New Book on Open Governance by Springer: Call for Chapter Proposals

CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS

Empowering Open and Collaborative Governance:

Technologies and Methods for On-line Citizen Engagement

in Public Policy Making

A book to be published by Springer Verlag - http://www.springer.com

A book edited by:

Yannis Charalabidis

University of the Aegean, Greece

Sotirios Koussouris

National Technical University of Athens

Introduction

Moving towards the direction of open governance roadmaps as adopted worldwide, on-line citizen engagement stands out as a new domain, important both for decision makers and citizens. Over the last decade, there has been a variety of projects and initiatives powered by policy makers, researchers, ICT vendors and citizens, that are targeting the actively citizen involvement through various digital platforms and means.  Such attempts promote ideas and solutions that could help minimize the democratic deficit and to support the active re-engagement of citizens to the decision making process, thus making governance more open, transparent, interactive and trustworthy.

In parallel, new attempts for evidence-based decision making and citizen involvement now include methods for massive data visualization, interactive argumentation, linked governmental data as well as connected social media platforms and collaborative systems over cloud infrastructures.

Objective of the Book

This title aims at providing the latest research findings such as theoretical foundations, principles, methodologies, architectures, technical frameworks, cases and lessons learnt within the domain of open governance and on-line citizen engagement. The book will constitute a new approach to addressing the issue of implementing open collaborative governance solutions and initiatives, providing both research and practice results. Unique characteristics that distinguish the publication from existing titles are the systematic analysis of the domain, the all-around view of political, legal, technical and user-oriented aspects and the inclusion of reviews, case reports and evaluation of international initiatives. The book will contribute to the systematic analysis and publication of cutting-edge methods, tools and approaches for assisting the relevant stakeholders in their quest for a more efficient participative public policy debate, allowing the utilisation of the capabilities provided by ICT.

These research findings are organized along the following main areas of contribution:

·         Public policy debate foundations: Processes and methods for scoping, planning, evaluating and transforming citizen engagement

·         Information and Communication Technologies for citizen participation

·         Future research directions of open, collaborative ICT-enabled governance

Since Open and Collaborative Governance is a multi-disciplinary domain, new research challenges are bound to touch on Semantics, Social Media Platforms, Web Service Technologies, Social Sciences, Service Oriented Architectures and Model Driven approaches.

Target Audience

The audience of the book includes researchers and practitioners in the Electronic Governance domain, public administration officials, policy makers and decision drivers at local, national or international levels, engaged both in design and creation of policies and services, , university students and professors of Computer, Social, Political an Management sciences, ICT industry staff engaged in eGovernance and Policy Modelling projects and solutions, and participants of related FP7 research and CIP/PSP innovation projects.

Recommended Chapter topics

On “Public policy debate foundation”

·       Models & metrics for assessing the public debate at various level

·       Methods for the evaluation of eParticipation, from the policy maker, the administration, the citizen and the researcher/practitioner perspectives

·       Studying the impact and the overall value proposition of eParticipation initiatives

·       Case studies from eParticipation or other public policy debate implementations involving cross-country, multilingual deliberation

On “Information and Communication Technologies for citizen participation”

·       Tools for implementing large public debates

·       Textual analysis technologies, ontologies and taxonomies

·       Federated content syndication systems for public participation, enabling the deployment of ubiquitous, citizen-driven, open data infrastructures

·       Data and argument visualisation technologies

·       Sentiment analysis and opinion mining, trend monitoring and policy analysis

·       Social media platforms and their applications for supporting citizen participation

·       Serious Games, simulation and virtual worlds for facilitating Policy Modelling

On “Future research directions of open, collaborative ICT-enabled governance”

·       Theoretical Frameworks of eGovernance processes

·       Research on a Model-based collaborative governance

·       Data-powered collective intelligence and action

·       Addressing Digital Divide and Social Exclusion through eGovernance

·       Governmental Service Infrastructures

·       Future Internet and eGovernance

·       Theoretical aspects towards a scientific base for ICT enabled Governance

Submission Procedure

Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit on or before 1^st February 2011, a 2-3 page chapter proposal, in plain Word format, explaining the mission and contents of the proposed chapter. Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by February 15, 2011 about the status of their proposals and sent chapter guidelines. Full chapters are expected to be submitted by 1^st June 2011. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis.

Important Dates

Proposal Chapters Due:            1^st February 2011

Full Chapters Due:                     1^st June 2011

Camera – Ready Chapters Due: 1^st October  2011

Final Publication Due:                Winter 2011-2012

Inquiries and submissions can be forwarded electronically to:
Ass. Prof. Yannis Charalabidis

University of the Aegean
Lymperis Building, 83200 Karlovassi, Samos, Greece
e-mail: yannisx@aegean.gr

The CFC is also available as a PDF, here. 

