions, as for presentation. The first session gathers papers in the areas of Open and Linked Data in Governance, including also structural components approaches:

· Fenareti Lampathaki, Yannis Charalabidis, Dimitris Askounis: “Open Linked Data and Visual Analytics in Electronic Governance: State of Play and Perspectives”

· Konstantin Hypponen, Miika Alonen, Sami Korhonen, and Virpi Hotti: “XHTML with RDFa as a Semantic Document Format for CCTS Modelled Documents and its Application for Social Services”

· Kelli de Faria Cordeiro, Maria Luiza Machado Campos, Marcos R. S. Borges: “Empowering Citizens and Government with Collaboration on Linked Open Data”

· Lucas de Ramos Araújo, Pablo N. Mendes, Jairo Francisco de Souza: “Publishing Linked Data from Brazilian Politicians on the Web”

The second part touches upon issues relative to more participative approaches, mainly at the policy support and deliberation areas. As such, Semantically-enriched Policy Making is a new direction for several existing categories of research artefacts, attracting papers such as:

· Riccardo Boero, Enrico Ferro, Michele Osella, Yannis Charalabidis, Euripidis Loukis: “Policy Intelligence in the Era of Social Computing: Towards a Cross-Policy Decision Support System”

· Christos Tsarouchis, Declan O’Sullivan, David Lewis: “Balancing system expressivity and user cognitive load in semantically enhanced policy modeling”

· George Anadiotis, Panos Alexopoulos, Konstantinos Kafentzis, Efrosyni Konstantinou, Milan Stankovic, and Manuel Waeckerle: “Semantics-powered Virtual Communities and Open Innovation for a Structured Deliberation Process”

· Alessio Gugliotta, Franco Alberti, Igor Jogan: “Comelicopedia: a Collaborative, Semantically-enriched Knowledge Base for the Sustainable Development in Mountain Areas”

All presentations and papers available at http://bit.ly/l0J3N6

Audience, Organisers
The audience of the workshop includes researchers and practitioners spanning the domains of Semantic Web, Electronic Governance and Policy Modelling, university students and professors of Computer, Management, Social and Public Administration sciences, ICT industry staff engaged in relevant projects and solutions, policy makers and decision drivers at local, national or international levels, public administration officials and industry executives, engaged both in organisational design and ICT deployment.

Workshop Chairs
Yannis Charalabidis (Corresponding Chair), University of Aegean, yannisx@aegean.gr
Fenareti Lampathaki, National Technical University of Athens, flamp@epu.ntua.gr
Gianluca Misuraca, JRC - European Commission, IPTS, Spain, Gianluca.MISURACA@ec.europa.eu

Workshop Programme Committee
Dimitris Askounis, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Enrico Ferro, ISMB, Italy
Marko Grobelnik, Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
Euripidis Loukis, University of Aegean, Greece
Michele Missikoff, IASI-CNR, Italy
David Osimo, Tech4i2, Belgium
Maria Wimmer, University Koblenz-Landau, Germany

MIS responsible needed, industry in Athens

2011-05-03T09:26:00.000+03:00

Large Greek Industry based in Athens is looking for an IT executive in financial department (MIS responsible), to enter at junior level. Training provided. Salary re-negotiation based on achievements, in 6-9 monthts.

Come back if interested and up to the task - yannis at aegean.gr

Future Internet Enterprise Systems Projects in Europe - 10 years of innovation

2011-04-23T09:49:00.000+03:00

The FInES cluster represents the Enterprise Interoperability and Collaboration Research Domain in Europe, and is composed of FP6 and FP7 funded projects, as well as experts and stakeholders from all over Europe, working in the areas of Enterprise Software, Enterprise Interoperability and Collaboration applicable to enterprises. Almost 30 projects have been running in this area, under FP6, FP7 and CIP programmes.

FInES Cluster FP7 Projects (2008 -)

ACCESS-ICT - Access to ICT Investors.
COIN & COIN-EEU - Enterprise Collaboration & Interoperability.
COMMIUS – COMMunity-based Interoperability Utility for SMEs.
ebbits - Enabling business-based Internet of Things and Services.
ENSEMBLE - Envisioning, Supporting and Promoting Future Internet Enterprise Systems Research through Scientific Collaboration.
iSURF - An Interoperability Framework for Collaborative Planning.
K-NET - Services for Context Sensitive Enhancing of Knowledge in Networked Enterprise.
NEFFICS - Networked Enterprise transFormation and resource management in Future internet enabled Innovation CloudS.
NisB - The Network is the Business.
SPIKE - Secure Process-oriented Integrative Service Infrastructure for Networked Enterprises.
SYNERGY - Supporting highly adaptive Network enterprise collaboration through semantically enabled knowledge services.
UNITE – UpgradiNg ICT excellence by strengthening cooperation between research Teams in an Enlarged Europe.
ICT-VENTUREGATE - Innovative Solutions For Enabling Efficient Interactions Between SMEs In ICT Projects And Innovation Investors.
YMIR – Stepping up ICT SME’s in accessing finance.

