PADGETS project newsletter - June 2013

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. A video presenting PADGETS platform is now available online. Pilot experimentations of the PADGETS concepts and operations have been carried out in Italy, Slovenia and Greece. Each piloting action has been constructed around a specific topic of primary interest for end users and decision makers. The scope of the pilots is to evaluate the concept of Policy Gadget (Padget) as innovative tool for leveraging the group knowledge produced over Social Media platforms inside policy making processes. An overview of the pilots per country is presented as follows: 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 Pilot campaigns run in Slovenia and are focused on: Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, Media Freedom, Corruption, Cooperative Society, Tax Fraud, European year of Citizens and Tender Puch Europe Publishment. PADGETS is used by the Slovenian Members of the European Parliament to publish information related to the above campaigns and track citizens’ opinions. PADGETS Pilot in Greece Three Pilot campaigns run in Greece: §  ■ A PADGETS campaign concerning policies to exploit Wind Power as an alternative and renewable energy source; http://eurenewablewind.blogspot.gr/ https://www.facebook.com/ioannis.tsoukalas https://twitter.com/iatsoukalas §  ■ A PADGETS campaign concerning the Financial Crisis in the Southern European Countries. The “South In Talk” campaign is organized in cooperation with policy makers and institutions from other Southern European Countries (Italy, Spain, Portugal); http://thesouthintalk.blogspot.gr/ https://www.facebook.com/marilena.koppa https://twitter.com/MarilenaKoppa §  ■ A PADGETS campaign concerning Women Entrepreneurship. The scope is to come up with a proposition on how the EU directive on improving the gender balance among non-executive directors of companies should be implemented in Greece. http://morewomenonboards.blogspot.gr/ https://www.facebook.com/RodiKratsa https://twitter.com/Rodi_Kratsa PADGETS Platform and Tools available PADGETS policy making and modelling platform is available and is accessible here! The platform empowers policy makers to initiate a policy campaign and disseminate their policy messages through multiple social media simultaneously by only using a single integrated interface. PADGETS MOBILE App and PADGETS WEB App are now available in PADGETS website. For evaluating PADGETS Application take the survey! It only takes a few minutes. PADGETS in the top-10 Policy Making 2.0 applications worldwide The PADGETS project was nominated among the 10 best Policy - Making 2.0 applications, in the international competition organised by the CROSSOVER project and presented at the International Conference on Policy Making 2.0 in Dublin, June 17 and 18, 2013. The competition targeted policy-making 2.0 applications making the best use of technology to improve the design, delivery and evaluation of Government policy, with a focus on implementation that can show a real impact on policy making, either in terms of better policy or wider participation. The policy-making 2.0 technologies showcased by the competing applications included: §  ■ Open and big data §  ■ Visual analytics §  ■ Modelling and simulation §  ■ Collaborative governance and crowdsourcing §  ■ Serious gaming §  ■ Opinion mining PADGETS combines social networking interoperability, social media analytics, opinion minining and simulation techniques, to enable policy makers in managing on-line campaigns towards reaching justified decisions. Cizens participate in various modes and forms with the assistance of web based and mobile applications, that support several types of behaviour. PADGETS at a new book on electronic participation and urban crowdsourcing. A new book on goverance innovation has been announced by IGI Global, edited by Carlos Nunes Silva, from University of Lisbon. The book will be made available in June 2013."Citizen E-Participation in Urban Governance Crowdsourcing and Collaborative Creativity " explores the nature of the new challenges confronting citizens and local governments in the field of urban governance. This comprehensive reference source explores the role that Web 2.0 technologies play in promoting citizen participation and empowerment in the city government and is intended for scholars, researchers, students, and practitioners in the field of urban studies, urban planning, political science, public administration. Topics covered by the various sections include crowdsourcing, e-democracy, e-participation, geographic information management, open source in urban governance and more. In this book Enrico Ferro and Michele Osella (Istituto Superiore Mario Boella), Euripidis Loukis and Yannis Charalabidis (University of the Aegean), have contributed the chapter on social media policy making, consolidating and reflecting upon the project experiences in Italy:“Policy Gadgets for Urban Governance in the Era of Social Computing: An Italian Pilot on Telemedicine”. The book is to be made available by IGI and global electronic retailers in June 2013. For more information click here! Forthcoming Publications §  ■ Enrico Ferro, Euripidis Loukis, Yannis Charalabidis, Michele Osella, “Policy Making 2.0: From Theory to Practice”, Government Information Quarterly §  ■ Enrico Ferro, Euripidis Loukis, Yannis Charalabidis, Michele Osella, “Evaluating Complex Forms of Social Media Use in Government”, 19th Americas Conference on Information Systems – Chicago, Illinois, USA, August 2013 Samos 2013 Summit on Digital Innovation for Government, Business and Society, Samos, Greece, July 1-5, 2013 The 4th Samos Summit on Digital Innovation for Government, Business and Society will be held in Samos, Greece on July 1 – 5, 2013 and is co-organised by the University of Aegean, the Greek Interoperability Centre of the National Technical University of Athens, the ENGAGE eInfrastructures