SMART 2010 - 1st International Workshop on Service Modelling and Representation Techniques

The SMART workshop was held in conjunction with the Service Wave conference in Ghent, on 13^th December 2010, and addressed issues related to modelling holistic service systems. Going beyond Web services or SOA, SMART aims to contribute to a holistic approach of designing, building and managing IT-enabled real-world services.

SMART workshop major focus is on service specific aspects like co-creation mechanics, service network structure and dynamics, service value exchange, service interaction processes as well as service flexibility, variation and customization to name just a few.  SMART 2010 included the following presentations:

• Arne Berre : Keynote Speech
• Konstadinos Kutsikos and Gregoris Mentzas: A Service Portfolio Model for Value Creation in Networked Enterprise Systems
• Erik Wittern and Christian Zirpins: On the Use of Feature Models for Service Design: the Case of Value Representation
• Yan Wang and Willem-Jan van den Heuvel: Towards A Hybrid Simulation Modelling Framework for Service Networks
• Yehia TAHER, Willem-Jan Van Den Heuvel and Sotirios Koussouris: Empowering Citizens in Public Service Design and Delivery: a Reference Model and Methodology
• Susan Stucky, Melissa Cefkin, Yolanda Rankin and Ben Shaw: Modeling the Co-creation of Value in Complex IT Service Engagements
• Yannis Charalabidis and Fenareti Lampathaki: A Description Framework for Digital Public Services
• Aditya Ghose: The Business Service Representation Language: A Preliminary Report

In the discussion that followed, several issues were discussed, relating to a unified modelling method for services of any kind, service collaboration patterns and service value modelling and simulation.

Organising Committee 

Yannis Charalabidis, NTUA

Christos Georgousopoulos, INTRASOFT International S.A.

Alan Hartman, IBM

Willem-Jan van den Heuvel, Uni Tilburg

Anshu N Jain, IBM

Antonis Ramfos, INTRASOFT International S.A.

Christian Zirpins, KI

A view of the COCKPIT project presentation 

For more information on Service Wave: http://servicewave.eu/2010/

For more information on the SMART Workshop: http://www.cockpit-project.eu/smart2010

Mobile Development Fiesta at Aegean University: Android training

Mobile development training in University of Aegean continued with Google Android, on 8th December 2010.   More than 30 pre-graduate and post-graduate students attended the course on Android mobile development platform,which took place within the curriculum of the Information and Communication Systems Engineering (ICSD) Department, more specifically the "Software Engineering" lesson, organised by the Information Systems Lab.

Ioannis Panagiotopoulos, an Android Development Engineer at Athens Technology Centre (ATC)  delivered more a hands-on training on the new features of  Android, including sample applications development and marketing.

The mobile development training in ICSD - Uni Aegean is one of the activities leading to the empowerment of a students and graduate young engineers team for developing innovative, free mobile applications for citizens and businesses, for academic and research purposes.

 

Ioannis Panagiotopoulos and students at Android training

Open Governmental Data for Scientific Research on ICT-Enabled Governance

Current Status: the struggling scientific approaches for ICT-Enabled Governance

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, engaging social sciences, complex systems theory or advanced modelling and simulation, giving birth to new research communities dealing with governance and policy modelling , public administration information systems , digital government or open, second-generation government .

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 information towards the research communities (e.g. operational data, financial performance data, process-related information, indices and metrics, key performance indicators, tacit knowledge). Furthermore, there is a shortage of experimental methods and tools that would allow effective knowledge mining, visualization or further computation, empowering the integration of information and communication technologies into government practices and their adoption by the public. In the context of governance, multiple aspects have to be taken into account (e.g. financial, social, political, administrative, legal), indicating that in order to make administrative transformation a success, a multi-disciplinary approach has to be adopted, as opposed to the sole use of ICT.

Outlook: new, open-linked data systems serving the research communities

The research communities needs new, advanced service infrastructures, incorporating distributed and diverse public sector information resources as well as data curation, semantic annotation and visualization 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.

Such research infrastructures are envisaged to promote a highly synergetic approach to governance research, by providing the ground for experimentation to actors from both ICT and non-ICT related disciplines and scientific communities, as well as by ensuring that the scientific outcomes are made accessible to the citizens, so that they can monitor public service delivery and influence the decision making process.

Such new research infrastructures should aim to:

• Create an open service platform, integrating large amounts of public sector data, processing tools and resources, in support of the research communities dealing with governance and policy modelling, complex systems simulation, public administration transformation, government 2.0, information and communication technologies, future internet and social sciences.