FInES Cluster FP6 Projects (2002 - 2007)

ABILITIES - Application Bus for InteroperabiLITy In enlarged Europe SMEs.
ATHENA - Advanced technologies for interoperability of heterogeneous enterprise networks and their applications.
CONTRACT - Contract based Systems Engineering Methods for Verifiable Cross-Organisational Networked Business Applications.
CoVES - Collaborative Virtual Engineering for SMEs.
e-NVISION - A new vision for the participation of European SMEs in the future e-Business scenario.
FUSION - Business process FUSION based on Semantically-enabled Service-Oriented Business Applications.
GENESIS - Enterprise Application Interoperability via Internet-Integration for SMEs, Govenrmental Organisations and Intermediaries in the New European Union.
IMPORTNET - Intelligent modular open source Platform for intercultural and cross-domain SME networks.
INTEROP-NoE - Interoperability research for networked enterprises applications and software (INTEROP-NoE).
LEKTOR - Legal Knowledge Transfer Accelerator for SME cluster and Digital Business Ecosystems.
NO-REST - Networked Organisations - Research into Standards.
ONE – Open Negotiation Environment.
OPAALS - Open Philosophies for Associative Autopoietic Digital Ecosystems.
SUDDEN - SMEs Undertaking Design of Dynamic Ecosystem Networks.
TrustCoM - Trust and contract management framework enabling secure collaborative business processing in on-demand created, self-managed, scalable, and highly dynamic virtual organisations.

CIP Projects

DEN4DEK - Digital Ecosystems Network of regions for (4) DissEmination and Knowledge Deployment.

See the FINES projects visualised with DebateGraph here: http://www.fines-cluster.eu/fines/jm/FiNES-Public-Information/fines-projects.html

The ENGAGE project: An EU eInfrastructures Initiative on Open Data

2011-04-12T15:14:00.000+03:00

An Infrastructure for Open, Linked Governmental Data Provision towards Research Communities and Citizens

A project under the European Commission eInfrastructure programme, to begin in Summer 2011.

Information and Communication Technologies have an unprecedented potential to improve the responsiveness of governments to the needs of citizens and have long been recognized as a key strategic tool to enable reforms in the public sector. During the last years, this potential of ICT has started to be dealt with in a multi-disciplinary way, giving birth to new research communities dealing with governance and policy modelling, modelling and simulation of complex systems, public administration information systems, open governance and social media. However, this potential is to this day non-systematically exploited, as there are significant barriers that hinder the effective exploration, management and distribution of the vast amounts of available public sector data towards the research communities.

The ENGAGE consortium comprises of 9 partners from Belgium, Germany, Greece, Israel, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, with an excellent track record both in the eInfrastructures and the Governance domain (NTUA, FOKUS, STFC, Uni. Aegean, TU DELFT) including world-leaders in cloud infrastructures (IBM, Microsoft and INTRASOFT International) and a large network of scientific data diffusion (EUROCris).

Following on Open Data initiatives throughout Europe, ENGAGE has established links with numerous National and International public sector organisations, research communities, open data experts and standardisation fora. The project is supported by the Greek NREN and NGI node GRNET, providing the infrastructure for service provision.

Join the ENGAGE project group at: http://www.linkedin.com/groups/ENGAGE-eInfrastructures-Project-3867416

The Samos Symposium on IT Entrepreneurship

2011-04-11T00:22:00.000+03:00

The 3rd academic symposium of the University of Aegean / Information and Communication Systems Engineering Department was held in Karlovassi, Samos, on 8th & 9th April 2011. Attended by more than 200 participants, the symposium featured invited talks and presentations by Government and Private Sector market representatives, including:

VELTI, MICROSOFT Innovation Centre, Greek Geeks, IMC, VTrip, TANEO Fund from the private sectors
Ministry of Interior, Prime Ministers Office, National Technical University of Athens

For the full programme, presentations and photos, please visit: http://samos-symposium.blogspot.com

Photo on the Left: The Opening of the Conference, in Karlovassi Town Hall

Outside the Karlovassi Townhall

The Future Internet Enterprise Systems (FInES) Cluster Meeting

2011-04-01T14:07:00.000+03:00

The European Commission Future Internet Enterprise Systems (FInES) cluster meeting was held in Brussels, on April 1, 2011. Attended by more than 30 international invited experts, the cluster meeting focused at FP7 and FP8 orientations for research on Future Internet for industries and SME's.