project on Open Data, the NOMAD and PADGETS projects on Social Media policy making (co-funded by the European Commission).It offers an unprecedented opportunity to see, interact with and influence cutting-edge European ICT research projects and initiatives. Attended by high caliber experts from research, administrations and enterprises, the Samos 2013 Summit focuses on the newest developments of Information and Communication Technologies and innovative applications in the context of the public and private sector. Main topics of the Samos 2013 Summit include: §  ■ Policy modeling §  ■ Collaborative Governance §  ■ Collective awareness platforms §  ■ Big, Open and Linked Data §  ■ Complex societal problem solving §  ■ Digital enterprise and Factory of the Future §  ■ Digital youth entrepreneurship §  ■ Horizon 2020 programme This year, Samos Summit will also include the 1st International Summer School on Open and Collaborative Governance which offers the possibility to younger members of the research community to enjoy tutorials, project workshops and experts panels on how ICT transforms governance and policy making. For more information click here! PADGETS has participated in many events, workshops and conferences and made presentations (including conferences presentations, demonstrations etc.) during the last months of the project lifetime. An indicative list of these can be found below: §  ■ Conference, Centre for eGovernance Development, Bled, Slovenia, March 29-30, 2012 §  ■ Workshop “Decision Support Systems for Policy Makers”, Torino, Italy, April 12, 2012 §  ■ SMAU BUSINESS ROMA : Smau Roma 2012 Mobile App Camp, Rome, Italy, April 21, 2012 §  ■ Social Media Week Panel, Conference, Torino, Italy, September 28, 2012 §  ■ Conference PA 140 organized by the Piedmont Regional Council (centered on new forms of Government 2.0 enabled by the systematic exploitation of Social Media), Torino, Italy March 7, 2013 §  ■ Conference: FP7 Egovernance and policy Modeling projects, Sheffield, UK, January 27, 2012 §  ■ Samos 2012 Summit on “Open Data and Interoperability for Governance, Industry and Society”, Samos, Greece, July 2-6, 2012 §  ■ Workshop: policy making 2.0, Sheffield, UK, April 1, 2012 §  ■ Workshop: Digital Literacy, skills and inclusion, Seville, Spain, May 3, 2012 §  ■ Workshop: Digital Literacy, skills and inclusion, Seville, Spain, September 6, 2012 §  ■ Workshop: Digital Literacy, skills and inclusion, Granada, Spain, May 29, 2013 §  ■ Transforming Government Workshop 2013 (tGov2013), London, UK, April 22-23, 2013 §  ■ Project presentation during Net-Eucen workshop on sustainable urban mobility, Rome, Italy, April 24, 2012 §  ■ Project presentation within Enel (http://www.enel.com/en-GB/) internal tutorial on Social Media Marketing, Cagliari, Florence and Rome (Italy), April 17, 19 and 20, 2012 §  ■ Project presentation at IT-SA exhibition, Nuremberg, Germany, December 16-18, 2012 §  ■ Project presentation at Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, March 29, 2013 Samos 2012 Participants, outside Karlovassi Town Hall. Michael Netter (UREG) at IT-SA Exhibition §  ■ Netter, M. , Riesner, M. , Weber, M. Pernul, G. (2013), "Privacy Settings in Online Social Networks-Preferences, Perception, and Reality", Proc of the 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Science (HICSS), Maui, Hawaii, USA §  ■ Riesner, M. , Netter, M. Pernul, G. (2013), "Analyzing Settings for Social Identity Management on Social Networking Sites: Classification, Current State, and Proposed Developments", Information Security Technical Report , 17, 4, Elsevier §  ■ Netter, M. , Hassan, S. Pernul, G., "An Autonomous Social Web Privacy Infrastructure with Context-Aware Access Control", 9th International Conference on Trust, Privacy & Security in Digital Business (TrustBus 2012), Vienna, Austria, 4-6 Sept. 2012 §  ■ Riesner, M. , Netter, M. Pernul, G., "An Analysis of Implemented and Desirable Settings for Identity Management on Social Networking Sites", 7th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES 2012), University of Economics, Prague, Czech Republic, August 20th - 24th, 2012 §  ■ Netter, M. (2012), "Conceptualizing Transparency on Online Social Networks", Tiny Transactions on Computer Science (TinyToCS) , 1 §  ■ Netter, M. , Herbst, S. Pernul, G. (2013), "Interdisciplinary Impact Analysis of Privacy in Social Networks", Altshuler, Y., Elovici, Y., Cremers, A., Aharony, N. Pentland, A. (eds.) Security and Privacy in Social Networks, Springer §  ■ Loukis, E., Charalabidis, Y., Diamantopoulou, V. (2012), “Different Digital Moderated and non-Moderated Mechanisms for Public Participation”, European Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems (EMCIS) 2012, 7-8 June 2012, Munich, Germany §  ■ Charalabidis, Y., Loukis, E., Androutsopoulou, A. (2012), “A System Dynamics Approach for Complex Government Policy Design - Application in ICT Diffusion”, 9th International Conference on Modeling, Simulation and Visualization Methods (MSV'12), July 16-19, 2012, USA §  ■ Charalabidis, Y., Loukis, E. (2012), “Participative Public Policy Making Through Multiple Social Media Platforms Utilization”, International Journal of Electronic Government Research (SCOPUS), Vol. 8, No 3, pp. 78-97 §  ■ Charalabidis, Y., Loukis, E. (2012), “Towards New Web 2.0 Based Multi-Channel Approaches to e-Participation”, Yogesh Dwivedi (Ed) ‘Transformational Government through eGov: Socio-economic, Cultural, and Technological issues’, Emerald Publications §  ■ Charalabidis, Y., Kleinfeld, R., Loukis, E. (2012), “Towards a Rationalisation of Social Media Exploitation in Government Policy-Making Processes”, European Journal of ePractice (sponsored by the European Commission), Nº 16, June/July 2012, pp. 77-93 To download the publications click here! Join us now! www.padgets.eu Drop us an e-mail: info@padgets.eu ©2013 PADGETS Newsletter | Project co-funded by the European Commission under the FP7 Programme