• Engage citizens into the public service delivery decision making process, by providing accurate information on the operation, cost and overall value of public services, through user-friendly visualization tools, thus being in the forefront of emerging Open Data initiatives in Europe and the world.

• Explore synergies with current e-Infrastructure service providers so as to leverage on existing grid and cloud services for storing, processing and providing large amounts of public sector information.

• Contribute to the evolving standardisation for open and linked governmental data, consolidating various approaches for harmonization, annotation, pre-processing, anonymisation, interoperability and provision of data, from public sector administrations at national, regional or local levels, towards scientists and citizens.

• Empower and engage researchers and actors from non-ICT related disciplines, such as political science, economics, law, sociology, statistics, etc. in experimental research relating to solving complex problems of high importance for the society.

Then, a new, significant step towards evidence-based, experimental ICT-enabled governance research will have been realised ...

"Mobile Development Fiesta" at Aegean University in Samos

During 18th and 19th November 2010, more than 40 pre-graduate students were trained in Mobile Development for Windows 7 Smartphones.  The training took place within the curriculum of the Information and Communication Systems Engineering (ICSD) Department, more specifically the "Software Engineering" lesson, organised by the Information Systems Lab.

Dimitris-Ilias Gkanatsios, a Microsoft Hellas Academic Evangelist delivered more than 12 hours of dedicated, hands-on training on the brand new features of Windows 7 Mobile develoment platform.

The mobile dev training in ICSD - Uni Aegean is one of the activities leading to the empowerment of a students and graduate young engineers team for developing innovative, free mobile applications for citizens and businesses, for academic and research purposes.

A panoramic view of students and Dimitris-Ilias in ICSD Labs

New Book on Transformational Government by IGI

The "Handbook of Research on ICT-Enabled Transformational Government: A Global Perspective" provides comprehensive coverage and definitions of the most important issues, concepts, trends, and technologies within transformation stage e-government (t-government) implementation. A significant reference source within the technological and governmental fields, this Handbook of Research with 25 chapters and more than 500 pages, offers theoretical and empirical studies that communicate new insights into t-government for both researchers and practitioners interested in the subject.

The book is edited by Vishanth Weerakkody (Brunel University, UK); Marijn Janssen (Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands); Yogesh K. Dwivedi (Swansea University, UK).

The book features a chapter by Charalabidis Y., Sarandis D., Askounis D., on «Knowledge-driven Project Management for achieving Electronic Government Transformation», detailing a new proposal for a project management method that targets reusability among e-Government and Government Tranformation projects.

See the book at IGI bookstore.

Practical studies in eGovernment, by Springer-Verlag

A new book titled "Practical Studies in e-Government", edited by Assar, S., Boughzala I., Boydens I. is published by Springer and is available in major bookstores. Featuring in-depth case studies of initiatives in eight countries, the book deals with such technology-oriented issues as interoperability, prototyping, data quality, and advanced interfaces, and management-oriented issues as e-procurement, e-identification, election results verification, and information privacy. The book features best practices, tools for measuring and improving performance, and analytical methods for researchers.

The book features a chapter on "Achieving Interoperability through Base Registries for Governmental Services and Documents Management", by Yannis Charalabidis and Dimitris Askounis.

Buy the book from Springer Bookstore.

New book on e-Health by PTI

A new title on electronic health has been published by PTI & ITEMS International and is available for sale in Amazon and other major bokkstores. Titled “e-Health: A Global Perspective", the book is targeting a multi-faceted presentation of e-Health best practices.

The book contains an enlightened collection of information written by 24 practitioners and researchers around the globe. This book is designed to offer insights as to the issues of the day and how various governments, institutions, and businesses are developing creative solutions utilizing the latest in technology in electronc health.

The book includes the chapter “Learning from the Past – Preparing for the future: On Medical Information Systems Evaluation”, by Thermou Y., Charalabidis Y., Maglogiannis I., presenting a novel framework for medical information sytems evaluation.

See the book in Amazon bookstore here.

Change and Enterprise 2.0: The disappearing boundaries of the enterprise and new ICT systems

The perspectives of change

As local economies still stagger getting “in and out” from the global financial crisis and as the need for sustainable economic activity and quality of life is propagating towards all societal groups, new visionary scenarios have to be constructed. The main characteristic of such visionary scenarios for enterprises, is certainly the fact of groundbreaking, rapid, sometimes disruptive, change. Within the next decade, ICT researchers and practitioners must be prepared to phase the challenges of change, that will affect FInES from multiple aspects, changing the concept of the enterprise, affecting the nature of enterprise systems and services, even redefining what are the real objectives for the ICT-enabled enterprise.