The agenda of the FInES cluster meeting was as following:

Time	Topic		Presenter
09:30-10:00	Registration
10:00-10:15	Introduction, FInES Cluster State Of Play, FInES Position Paper on FP8 Orientations Dissemination	Cristina Martinez (EC)
10:15-10:30	FIA activities	Man-Sze Li (IC Focus)
10:30-10:45	What’s new from ENSEMBLE	Yannis Charalabidis (NTUA)
10:45-11:00	Introduction to SPRINT: Software Platform for Integration of Engineering and Things	Andreas Keis (EADS)
11:00-11:10	Coffee Break
11:10-12:10	FInES Task Forces Progress Report	Fenareti Lampathaki (NTUA)
	· Standardisation	Guy Doumeingts (INTEROP VLab)
	· FInES Research Roadmap Task Force	Michele Missikoff (CNR-IASI)
	· FInES Research Exploitation and Impact Creation	Anton Theuma (Paragon Europe)
	· Manufacture and Industry	Jesper Thestrup (In-Jet ApS)
12.10-12:25	FIA architecture developments	Isidro Laso (EC)
12:25-12:55	Proposal for Task Force on FInES architectural design principles	Man-Sze Li (IC Focus)
12:55-13:55	Lunch
13:55-14:10	The PARADISO 2 project: state of play (tbc)	Fabrizio Sestini (EC)
14:10-14:35	An industrial perspective of FP8 priorities: ATOS	Nuria De-Lama Sanchez (ATOS)
14:35-15:05	ActionPlanT: A Road-Mapping exercise for ICT for Future Manufacturing. · Introduction to the project, its concepts, progress and further activities · Discussions	Klaus-Dieter Platte (Platte Consult)
15:05-15:20	A research viewpoint: Smart Society and FInES	John Sutcliffe-Braithwaite (Metaloger Technologies)
15:20-15:30	Coffee Break
15:30-16:45	Contribution to FISA, new orientations towards FP8 from the Position Paper	Michele Missikoff (CNR-IASI)
	· Knowledge Cafés on: Cloud computing, Identity Management, FInES Architecture.
16:45-17:00	Closing of the Meeting	Cristina Martinez (EC)

Diana-Ioana Vlad - Calcic (EC), Cristina Martinez (EC), Yannis Charalabidis and Fenareti Lampathaki (NTUA) at the opening of the FInES cluster meeting

More information on the FInES cluster meeting and activities is found at: http://www.fines-cluster.eu

Mobile Government Applications from University of Aegean

2011-03-31T16:44:00.000+03:00

Within the Software Engineering lesson of the pre-graduate program of the ICS department, several Mobile Applications were developed by students. Two specific training sessions provided hands-on experience in Android and Windows 7 development platforms, provided by ATC SA and Microsoft Hellas.

The applications targeted simple mobile government functionality, through reusing open data / open services from the Greek public sector information systems. At the time of development (Nov 2010 – Feb 2011) not many open web services existed within the Greek Public Sector, thus limiting possibilities.

The applications developed for Android and Windows 7 mobile platforms are the following:

- Automated VAT number validity check (Ministry of Finance)

- The new structure of Greek Local Administration, after the 2010 reform – “Kallikratis” programme

- The structure of Central Administration (Ministries, General Secretariats)

- A mobile tourist guide for Samos, including public administrations in the Island (in English)

- The list of electronic services provided by the Greek eGovernment gateway “Ermis” (Ministry of Interior)

- The Greek Government daily news via RSS (Presidency of the Greek Government)

- The open Government daily news (RSS from open government site “Diavgeia.gr”)

The 2011 WeGov Awards: 2nd Students Competition on Electronic Governance

2011-03-29T16:01:00.000+03:00

The second Greek students competition in eletcronic governance innovation "WeGov 2011 Awards" is launched.

