The PADGETS project on SocialMedia-based Policy Making / 2012 Newsletter

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, 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 analysing users’ reactions to the policy message. PADGETS at a new book from IGI Blobal on social and semantic web A new book has recently been published by IGI Blobal, 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. 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, University of Aegean and Fraunhofer FOKUS, present the recent developments and propositions for utilisation of Social Media within the governance context.The 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. For more information click here! PADGETS at a new book titled "Empowering Open and Collaborative Governance" PADGETS case will be presented in the publication of the book titled "Empowering Open and Collaborative Governance" . Edited by Yannis Charalabidis (University of the Aegean, Greece) and Sotirios Koussouris (NTUA, Greece), the book summarizes the latest research findings such as theoretical foundations, principles, methodologies, architectures, and technical frameworks for e-Government and e-Participation. It provides a comprehensive view of political, legal, technical and user-oriented aspects of e-Governance and Policy Modelling. It also includes reviews, case reports and evaluations of international collaborative governance and on-line citizen engagement initiatives. The book will be published by Springer on 31st of March 2012. PADGETS pilot in Greece, with the support of the Greek Open Government initiative OpenGov.gr Within the OpenGov collaborative governance initiative, managed by the Greek Prime Minister’s office, PADGETS toolset is used for gathering and promoting innovative ideas in the area of Public Administration reform, through a variety of social media platforms. PADGETS pilot in Italy, with the support of the Piedmont Region The pilot is focused on allowing local administration policy makers to gather and analyse citizens’ responses to the planned regional implementation of telemedicine, in Piedmont Region. PADGETS pilot in Slovenia, with the support of the Centre for eGovernance Development The campaign in Slovenia is focused on the Immigration and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). PADGETS is used by the Member of the European Parliament Ms Tanja Fajon to publish information and track citizens’ opinion in European policies. PADGETS Greek Pilot PADGETS Italian Pilot PADGETS Slovenian Pilot 13th Bled Forum on Europe Foresight Conference: "Europe Beyond Smart – Inclusive – Sustainable Throughout Cloud Computing Decade", Bled, Slovenia, March 28-30, 2012 The 13th Bled Forum on Europe Foresight Conference will be organised by PADGETS partner "Centre for eGovernance Development" (CeGD) in cooperation with the Bled Forum on Europe Research Association. It is a regional scientific event involving NGOs, Austrian Science and Research Liaison Office in Ljubljana,government institutions, the private sector, the WFUNA Millennium Project, and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre/Institute for Prospective Technological Studies. Building on a tradition of this conference being organized since 1996, all Bled Forum on Europe conferences are examples of cross-border, multidisciplinary, and public- private regional and international cooperation. This high level conference also facilitates the integration of different regional and national centres into a coherent and cooperative matching point. The purpose of the conference is to promote knowledge-based governance with ethical considerations and the use of future studies and foresight and to connect researchers, scientists, businessmen, policy makers and civil society with the aim of responding to global challenges. The overall objective is to influence decision makers and other stakeholders to implement Bled Forum on Europe recommendations in long-term planning and short-term actions. For more information click here! EMCIS 2012, Munich, Germany, June 7-8, 2012 For more information click here! Samos 2012 Summit on Open Data and collaborative governance, Samos, Greece, July 2-4, 2012 The Samos 2012 Summit on Open Data "The power of collaboration in societies" will be hosted by University of Aegean (ICSD-Information Systems Lab) and will be organised by the ΕNGAGE project, the PADGETS project, the Greek Interoperability Centre of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA-DSS Laboratory) and the University of Aegean (ICSD-Information Systems Lab). For more information click here! IFIP eGOV – ePART 2012 Conference, Kristiansand, Norway, September 3-6, 2012 The eleventh conference on electronic government will be held in Kristiansand, Norway. This conference brings together the top of the scientific research community in e‐government and e-governance from all over the world. The conference provides a highly interactive and professional forum for exchanging research concepts, progress and results. For more information click here! Other Upcoming National Activities §  Seminar on eHealth (CeGD and Albanian public authority), Tirana, Albania, May 2012 §  Moldova e-Government Summit 2012 (CeGD and Moldavian public authority), Chisinau, Moldova, May 2012 §  eDemocracy conference 2012 (CeGD and Macedonian public authority), Ohrid, Republic of Macedonia , September 2012 §  Cities of the future: Lljubljana Forum 2012 (CeGD and NAIS-Albania), Lljubljana castle, Slovenia, October 2012 §  Infofest 2012 (CeGD and Ministry of Information Society and Telecommunications Montenegro), Budva, Montenegro, October 2012 The workshop speakers and chair, at the ESWC 2011, May 30th 2011 PADGETS at ESWC Workshop on " Semantics in Governance and Policy Modelling", Heraclion, Greece, May 29-June 2, 2011 PADGETS partners AEGEAN, POLITO and PIED participated at the workshop which was 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 was placed in multidisciplinary approaches, combining theoretical policy making methodologies, advanced ICT and Government 2.0 collaboration practice. For