The disappearing boundaries of the enterprise

As globalisation persists, economic crisis is viewed as a recurring effect in many nations or regions, and as the quest for new markets and growth is fiercer than ever, entrepreneurship will soon touch upon every aspect of the lives of individuals. Future internet will soon have to cope with the fact of having very small enterprises (VSE’s) playing an important role in progressed economies, while governments are raising the legal barriers and technology lowers the required size or capital expenditure to start a new business. While the tendency to become larger and global will still exist for many large enterprises, a bottom-up entrepreneurial movement will in parallel bring citizens acting as service creators and providers, or employees offering the services in multiple enterprises while at the same voting for the approval of public-private partnerships, in their local municipal councils. Such examples of fusion among governmental organisations, enterprises, employees, consumers and citizens will gradually dominate the landscape, practically redefining what we mean by the word “enterprise” and posing new requirements to ICT systems and digital services.

The changing nature of enterprise systems and services
Within the scenario of “business ubiquity”, one can realise the challenges for ICT systems and services: as speed will be the most precious characteristic of businesses, fully automated and seamlessly collaborating infrastructures are to make the difference in supply chain organisation, new products time to market, or feature-based competitive pricing and sourcing. The quest for speed in businesses of all sizes will soon pose challenges for a different generation of intelligent systems (“pushing” the humans out of the everyday operations of almost all enterprise functions), as the need for end-to-end digital services that are executing in one stop, give the response in one second, with minimal costs, will be persevering.

Hervé Panetto, Nancy University, in Athens

Hervé Panetto, professor at Nancy-University, Université Henri Poincaré Nancy I and deputy director of ESIAL, School of Engineering in Information Technology, visited the Greek Interoperability Centre, on October 25th 2010. 

The two organisations share common research orientations, in the domains of Enterprise Interoperability and Future Internet  Enterprise Systems.

Prof. Hervé Panetto also joined the working meeting of the Greek Interoperability Council, an initiative supported by many organisations from research and industry in Greece, delivering an invited talk on the status and outlook of interoperability, at a global scale.

Yannis Charalabidis and Hervé Panetto in Athens

Call for Contributions - International Competition on Future Internet and Interoperability

The ENSEMBLE project (http://www.ensemble-csa.eu), funded by the European Commission, aims to coordinate research activities in the domain of Future Internet Enterprise Systems (FInES). Furthermore, ENSEMBLE aims to study systematically and formalize Enterprise Interoperability (EI) as a scientific domain, by combining systemic approaches, scientific multi-disciplinarity and a community-driven mentality.

With this call for contributions, ENSEMBLE aims to attract high-quality innovative contributions, in the form of short papers that depict sound positions and views for either:

a. State of the art, new research fields and/or forward-looking challenges in the area of Future Internet Enterprise Systems. Each contribution should address one or more of the following questions:
• Why is research in the proposed field important in relation to enterprise environments?
• Which are the necessary research activities to be carried out in Future Internet Enterprise Systems? Which scientific gaps are they addressing?
• Taking into account the complexity of enterprise environments, which aspects are essential for the support of novel and reusable enterprise practices?
• What Future Internet enterprise applications could be envisaged by 2020, based on the research activities described? What is the anticipated benefit which may arise from the proposed research field?

b. Innovative approaches and formal methods addressing the foundation of Enterprise Interoperability science. Each contribution should address one or more of the following issues for Enterprise Interoperability:
• Foreseen basic research and foundational principles on interoperability
• Formal methods to describe interoperability problems and solutions
• State of the art in scientific methods for interoperability
• Populations of formal descriptions, generalization of approaches
• Scientific methods for interoperability in specific sectors and vertical domains
• Impact assessment, simulation methods and tools
• Proposals for academic curricula on interoperability
• Proposals on the value proposition and marketing of the scientific offerings for enterprise interoperability

Up to 5 authors of the best papers submitted under this call will be invited to join the ENSEMBLE Expert Scientific Committee. Members of this committee have a key role in providing their expertise in specific research areas, in participating in the workshops that will be conducted during the project, and in presenting their comments and feedback to the project deliverables. Beside the prestige and the opportunity to shape the EU research agenda on the Future Internet, each member of the Expert Scientific Committee will receive a sum of 2,500 EUR to fund participation in the activities of the project.

All submissions must be between 2,000 and 3,000 words, following the LNCS format. 