With a submission deadline in July 2011 and the finals ceremony in November 2011, in conjunction with the Greek ICT Forum, the competition offers prizes, which include 1,000 - 2,000 EUR grants and further collaboration opportunities with research organisations and international ICT industries, in three categories:

- Best Idea (can be at any of the 10 areas of governance addressed)
- Best Prototype (can be at any of the 10 areas of governance addressed)
- Best Application in the areas of Mobile Devices and Cloud

The WeGov Competition is an initiative of:

University of Aegean / Information Systems Lab

National Technical University of Athens / Decision Support Systems Lab & Greek Interoperability centre

University of Peiraeus / Information Security Lab

under the auspices of the Ministry of Interior / GS of Administrative Reform

More information to be found (in Greek) at:
http://wegov.blogspot.com

Samos 2011 Summit on Future Internet

2011-03-26T19:31:00.000+02:00

Participate in Samos 2011 Summit

Registration will be open on April 1st, 2011

The Samos 2011 Summit on Future Internet: “The power to change society” will take place on July 4th to 6th, 2011 in Samos, Greece, and will be co-organised by the ENSEMBLE FP7 project, the Greek Interoperability Centre of the National Technical University of Athens and the University of Aegean, with the support of the FInES Cluster.

With an emphasis on Future Internet systems and services in the factory, in the enterprise and within a connected, inclusive society, the Samos Future Internet Summit will be a first-class opportunity to see, interact with and influence cutting-edge European ICT research projects and initiatives from a governance, societal or interoperability viewpoint.

Join the Collaborative Workshops on

(a) the new Research Roadmap on Future Internet Enterprise Systems, and

(b) the Enterprise Interoperability Scientific Formulation,

as being prepared by the research community and the ENSEMBLE project partners and Experts Scientific Committee.

Registration will be open on April 1st, 2011 at: http://samos-summit.blogspot.com/

The PADGETS Project on Social Media for Governance : March Newsletter

2011-03-21T14:46:00.000+02:00

The first newsletter of the PADGETS project has just been published.

PADGETS is project on ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling co-funded by the European commission under the FP7. The vision of the PADGETS is to bring together two well established domains, the mashup architectural approach of web 2.0 for creating web applications (gadgets) and the methodology of system dynamics in analyzing complex system behaviour. The objective is to design, develop and deploy a prototype toolset that will allow policy makers to graphically create web applications that will be deployed in the environment of underlying knowledge in Web 2.0 media. For this reason, the project introduces the concept of Policy Gadget (Padget) – similarly to the approach of gadget applications in web 2.0 – to represent a micro web application that combines a policy message with underlying group knowledge in social media (in the form of content and user activities) and interacts with end users in popular locations (such as social networks, blogs, forums, news sites, etc) in order to get and convey their input to policy makers.

Through the PADGETS platform any policy can become a reusable and communicable web application to be used in relation to underlying content and social activities over the web. Policy makers will be able to set up such applications on their own and use them to communicate their policies to the public. People can use these applications as they use everyday services and policy makers can track the results of this interaction back to their policy making process to assist them in reaching solid decisions that represent society’s input and aspirations.

In this newsletter, we provide you with information about the latest developments, upcoming and past events as well as recent publications.

Download the newletter (pdf) at: http://www.padgets.eu/Downloads/Newsletters.aspx

PADGETS project is beng implemented by an international consortium, coordinated by the University of Aegean / IS Lab ( http://www.icsd.aegean.gr/is-lab)

Social Media: Innovation & IPR Perspectives

2011-03-16T13:07:00.000+02:00

Social Media: Innovation & IPR Perspectives

Friday 18th March

Athens Information Technology (AIT) (www.ait.gr).

9:30-10:00 Registration and Coffee

10:00-10:10 Welcome Speech & Workshop Introduction
Prof G. Yovanof (Professor, Associate Dean, AIT), Dr. X. Ziouvelou (AIT)

Session 1: Social Media - Innovation Perspectives
10:10-10:25 Social Media and Networks for Marketing
Dr. N. Paparoidamis (Director, emphasis marketing services
& Associate Professor of Marketing, Catholic University of Lille, IESEG)

10:25-10:40 Re-contact with a snapshot
E. Kitra (Director, OMD Digital/Tempo OMD Hellas)10:40-10:55

10:40-10:55 How Lacta got to have the most popular Facebook brand page in Greece!
P. Sambrakos (Executive Creative Director, OgilvyOne Worldwide)

