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

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

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

The PADGETS team at Google Zurich

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

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

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

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








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

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

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

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

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

An Interview on Interoperability Standards and Digital Agenda 2020

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

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

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

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

- The evolving standardisation at EU and National levels.

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

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

New Book on Organisation Interoperability from Springer

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

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

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

A must read for the period.

Find more on the book here.

Greek Tax Offices productivity visualisation

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

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

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

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

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

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