Important Dates:

Deadline for submission of position papers: 1st November 2010
Announcement of results and best papers: 15th November 2010

The ENSEMBLE Steering Committee
• John Psarras, National Technical University of Athens - NTUA, Greece, Project Coordinator
• Yannis Charalabidis, National Technical University of Athens - NTUA, Greece
• Ricardo Jardim-Gonçalves, Instituto de Desenvolvimento de Novas Tecnologias, UNINOVA, Portugal
• Fenareti Lampathaki, National Technical University of Athens - NTUA, Greece
• Michele Missikoff, National Research Council - Istituto Di Analisi Dei Sistemi Ed Informatica, CNR- IASI, Italy
• Keith Popplewell, Coventry University, UK
• Antonis Ramfos, INTRASOFT International S.A., Luxembourg

You may retrieve the CFC at: https://pithos.grnet.gr/pithos/rest/yannisx@aegean.gr/files/Shared/ENSEMBLE_CFC.pdf

The new Research Roadmap for Governance and Policy Modelling

More than 100 policy makers, researchers and practitioners participated in the Workshop on the new Research Roadmap for Governance and Policy Modelling, which was organised by the CROSSROAD project on 27th September 2010, in conjunction with the ICT 2010 event in Brussels, Belgium.

The aim of the session was to create feedback and reach community consensus on the research roadmap on ICT for governance and policy modelling. In the first part of the session, Dimitris Askounis from NTUA presented the CROSSROAD project, followed by a presentation by David Osimo (Tech4i2) and Yannis Charalabidis (NTUA) on the Grand Challenges for research, that are:

• Model-based collaborative governance to overcome the current fragmented and micro-level approach to policy modeling in which existing econometric models are unable to account for human behavior and unexpected events.

• Data-powered collective intelligence and action to identify tools that allow for progressive forms of citizen involvement that deal with information overload and engage all pro-active as well as more passive citizens in policy making

• Government service utility to reflect the future of digital public services that will be co-generated through the participation of administrations, enterprises and citizens, co-delivered, tailor-made and citizen-centric.

• Scientific base of ICT-enabled governance  to lay the theoretical foundations of the domain, study the relations with neighboring domains and achieve scientific rigor and further evolution with the utilisation of future ICT capabilities.

The presentation was followed by a discussion and the validation / rating of the challenges by the participants, facilitated by the CROSSROAD Consortium members (Fenareti Lampathaki and George Gionis from NTUA, Katarzyna Szkuta from Tech4i2).
The session also included presentations of next activities and future research opportunities, by:
- Antonis Ramfos, INTRASOFT International
- Yael Dubinsky, IBM Research Haifa
- Richard Wilson, IZWE.com

For more information and participation in the discussion, please visit:

The CROSSROAD WebSite at: http://www.crossroad-eu.net/
The CROSSROAD LinkedIn Group at: CROSSROAD Group in Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=2594136

Greek Interoperability Centre visits IBM Research Labs in Haifa

The Greek Interoperability Centre and IBM Research examined common projects, research results and opportunities in a meeting in IBM Labs in Haifa, Israel, in September 2010.

The two organisations share common work in the areas of elctronic governance, future internet, cloud infrastructures and interopeability.

In picture, left, Yael Dubinsky (IBM Research) Yannis Charalabidis (GIC) and Gilad Saadoun (IBM Research) in Haifa Labs.

Cloud Infrastructures and Interoperability Track in MCIS 2010

The Track on Cloud Infrastructures and Interoperability was succesfully conducted on 12 September 2010, as a part of the 5th Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems - MCIS 2010 in Tel-Aviv, Israel.

The track targeted novel approaches, methods, practices and tools for achieving interoperability in the provision of Digital Public Services, resulting into a significant increase of service quality for citizens and businesses, through utilizing cloud infrastructures. Specific importance was placed in multidisciplinary approaches, combining organizational, legal, semantic, technical and participative elements of interoperability, providing relative support by advanced information systems. The papers of the track were the following:

Policy Processes Support Through Interoperability With Social Media George Gionis - National Technical University of Athens, Yannis Charalabidis, Euripides Loukis - University of the Aegean,

Extracting Normative Content From Legal Texts Daniela Tiscornia and Tommaso Agnoloni - The Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of the Italian National Research Council (ITTIG-CNR)

A Distributed E-Learning Service  For Remote Areas Anna Mavroudi, Thanasis Hadzilacos - Open University of Cyprus, Demetra Egarchou - Research Academic Computer Technology Institute

Chairpersons: Yannis Charalabidis - University of the Aegean, Ralf Klischewski German University in Cairo

ICT 2010 - Networking Session: Research Roadmap on ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling

The aim of this session is to generate insight, feedback and consensus on the research roadmap on ICT for governance and policy modelling. It will explore issues such as societal modelling, simulation, visual analytics, social networking and mass collaboration. Participants can become involved in the development of the roadmap and join the validation community by discussing research related to ICT for governance and policy modelling, what research activities need to be carried out, and which aspects are essential for supporting novel governance practices. Discussions will also focus on what applications could be envisaged by 2020.

