Greek - Ukrainian delegation meeting on FP7 Research

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

Projects presented in detail include:

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

- The ENGAGE eInfrastructures project on Open Data

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

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

View of the Greek - Ukrainian delegations meeting

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

INFORMATION SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT

An ISI-Indexed Journal / Taylor & Francis Group

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

Special Issue on:

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

Guest  Editors

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

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

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

Aims and Scope

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

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

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

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

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

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

•            Advanced systems for structured high quality deliberation

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

•            Textual analysis technologies, ontologies and taxonomies

•            Opinion mining and sentiment analysis

•            Data and argument visualization technologies

•            Federated content syndication systems for public participation

•            Trend monitoring and policy analysis

•            Policy modeling and impact assessment

•            Data-powered collective intelligence and action

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

•      Methods for the evaluation of e-Participation      

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

•            Case studies from e-Participation and e-Consultation

•      Theoretical aspects towards a scientific base for ICT enabled Governance

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

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

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

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

- an abstract (max of 75 words)

- at least 3 keywords

- full author names and affiliations

- brief author bios

- an email address for the corresponding author

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

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

Schedule

•            Submission deadline: November 15, 2011

•            Completion of first review: January 15, 2012

•            Revisions deadline: March 15, 2011

•            Camera-ready deadline: April 15, 2012

•            Tentative publication: Fall 2012

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

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

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 ?

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 ...