PADGETS in the top-10 Policy Making 2.0 applications worldwide

The PADGETS project was nominated among the 10 best Policy - Making 2.0 applications, in the international competition organised by the CROSSOVER project and presented at the International Conference on Policy Making 2.0 in Dublin, June 17 and 18, 2013.

The competition targeted policy-making 2.0 applications making the best use of technology to improve the design, delivery and evaluation of Government policy, with a focus on implementation that can show a real impact on policy making, either in terms of better policy or wider participation. 

The policy-making 2.0 technologies showcased by the competing applications included:

• Open and big data
• Visual analytics
• Modelling and simulation 
• Collaborative governance and crowdsourcing
• Serious gaming
• Opinion mining

PADGETS combines social networking interoperability,  social media analytics, opinion minining and simulation techniques, to enable policy makers in managing on-line campaigns towards reaching  justified decisions. Cizens participate in various modes and forms with the assistance of web based and mobile applications, that support several types of behaviour. PADGETS is implemented by a joined multi-national team of more than 40 researchers, coming from 12 partners:

• University of the Aegean (GR), as Coordinator
• Whitehall Reply Srl (IT)
• Athens Technology Center S.A. (GR)
• Google (UK)
• University of Regensburg (DE)
• Politecnico di Torino (IT)
• National Technical University of Athens (GR)
• Tech4i2 (UK)
• Piedmont Region (IT)
• The Observatory for the Greek Information Society (GR)
• The Centre for eGovernance Development for South East Europe (SI)
• Fraunhofer Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung - FOKUS (DE)

All PADGETS applications for the web and mobile platforms are freely available for use or download.

For more information on the PADGETS project, visit www.padgets.eu

Career Day at the University of the Aegean in Samos

A career orientation day for students was held on 13th April 2013, at the University of Aegean in Samos.  Pre-graduate and post-graduste students had the opportunity to see presentations and discuss with representatives of successful enterprises on the challenges of the job market in Greece.  The following members of the private sector presented the current status and gave specific information on how to look for a job within the specific subsectors:

• Kostas Pazalos, Velti PLC  (ICT - mobile systems and services)
• Vaggelis Chatzigeorgiou, NETU Hellas S.A. (ICT - enterprise systems and services)
• Leonida Kalipolitis, Athens Technology Centre SA (ICT - mobile systems and services)
• Eleni Chalioti - Karamolegos SA (Food industry)
• Dimitris Karelas, LECTA Advertising ltd (Marketing and Communication)
• Giannis Georgoulakis, SoftOne Technologies SA (ICT - enterprise systems and services)

After the end of the presentations, students had the opportunity to have short interviews and face-to-face discussions with the industry representatives.