Session Agenda:

Part A: The CROSSROAD Roadmap for ICT-enabled Governance 14:00 – 14:30
- The CROSSROAD Project Dimitris Askounis (NTUA)
- Roadmap presentation David Osimo (Tech4i2), Yannis Charalabidis (NTUA)

Part B: Discussion and Deliberation 14:30 – 15:00
Discussion and rating on the Roadmap Challenges by participants, facilitated by the CROSSROAD Consortium members.

Part C: Next activities and future opportunities 15:00 – 15:30

- Antonis Ramfos, INTRASOFT International
- Yael Dubinsky, IBM Research Haifa
- Richard Wilson, IZWE.com
- Next steps, closing Yannis Charalabidis (NTUA), David Osimo (Tech4i2)

You may comment, propose issues and follow developments at:  http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/events/cf/ict2010/item-display.cfm?id=2844

Twitter hash-tag: #xroad

CROSSROAD Group in Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=2594136

Printable version of the agenda here.

The CROSSROAD Workshop on the Grand Challenges for ICT-enabled Governance

More than 50 international experts from all over the world participated in the Workshop organised by the CROSSROAD project (http://www.crossroad-eu.net/) on the new research roadmap for ICT-enabled governance.  The Workshop was held in IDHEAP Lausanne on 30th August 2010,  in conjunction with the IFIP International eGoverment Conference.  The agenda of the Workshop was as following:

Session A: Research Projects on ICT for Governance & Policy Modelling

• “PADGETS - Policy Gadgets Mashing Underlying Gruop Knowledge in Web 2.0 Media”, Yannis Charalabidis, University of the Aegean
• “OCOPOMO - Open COllaboration for POlicy Modelling”, Maria Wimmer, University of Koblenz-Landau
• “IMPACT: Integrated Method for Policy Making Using Argument Modelling and Computer Assisted Text Analysis” Radboud Winkels, University of Amsterdam
• “COCKPIT - Citizens Collaboration and Co-Creation in Public Service Delivery”, Fenareti Lampathaki, National Technical University of Athens

Session B: ICT Research Roadmap for Governance & Policy Modelling
• “CROSSROAD - A Participative Roadmap for ICT Research in Electronic Governance and Policy Modelling”
• Questionnaire on Grand Challenges (online and paper)
• Discussion on Grand Challenges and Overall Conclusions, led by the Workshop Chairs


You are invited to fill-in the online questionnaire for rating the Grand Challenges for ICT-enabled governance at http://bit.ly/b7HbVG

Workshop Chairs:

Yannis Charalabidis, National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece
Gianluca Misuraca, JRC - European Commission, IPTS, Spain
Maria Wimmer, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany

More information on the workshop is available at http://www.crossroad-eu.net/

New IGI Book on Interoperability

Interoperability in Digital Public Services and Administration: Bridging E-Government and E-Business

Yannis Charalabidis (University of the Aegean, Greece)

ISBN: 9781615208876; (c) 2010; 350 pp.

During the last decade, interoperability has emerged as a vivid research area in electronic business and electronic governance, promising a significant increase in productivity and efficiency of information systems, enterprises and administrations.

"Interoperability in Digital Public Services and Administration: Bridging E-Government and E-Business" provides the latest research findings such as theoretical foundations, principles, methodologies, architectures, technical frameworks, international policy, standardization and case studies for the achievement of interoperability within the provision of digital services, from administration and businesses toward the user citizens and enterprises.

More info at: http://igi-global.com/Bookstore/TitleDetails.aspx?TitleId=40287&DetailsType=Description

The Greek Interoperability Centre Bi-Annual Report

It may look older, but the Greek Interoperability Centre has recently celebrated its second anniversary.  Read the report the consolidates 2 years of the Greek Interoperability Centre experience, to find out more about:

- 10 international interoperability projects

- 2 national interoperability frameworks

- 2,000 governmental and private sectors services modelled

- 3,000 hours of training on interoperability

- 500,000 pages of documentation

- 2 books, 70 publications (Journals: 40%)

- 1,000,000 miles travelled

- 80 partners engaged

- A team of 20 members

- The next 2 years' figures ...

... and find yourself in one of the pictures, possibly !