10:55-11:10 Social media: Strategies, fairy tales and the big bad wolf
V. Kolovou (Web developers/Owner, netWire)

11:10-11:25 Social magazines
Dr. J. Pagonis (Partner, Pragmaticomm)

11:25-11:55 Coffee Break

11:55-12:10 enGAMEment in the Social Space
G. Zenzefilis (General Director, INTRALOT Interactive)

12:10-12:25 Social Gaming: The shift to social media marketing
T. Aivalis (CEO, SocialBrands – Social Media Marketing Agency)

12:25-12:40 Bowling alone: Ubiquitous Social Capital
Dr. D. Kontarinis (VP of Innovation, Velti Plc)

12:40-12:55 Social Media Innovation
D. Tsigos (Founder & CEO, Virtual Trip Group & European Confederation of Young Entrepreneurs -Y.E.S.)

12:55-13:10 Social Medi@ted Innovation
T. Georgoulis (Business Analyst/Project Manager, Realize S.A.) & Dr X. Ziouvelou (AIT)

13:10-13:25 Social Network related innovations of SOCIETIES
Y. Bouloudis (AMITEC Ltd, SOCIETIES EU Project)

13:25-14:25 Lunch Break

Session 2: Social Media - IPR Perspectives
14:25-14:40 Social Network Interoperability Issues
Dr. V. Papakonstantinou (Attorney At Law, PK Partners)

14:40-15:55 Social media marketing and copyright issues
Dr. Maria-Daphne Papadopoulou (Lawyer, Hellenic Copyright Organisation)

15:55-16:10 Gaining your client’s confidence: The most pivotal principle for e-entrepreneurship
in a social media environment
M. Zoulovits (Lawyer, Philotheidis & Partners Law)

16:10-16:25 Privacy in the nook of Facebook
M. Papadopoulos & A. Kaponi (Lawyers, Patsis, Papadopoulos, Kaponi & Associates)

16:25-16:40 Social Media and the Employment Relationship
S. Mihos (Lawyer, Legal Manager, Hellenic Fuels S.A.)

16:40-16:50 Summary & Closure

HICSS MiniTrack on Cloud Infrastructures and Interoperability in the Public Sector

2011-03-08T20:29:00.000+02:00

CALL FOR PAPERS

Cloud Infrastructures and Interoperability

Y. Charalabidis, M. Janssen, O.Glassey

Within the 45th Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), we organise a minitrack on Cloud Infrastructures and Interoperability in the Public Sector. The 45th HICSS, one of the most prominent Conferences on Information Sciences worldwide, will be held on January 4-7, 2012, in Maui, Hawaii.

This minitrack is aimed at discussing theories, methodologies, experience reports, literature and case studies in e-government infrastructures and interoperability. We solicit for papers covering a variety of aspects and combining theory and practice. papers in the field of e-government induced data-and process-based integration, information exchange, enterprise architecture, cloud computing, ICT-(shared) services and Software as a Service (SaaS) are strongly encouraged. We promote a diversity of research methods to study the challenges of this multifaceted discipline focusing on various aspects of interoperability and also theoretical papers and papers from developing countries.

Topics and research areas include, but are not limited to:

Development, implementation, maintenance of projects, system and enterprise architectures and infrastructures
System, data and process-based integration
Information infrastructures, cloud infrastructures, reuse, quality
Semantic ontologies, web services and modeling
Cloud computing, infrastructures, ICTservices, scalability, reliability, flexibility
Software as service (SaaS), utility computing, platform as service, shared services, service providers
Cross-organizational modeling and visualization ranging from the organizational to technical level
Infrastructure, interoperability and enterprise architecture planning, alignment, strategies and governance
Technical, semantic, organizational, managerial aspects of interoperability
Organizational and/or policy perspectives on the dynamics of the infrastructure and interoperability process and barriers to interoperability
Theoretical contributions and contributions from developing countries
Interoperability and architecture standards, principles and frameworks
Service-oriented architectures, web services, semantic web services, web service orchestration and composition
Best practices and case studies at all levels of government, including local and transnational government-Longitudinal studies that span over generations of e-Government implementations
Longitudinal studies that span over generations of e-Government implementations

Important Deadlines:
June 15.2011: Submit full manuscripts for review.
Aug 15.2011: Acceptance notices are emailed to authors by the Review System.
Sept 15.2011: Accepted authors submit Final Paper.