more information on ESWC 2011 please click here! PADGETS at W3C/PrimeLife Federated Social Web Europe Conference 2011, Berlin, Germany, June 3-5, 2011 NTUA and FOCUS from PADGETS Consortium participated and presented the project at an open event on Social Web interoperability, standards and privacy, organized by W3C. The project was promoted through the conference's wiki and sparked a lot of interest. PADGETS at Summit on “Future Internet: The Power to Change Society”, Samos, Greece, July 4-6, 2011 The Samos 2011 Summit on “Future Internet: The Power to Change Society” was held with the support of the European Commission – DG Information Society and Media and was 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 was supported by research and development centers of Google, IBM, Microsoft, INTRASOFT International S.A., Engineering, Whitehall Reply and Athens Technology Centre. Click here! Samos Summit: Poster Session - PADGETS Project stand The AULA Conference Centre at TU Delft PADGETS at IFIP EGOV 2011 Conference, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, August 29 –September 2, 2011 AEGEAN, PADGETS co-ordinator participated in the conference which brought together the top of the scientific research community in e-government from all over the world. The conference provided a highly interactive and professional forum for exchanging research concepts, progress and results. As in the past, IFIP EGOV featured refereed paper presentations, invited keynote presentations, high-level discussion panels, workshops and a PhD Colloquium. Among them, the workshop entitled “Open Government: Contributions from Current EC-funded Projects to Citizen Participation, Good Governance and Collaborative Policy Development” was organised, during which the PADGETS contribution was outlined. For more information on the IFIP EGOV 2011 conference please click here! Michael Netter at the 10th anniversary of the IT-Speicher Regensburg (on the left) and Ludwig Fuchs in the Regensburg University stand in IT-SA (on the right) PADGETS at the 10th anniversary of the IT-Speicher Regensburg, September 21, 2011 PADGETS partner UREG participated in the 10th anniversary of the IT-Speicher Regensburg, which is a municipal enterprise belonging to the City of Regensburg to support the IT sector in the Upper Palatinate region. Part of the event has been a company exhibition, comprising of 35 companies and research units related to the IT-Speicher. UREG participated in this exhibition with a poster presentation. PADGETS at IT-SA Exhibition, Nuremberg, Germany, October 11-13, 2011 PADGETS partner UREG presented the project in the IT-SA exhibition supported by PowerPoint slides, poster and brochures. For more Information on the IT-SA Exhibition please click here! PADGETS at the Torino Software and Systems Meeting, Torino, Italy, November 18, 2011 PADGETS partner POLITO, was invited to talk about PADGETS at the Torino Software Meeting. Enrico Ferro presented the project at a workshop on collaborative environments within the Turin Software Meeting initiative. He presented PADGETS to ICT Companies & Researchers. The presentation sparked a lot of interest and questions from the public. PADGETS at the Workshop on Digital Agenda online engagement, DG INFSO, Brussels, Belgium, November 21, 2011 PADGETS partner Tech4I2, was invited at the Internal strategic seminar about innovative stakeholders engagement at DG INFSO. David Osimo presented PADGETS to DG INFSO social media team, communication team and Digital Agenda Unit as well as to Practitioners and consultants. The presentation sparked a lot of interest and possitive feedback on twitter. DG INFSO Seminar about innovative stakeholders engagement §  Yannis Charalabidis, Euripidis Loukis, and Aggeliki Androutsopoulou (University of the Aegean), “Enhancing Participative Policy Making through Modelling And Simulation: A State of the Art Review”, Online Proceedings of the European, Mediterranean & Middle Eastern Conference on Information Systems (EMCIS 2011), Athens, Greece. Download here! §  Iosif Alvertis, Michael Petychakis, George Gionis (NTUA), Robert Kleinfeld (FOKUS), “A platform for managing campaigns over Social Media”, W3C/PrimeLife Federated Social Web Europe Conference 2011. Download here! §  Yannis Charalabidis, Euripidis Loukis (University of the Aegean), “Transforming Government Agencies’ Approach to eParticipation through Efficient Exploitation of Social Media”, Proceedings of European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) 2011, AIS Electronic Library, Helsinki, Finland. Download here! §  Manolis Maragoudakis, Euripidis Loukis, and Yannis Charalabidis (University of the Aegean), “A Review of Opinion Mining Methods for Analyzing Citizens’ Contributions in Public Policy Debate”, Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg, Germany. Download here! §  Enrico Ferro, Michele Osella (POLITO), Yannis Charalabidis, Euripidis Loukis (University of the Aegean), and Riccardo Boero (PIED), “Policy Gadgets: Paving the Way for Next-Generation Policy Making”, Proceeding of IFIP Third International Conference on e-Participation - ePart 2011, Trauner Verlag, August 29 – September 1, 2011, Delft, The Netherlands. Click here! §  Netter, M., Herbst, S., Pernul, G. (University of Regensburg), (2011) Analyzing Privacy in Social Networks - An Interdisciplinary Approach, Proceedings of the Third IEEE International Conference on Social Computing Workshop on Security and Privacy in Social Networks (SPSN at Social Computing Workshop on Security and Privacy in Social Networks (SPSN at SocialCom), Boston, October, 2011. Download here! §  Riccardo Boero (PIED), Enrico Ferro, Michele Osella (POLITO), Yannis Charalabidis, and Euripidis Loukis (University of the Aegean), “Policy Intelligence in the Era of Social Computing: Towards a Cross-Policy Decision Support System”, in: Garcia-Castro, R., et al. (Eds.), ESWC 2011 Workshops, LNCS 7117, pp. 217–228, Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg, Germany. Download here! Join us now! www.padgets.eu Drop us an e-mail: info@padgets.eu