The information day was co-organised by the University Office for interconnecting with the industry with the support of the Information Systems Laboratory

University students, speakers and organisers at the Career Day in Samos

HICSS 2014 Minitrack on "E-Government Open data and Cloud Services"

Call for Papers 

HICSS 2014 Minitrack on "E-Government Open data and Cloud Services"

Big Island, Hawaii, January 6-9, 2014

Within the 47th Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), a minitrack on Open data, Interoperability and Cloud services in the Public Sector is organized. The 47th HICSS, one of the most prominent Conferences on Information Sciences worldwide, will be held on January 6-9, 2014, in Big Island, Hawaii (http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu ).

Public organizations are releasing their data to the public, developing, sharing and sourcing their services and taking advantage of the cloud. Public systems are more and more connected with each other and with systems of others resulting in a spaghetti of interconnected systems. All these efforts require information sharing and interoperability to ensure that systems work in concert. Moreover decisions concerning the development, operation and maintenance of services and hosting of the services in the cloud should be made. All these developments impacts the technical, organizational, managerial and strategic level. Yet it is unclear what should be done and what the impact is. This minitrack is aimed at discussing theories, methodologies, experience reports, literature and case studies in the field of open data, interoperability and cloud services.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

·      System development, implementation and agility for digital public services

·      System, user data- and process-based integration

·      Information infrastructures, cloud infrastructures, reuse and quality in digital public services

·      Semantic ontologies, web services and modeling for governmental infrastructures

·      Cloud computing, ICT-services, scalability, reliability, flexibility

·      Multi-sided platforms, interoperability, information sharing

·      Software as service (SaaS), utility computing, shared services, cloud providers

·      Cross-organizational modeling and visualization ranging from the organizational to technical level

·      Infrastructure and enterprise architecture planning, alignment, strategies and governance

·      Interoperability and architecture standards, principles and frameworks

·      Technical, semantic, organizational, managerial and legal/policy aspects of interoperability

·      Organizational and/or policy perspectives on the dynamics of the infrastructure and interoperability process and barriers to interoperability

·      Service-oriented architectures, web services, semantic web services, orchestration and composition

·      Open data, Linked data, meta-data and semantic technologies leading to enhanced digital public services

·      Best practices and case studies and longitudinal studies

·      Theoretical contributions and contributions from developing countries

MINITRACK CHAIRS
Marijn Janssen, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, m.f.w.h.a.janssen@tudelft.nl (primary contact)

Yannis Charalabidis,  University of the Aegean, Greece, yannisx@aegean.gr

Helmur Krcmar, Technische Universität München, Germany, Krcmar@in.tum.de

IMPORTANT DATES (2013)

June 15           Submission full manuscripts

Aug 15            Acceptance Notifications

Sept 15           Submission camera-ready paper

Oct 1               Early Registration fee deadline

More info:

http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/hicss_47/eg.html and

http://faculty.washington.edu/jscholl/hicss47/Welcome.html

Call for Papers: DATAWEB session on Open Data

Call for Papers - Special Session on the Web of Data (DATAWEB)

Production and deployment of Open, Linked and Big Data

http://dataweb.medialab.ntua.gr/

To be held in conjunction with the 17th Panhellenic Conference on Informatics (PCI 2013), September 19-21, 2013, Thessaloniki, Greece, http://pci2013.epy-mathra.gr/  

Proceedings to be published by ACM.

Organizers:

Ioannis Anagnostopoulos, University of Central Greece, Greece

Yannis Charalabidis, University of the Aegean, Greece

Agisilaos Papantoniou, National Technical University of Athens, Greece

Michalis Vafopoulos, National Technical University of Athens, Greece

Special Session description:

The evolution of technologies now effectively supports the creation and existence of the Web of Data. However, the production and mass consumption of data have been a matter of debate over methodologies that should be employed in the technological and business domain. Data over the Web can be seen under three major perspectives. One that deals with their “openness”, one that addresses their interconnection and one that discusses new ways of managing their performance.

This special session aims to stimulate a multi-origin discussion about data production and deployment within the Web corpus. It is focused on new models, languages and applications that exploit the Web of data in order to act as a global repository of interlinked resources.