Minitrack Chairs (potential authors may email for guidance on paper ideas)
Yannis Charalabidis (primary contact)
University of Aegean and National Technical University of Athens

yannisx@epu.ntua.gr

Marijn Janssen
Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, m.f.w.h.a.janssen@tudelft.nl

Olivier Glassey
IDHEAP - Institut de Hautes Etudes en Administration Publique, University of Lausanne, olivier.glassey@idheap.unil.ch

More information and author guidelines at: http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/hicss_45/apahome45.htm

The 12th Bled Forum on Europe

2011-03-03T19:26:00.000+02:00

The 12th Bled Forum on Europe, is taking place in Bled, Slovenia on 3rd and 4th March 2011.

This year the Bled Forum on Europe Conference is targeting "Governance of Fear and Prosperity", in an effort to deal with the most important, non-linear global challenges and problems of decision - making.

The Centre for eGovernance Development is the main organizer of the 11th Bled Forum on Europe. The Forum is also supported by the Greek Interoperability Centre (GIC), Microsoft Corp., and the Regional Cooperation Council, among other organisations.

Among this years' key speakers are:

Jerome Glenn, Director of the Millennuim Project
Mohamed Al Qaed, CEO of eGovernment Authority, Kingdom of Bahrain
Dr. Jose Cordeiro - How to Address the Threat/Challenge of Poverty in the World – Singularity University, US
Yannis Charalabidis from the University of the Aegean / Greek Interoperability Centre

The full agenda of the Bled Forum 2011 may be downloaded here: http://bit.ly/fG2Lq9

My presentation on "ICT Solutions for Good Governance" is found here: http://www.slideshare.net/charalabidis

A view of the 12th Bled Forum Opening, by Blaz Golob, CeGD

Blaz Golob CEGD, Tanja Fajon - Member of the European Parliament, Yannis Charalabidis - Aegean/GIC

Information Day on "Cloud Computing in the Public Sector"

2011-02-09T13:17:00.000+02:00

Microsoft Innovation Centre in Greece organised an information day targeting Cloud Computing and its applications to the Public Sector, on February 10, 2011 in Athens. Titled "Innovative Approaches for Cloud Computing", the information day gathers representatives from the ICT industry, the academia and the research community.

Within the information day, a panel discussion focused on how Greece can confront the challenges of financial crisis with the aid of cloud infrastructures, featuring:

- Andreas Drimiotis, chief ICT consultant to the Prime Minister's office
- Yota Paparidou, Vice President, Greek ICT Federation
- Yannis Charalabidis, Manager, Greek Interoperability Centre
- Stavros Alexakis, Public Sector Manager, Microsoft Hellas

A. Drimiotis, I. Paparidou, Y. Charalabidis, S. Alexakis and J.Rizopoulos (journalist)

The full programme of the information day is found here: http://www.microsoft.com/hellas/innovationday/program.aspx

Envisioning Digital Europe 2030: Scenarios for ICT in Future Governance and Policy Modelling

2011-01-29T17:26:00.000+02:00

The report on Envisioning Digital Europe 2030, is the result of research conducted by the Information Society Unit of IPTS as part of the CROSSROAD Project – A Participative Roadmap on ICT research on Electronic Governance and Policy Modelling (www.crossroad-eu.net).

After outlining the purpose and scope of the report and the methodological approach followed, the report presents the results of a systematic analysis of societal, policy and research trends in the governance and policy modelling domain in Europe. These analyses are considered central for understanding and roadmapping future research on ICT for governance and policy modelling.

The study further illustrates the scenario design framework, analysing current and future challenges in ICT for governance and policy modelling, and identifying the key impact dimensions to be considered. It then presents the scenarios developed at the horizon 2030, including the illustrative storyboards representative of each scenario and the prospective opportunities and risks identified for each of them. The scenarios developed are internally consistent views of what the European governance and policy making system could have become by 2030 and of what the resulting implications for citizens, business and public services would be.

Finally, the report draws conclusions and presents the proposed shared vision for Digital Europe 2030, offering also a summary of the main elements to be considered as an input for the future development of the research roadmap on ICT for governance and policy modelling

Get the report online from: http://ftp.jrc.es/EURdoc/JRC61593.pdf

Cite this report as:
Misuraca G., Broster D., Centeno C., Punie Y., Lampathaki F., Charalabidis Y., Askounis D., Osimo D., Szkuta K., Bicking M.: "Envisioning Digital Europe 2030: Scenarios for ICT in Future Governance and Policy Modelling", JRC Scientific & Technical Reports, IPTS, European Commission, 2010.