Delfina de Sá Soares

Open government data initiatives in Europe: northern versus southern countries analysis

This paper explores a set of national European open government data. The study is particularly focused on analyzing and identifying differences on how northern and southern countries of Europe have adopted, accepted and promoted open government data portals. Using web content analysis, open government data portals of six countries, three from the Northern Europe region (Denmark, Norway, and United Kingdom) and three from the Southern European region (Italy, Portugal, and Spain) are scrutinized for understanding the status of open government data initiatives. The results of the direct content analysis observation point to the existence of some currently differences among the countries of the two regions, mainly in what concerns their ability to reuse open data made available by public entities. Some possible reasons for that are advanced and further streams of research to deep the understanding of those reasons are proposed. This way this paper offers new understanding of the current open government data efforts development.

Research Gaps on Public Service Delivery

This paper follows the research framework for context-specific public service delivery presented at ICEGOV 2016 [1]. The research has been conducted at the UNU-EGOV unit during the last year. The paper presents the research landscape for ICT enabled public service delivery scientific and policy literature. The findings are analyzed and presented in a conceptual framework allowing us to identify the core dimensions and sub-dimensions of public service delivery. The paper concludes by outlining the research gaps identified by the study and a series of policy recommendations to enhance public service delivery. The results showed that the Innovation and Evaluation dimensions and their sub-dimensions, Innovating Public Procurement, Collective Learning and Intelligent, Evidence-Based Policy Making and Social Media Impact are the areas with less investigation.

Electronic Governance for Context-Specific Public Service Delivery: a Survey of the Literature

Based on the latest trends of government digitization efforts, this paper presents a survey of the literature illustrating how governments are using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to deliver public services pursuing concrete development goals and taking into account specific needs of the local context. Based on the survey, we illustrate examples of context-specific public service delivery and propose a research framework to guide future research on the area. The relevance of this work relies on the latest commitment of governments to pursue the 2030 development agenda, since the framework provides a roadmap to further investigate how to locally design public services to achieve sustainable development goals leveraging on ICT.

Studying the Effects of Peer-to-Peer Sharing Economy Platforms on Society

Peer-to-peer sharing economy platforms potentially have big effects on values in society. Policymakers need to develop governance arrangements to benefit from the positive effects, while simultaneously mitigate the negative effects. This requires having a structured overview of the effects of these platforms on the diversity of values that are involved. Currently no theoretical overview of these effects on values is available. The objective of this article is to structure the research into the effects of sharing economy platforms. We use a theoretical mapping that was developed by using a Grounded Theory approach. By positioning the literature onto the map, we derived an overview of the extend in which each effected value has been studied so far. Based on this mapping, we propose five research themes into specific effects of peer-to-peer sharing economy platforms: social values, consumer and societal risks, working conditions and labor market dynamics, environmental sustainability and innovation.

Information Systems in schools: improving governance good-practices

The purpose of this study is to characterize the information systems (IS) management activity in public Portuguese schools and to suggest possible improvements for that activity. Data was gathered by document analysis, interviews with school directors and IS managers, and a questionnaire sent to the whole universe of 811 schools. Preliminary data analysis shows the existence of (i) some weaknesses in the curricula of both school directors and IS managers, (ii) a deep spectrum of maturity and quality of Management of Information Systems (MIS) in schools, and (iii) a quite frequent ad-hoc approach to MIS in schools.

Who Is Measuring What and How in EGOV Domain

Governments around the world have accepted information and communication technology as a facilitator to reform, transform and modernize the governance activity - EGOV. Although EGOV is accepted to bear several benefits, government accountability demands its measurement and assessment for management and improvement. Many tools and instruments have been proposed by researchers for measuring, assessing and monitoring different aspects of EGOV, but their value has not been availed by researchers and practitioners alike. This happens because evaluation tools are dispersed among various sources and there is also no systematized framework to support the analysis and selection of the adequate tool for specific situations. This work intends to answer these issues by characterizing the literature available in the context of EGOV measurement, assessment and monitoring to generate a strong base of knowledge oriented towards the creation of a future catalog of tools and instruments for EGOV evaluation, and to present a conceptual framework to support the choice of an adequate tool from such catalogue.

Predicting Citizens Acceptance of Government-led e-Participation Initiatives through Social Media: A Theoretical Model

Whilst the idea of utilizing social media to advance government-led e-Participation initiatives has proliferated significantly in recent years, mostly such initiatives do not meet the intended expectations, as the majority of them fail to attract wider citizens’ audience. Overall, the key factors that could explain and predict citizens’ participation are not yet thoroughly identified. Therefore, the current study develops a theoretical citizen-centric model that seeks to explain and predict the intention of citizens’ behavior towards their involvement in government-led e-Participation initiatives through social media. The methodological approach is primarily based on utilizing and extending one of the well-known theories for describing a person acceptance behavior, namely the Theory of Planned Behavior. The model applies the main constructs of the Theory – attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control; and complements them with several constructs drawn from relevant literature. The paper contributes to understanding the reasons why citizens decide to engage or not in government-led e-Participation initiatives through social media.

From a Literature Review to a Conceptual Framework for Health Sector Websites’ Assessment

Health sector institutions’ websites need to act as effective web resources of information and interactive communication mediums to address the versatile demands of their multiple stakeholders. Academic and practitioner interest in health sector website assessment has considerably risen in recent years. This can be seen by the number of papers published in journals. The purpose of this paper is twofold to further establish the field. First, it offers a literature re-view on hospitals’ websites assessment. Second, it offers a conceptual framework to address the website assessment issue in health sector. The proposed assessment framework focuses on four main criteria: content, technology, services, and participation being evaluated by the use of several indicators. Academics, hospital practitioners, public officials and users will find the review and the framework useful, as they outline major lines of research in the field and a method to assess health institution websites.

Hit the bull's-eye: electronic participation through social media

This paper presents research findings of reviewing 42 studies concerning electronic participation (e-Participation) through social media. Overall, such initiatives have reflected the prevalence of a one-way communication strategy, what do not considerably foster citizen involvement in policy decision making process.

Information systems security management key issues in local government

Information systems security plays a central role in the provision of services by Public Administration agencies. To foster a trust climate in the development of e-government, it is important to know the main concerns when managing initiatives to protect information assets. The aim of this research in progress is to identify and prioritize the key issues that Local Government chief information officers face, or believe they will face in the near future, in the domain of information systems security management.