The report (13MB) is available at: http://www.iocenter.eu/media/21041/d8_1-m24%20gic_activityreport.pdf

International IFIP Working Conference on Enterprise Interoperability

International IFIP Working Conference on Enterprise Interoperability (IWEI 2011)

Call for papers: IWEI 2011, Stockholm, 23-24 March 2011

“Interoperability and Future Internet for next-generation enterprises”
March 23-24, 2011, Stockholm, Sweden
Organised by IFIP Working Group 5.8 on Enterprise Interoperability in cooperation with INTEROP-VLab

One of the characteristics of our economy today is that enterprises increasingly (need to) compete and collaborate in a global market, using the internet and other technical means to overcome the traditional barrier of geographical distribution. Another characteristic is continuous and rapid change and innovation, which may be internal or external to individual enterprises, but anyway affecting the way these enterprises can perform in relation to other enterprises and their market environment. The success of an enterprise therefore more and more depends on its ability to seamlessly interoperate with other agile enterprises, and be able to adapt to actual or imminent changes, instead of making some product or providing some service in the most efficient way.

The role of the current internet for enterprise interoperability is essential but at the same time very limited in the light of its potential. The Future Internet should be much more than a universal access and communication infrastructure. It should be able to empower enterprises to innovate by creating new business value in competition and together with other enterprises, based on relevant knowledge about each other and the market. It should do so in a sustainable and socially responsible fashion, making efficient use of physical resources with a minimal environmental footprint. The current internet should evolve into a universal business support system in which enterprises enjoy interoperability services that can be invoked on the fly according to their business needs. Such interoperability services may require physical sensing capabilities as well as extensively exploiting knowledge assets.

More info at: http://www.iwei.eu/

Open Consultation on ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling - by the CROSSROAD EU Project

CROSSROAD Open Consultation on Research Gaps in ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling

In this context, the CROSSROAD project, funded by the European Commission, aims to deliver a research roadmap on ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling. Lasting the whole year of 2010, CROSSROAD will create a shared vision to support policy research and research implementation in this field. The methodology consists of four phases: state-of-the-art in the domain, scenario building, gap analysis, and roadmapping. This roadmap will be considered for the preparation of future Work Programmes of the European Commission.  All the supporive material on CROSSROAD state of the art, scenario building and gap analysis are available at: http://www.crossroad-eu.net/

Now the CROSSROAD project verifies the identified Resarch Gaps:  If you feel you have something to share, you are kindly invited to participate in the CROSSROAD online consultation on assessing research gaps for ICT for governance and policy modelling.

Please use the following link to access the online questionnaire: http://crossroad.epu.ntua.gr/consultation-systems/online-gap-analysis-consultation-questionnaire/

eGovernment Newsletter / Fraunhofer FOKUS / Interoperability

Download and check the International eGovernment Newsletter from FOKUS / ELAN, "... with a particular emphasis on the areas of interoperability, service-oriented architectures, identity management and process-oriented IT-governance, the Competence Center for eGovernment is a prominent partner in the establishment of eGovernment in Germany and Europe."

Prof. Dr. Radu Popescu-Zeletin, Director Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems FOKUS, states: "Who isn’t familiar with the following scenario: you are sitting in your office, the deadline
is rapidly approaching, and you are anxiously awaiting the arrival of an important document. Finally, the mail arrives, you click to open the attachment – and the only thing that appears on your screen is an error message saying “unknown file format”. The hassle that results from this makes us lose faith in our digital helpers. This is a symptomatic case of an interoperability problem."

To read more, go to: http://www.fokus.fraunhofer.de/en/elan/news_events/international_newsletter/index.html

The Samos 2010 Summit on ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling

The "Samos Declaration" on the Future of ICT-enabled Governance

The Samos 2010 Summit was organised with great success and global visibility, on July 6 – 9, in the Research and Training Institute of East Aegean - INEAG, at Campos Vourlioton, Samos. The Samos Summit was coorganised by the University of Aegean, the National Technical University of Athens and the Greek Interoperability Centre, under the auspices of European Commission / DG Information Society and Media. 

With the participation of 100 high-level eGovernment experts from 20 countries, the meeting adopted the "Samos Declaration," which calls the United Nations, the European Union and the National Governments to support research on new ICT tools for citizens and governance in the coming years.

Samos Summit Participants, outside Karlovassi Town Hall

The Samos Declaration, concludes in four Grand Challenges for future ICT research:

- Collaborative model-based Governance
- Open Data for transparency and behavioral change
- Government Service Utilities for trans-national, collaborative public-private services
- The scientific foundation of the field of ICT-enabled Governance

W.Grommen - Microsoft, N.Kryvossidis - Google, M.Geronymaki - European Commission, Y. Charalabidis and E.Loukis - University of Aegean

The Summit hosted presentations of international research projects CROSSROAD, PADGETS, COCKPIT, OCOPOMO, + SPACES, UBIPOL and WEGOV, which are expected to produce innovative applications for citizens, public officials, politicians and businesses, in the coming years.