We seek original articles balanced between theoretical and practical approaches in research aspects and/or applications that utilize either Open, Linked and Big Data. We further encourage the submission of contributions that discuss and address exploitation issues of data in different disciplines. Submitted papers may deal with methods, models, case studies, practical experiences and technologies, but also with work in progress solutions. The thematic categories are divided in three parts:

1. Open Data

Definition@wikipedia: “Open data is the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control. The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "Open" movements such as open source, open content, and open access.”

Topics of interest cover the following areas (but are not limited to):

●     Business models, marketplaces and crowdsourcing platforms for Open Data

●     Policies, strategies for the development of data ecosystems

●     Country/nationwide challenges and opportunities

●     Privacy and provenance issues

●     Reliability and trustworthiness of Open Data

●     Case studies for domain/sector-specific open data strategies (smart cities, environmental and geospatial research, social media)

●     Methodologies for open data production, cleansing and utilization

●     Heterogeneity, quality assurance, vocabulary repair and maintenance

●     Benchmarks and metrics in Open Data usage

●     Open Data usability, user interaction and case studies with lessons learned

2. Linked Data

From the moment they were officially introduced in 2008, Linked Open Data (LOD) and their applications are flourishing. The Open Data movement, along with the maturity of Web 3.0 technologies has led various Organizations to publish their data, making them accessible worldwide. One of the fundamental issues that follows the initial success of these LOD initiatives is a way to standardize the effort according to effective functional and technical specifications.

Topics of interest cover the following areas (but are not limited to):

●     Methodologies for Linked Data production and deployment

●     Assessing trustworthiness in Linked Data

●     Linked Data publication and visualization

●     AI technologies for Linked Data

●     Engineering Linked Data stems

●     Searching and ranking methodologies and algorithms

●     Linked Data real world applications and uses (e-Government, health, energy, finance)

●     Rule interchange formats

●     Reasoning

●     Query languages

●     Data cleansing techniques

●     Social media interactivity

●     Adaptive Linked Data systems

●     Services development and orchestration

●     Provenance and right management

●     Dataset description, discovery and consolidation

●     Architectural paradigms

●     Mobile Linked Data

●     Business models

3. Big Data

In this thematic category we aim to investigate how the well-defined concepts of data utilization can be applied in order to develop new techniques and methods for the sustainable and socially balanced exploitation of huge data pools.

Topics of interest cover the following areas (but are not limited to):

●     Scalable, distributed and parallel algorithms for solving Big Data

●     Harvesting Linked Data from large heterogeneous sources

●     Connecting massive unstructured data with well-defined linked formats

●     Semantic models and environments to support Big Data

●     Data management for mobile and pervasive computing

●     Data Management in large social graphs

●     Crowdsourcing as a solution to Big Data handling

●     Big Data analytics in government and society (public sector, social security, etc.)

●     Visualization and presentation of Big Data

●     Security, privacy issues derived from Big Data handling

●     Complex applications in:

○     Science, scientific data mining

○     Large scale recommendation systems (e.g. medicine, biology, finance, business, etc.)

○     Communications and social media applications

○     Real-life problems (urban, transportation, weather, energy consumption, etc.)

Program committee: (to be extended)

Jose Maria Alvarez Rodriguez, Web Semantics Oviedo – WESO, Spain

Christos-Nikolaos, Anagnostopoulos, University of the Aegean, Greece

Lefteris Angelis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

Phil Archer, W3C

Maria Bielikova, Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Slovakia

Alvaro Graves, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, US

Harry Halpin, W3C

Marijn Janssen, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands

Keith Jeffery, STFC, UK

Vangelis Karkaletsis, NCSR Demokritos, Greece

Theodoros Karounos, Greek Free / Open Source Software Society (GFOSS), Greece

Nikolaos Loutas, PwC

Ioanna, Lykourentzou, INRIA – Nancy, France

Phivos Mylonas, Ionian University, Greece

Petros Stefaneas, National Technical University of Athens, Greece

Nicolaos Tsapatsoulis, Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus

Prodromos Tsiavos, London School of Economics, UK

Athina Vakali, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

Manolis Wallace, University of the Peloponnese, Greece

Submission Guidelines - Proceedings

The submitted papers will be evaluated by the members of the Special Session Technical Program Committee (see below). The paper submission, as well as the publication procedures after acceptance, follow the PCI 2013 Paper Submission and Proceedings Guidelines as described in the official web page of the conference -->

http://pci2013.epy-mathra.gr/index.php/author-information/paper-submission.

Important Dates:

Special Session paper submissions: April 5, 2013

Notification of paper acceptance: May 3, 2013

Camera-ready paper due: May 31, 2013