The Samos Summit hosted presentations of research teams and representatives from major ICT industries and research centres, including Gartner Group, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Atos Origin, Intrasoft International, Engineering, ATC, TU Delft, Brunel University, Imperial College, Fraunhofer FOKUS, CeGD, University College London, University Koblenz - Landau, IPTS, Tech4i2, Salford University, Zaragoza University, Aegean University, Greek Interoperability Centre and more.

M.Janssen - TU Delft, J.Glidden - 21c, A.Hartman - IBM, J.Pitt - Imperial College, D. Askounis - NTUA

Samos Summit publicity relied primarily on the Internet: in addition to summit participants, more than 300 scientists from around the world attended via internet broadcasting. Furthermore, thousands of members of the scientific community were informed "live" for the presentations and outcome of the meeting through Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin.

The event was also covered by local and national Greek media: news papers and sites Naftemporiki, Samiaka Nea, ICT Plus, ; radio stations Armonia and Ionia as well as the Samos TVchannel presented parts of the event.

Yannis Charalabidis, assistant professor in University of Aegean and Chair of the summit, said: "The Samos Summit was an important and ambitious initiative, which was a great success – giving Samos significant visibility at international level. Congratulations to participants, colleagues, students of the University of the Aegean and the National Technical University of Athens, local authorities and citizens of our island: we showed that teamwork and positive attitude can achieve a lot. And we can still become better. "

All material and presentations of the Samos 2010 Summit, photos and the "Samos Declaration" are available at: http://samos-summit.blogspot.com/


Michiel Mallotaux - Gartner Group

Microsoft, Oracle and GIC initiate the Greek Interoperability Council, in Athens

The "Interoperability Day" co-organised by the Greek Interoperability Centre, 9th June 2010

The Greek Interoperability Centre (GIC), Microsoft Innovation Centre and Oracle Hellas organised the "Interoperability Day for the Private and Public Sector", on Future Internet Digital Services, in order to promote international interoperability standards in the Greek Public and Private Sector, towards new digital public services.

<- On the left: J.Psarras, T,Tzakri, Y. Charalabidis and W. Grommen in GIC Day opening


During the day, representatives of public administration, IT industry and research centres discussed about strategy, actions and impact of Future Internet services for governments and businesses.  Keynore speeches, after introduction by Prof. John Psarras, NTUA were as following:

Theodora Tzakri (pictured, right) Vice Minister of the Greek Ministry Interior, responsible for Electronic Governance, talked on the new framework for eGovernance and Interoperability in Greece, announcing more than 10 specific actions and initatitives on fiber infrastructures, base registries, service delivery channels, interoperability standards, open government in local administration and the overall target of having all major G2C services in level-5 (pro-active and personalised)

Yannis Charalabidis, Manager of the Greek Interoperability Centre and Ass. Prof. in the University of Aegean in Samos, spoke on world-class examples for policy making, service transformation, open governance and interoperability science, with a note to the "interoperabilty ROI" within crisis. Microsoft Interoperability Council, FhG FOKUS Germany-Online plan and eID, the ENSEMBLE project on interoperability science base were among the highlights.

This first session also included:

- Wilfried Grommen (pictured, left), Regional Technology Officer, Central and Eastern Europe, Microsoft, delivering a talk on cloud infrastructure and open standards for governments.

- Theodore Karounos, Consultant to the Greek Prime Minister, on the Greek OpenGov.gr initiative and interoperability outlook.

- Yota Paparidou, Greek ICT Industry Association, on the enterprise interoperability needs of SME's  

- Ingo Prestel (pictured right, bottom), Senior Manager Public Sector - EMEA, ORACLE, described the multi-fold interoperability offering of Oracle, relying on open standards, common infrastructures and Fusion middleware.

In the second part of the day, Dimitris Askounis, Ass.Prof NTUA and researchers from the Greek Interoperability Centre, together with collaborating organisations and companies, showcased innovative scenarios for automated government, seamless security and identity management, semantic interoperability and coordinated process management.

Within the panel discussion, journalist Yannis Rizopoulos dicussed "the next day in interoperability" with a pool of experts from the Greek Market:

- Panos Theodosopoulos, Public Sector Director, Microsoft Hellas
- George Bourmas, DB & Options Sales Consulting Manager, Oracle
- Nikos Karamolegos, National Bank of Greece
- Yannis Papidis, IT Applications Operations Director, OTE

The establishment of the Greek Interoperability Council was announced, aiming at coordinating interoperability-related efforts. Establishing members include representatives from Aegean University, NTUA-DSSL, AUEB-ELTRUN, Microsoft, Oracle, Singular Logic, ATC, Greek Geeks, HSE and Piraeus Bank.

See all the presentations and announcements at:

http://www.iocenter.eu/news--events/events/iopday.aspx