Tommaso Federici

‘Gentlemen, all aboard!’ ICT and party politics: Reflections from a Mass-eParticipation experience

Abstract Information and Communication Technology (ICT) use is becoming an ever more popular way to involve citizens in political decision making. And yet, despite their recently increasing number, few eParticipation initiatives have achieved their intended aims. If nothing else, this shows that the internal processes, challenges and opportunities of using ICT to engage citizens in politics deserve further examination. The present paper attempts to undertake such an investigation by analysing Italys Five Star Movement, a mass-eParticipation-based political organisation recently founded by private citizens. Using an interpretive case-study approach, this paper assesses the goals, participation, technology use, internal governance, external consequences, and challenges endemic to employing ICT in citizen engagement, to answer the following question: what consequences, challenges and opportunities does mass-eParticipation present to organisational stakeholders? Results of the study bring to light several additional research questions whose answers will surely advance the current discourse on eParticipation, and they also provide practical guidance and direction for those launching eParticipation initiatives.

An IS for archaeological finds management as a platform for knowledge management: The ArcheoTRAC case

Purpose – The aim of this study is to describe the context, the activity, and the outcome of a project, which led to the creation of ArcheoTRAC, the first information system (IS) designed to run all the daily activities in archaeological finds management, to share information among the different professionals and to support in this way knowledge creation.Design/methodology/approach – The study focuses on the ArcheoTRAC system and on the project that contributed to its development. Since the authors of this paper have been involved in the project (one of them since its very beginning), an action research paradigm has been used to derive scientific knowledge out of the experience. Both organizational and technological aspects are investigated under the respective theoretical knowledge management perspectives.Findings – There were two effective choices in order to foster knowledge sharing in a context of a scarcity of interactions among professionals involved. Grouping representatives of possible users in th...

A Business Intelligence Process to Support Information Retrieval in an Ontology-Based Environment

A Business Intelligence Process to support Information Retrieval in an Ontology-Based Environment

From the Blogosphere into Real Politics: The Use of ICT by the Five Star Movement

Research on ICT and the public discourse often focuses on how ICT can be used to increase citizen participation in political decision-making processes. The Italian Five Star Movement (5SM) represents a novel approach to using ICT to include citizens, and a big challenge for the traditional political actors. The 5SM was initiated outside the established political systems, with the use of Internet tools as cornerstones to promote political actions based on the directly expressed will of citizens. In this paper, based on an exploratory case study approach and informed by the introduction of E-Democracy models, we investigate the role of ICT in various phases of the 5SM, from its birth through the current stage. The focus here is on the transformation from a protest organisation outside the established political processes to being the second most voted party within the Italian parliament.

How Internet Is Upsetting the Communication Between Organizations and Their Stakeholders: A Tentative Research Agenda

A new phenomenon is already visible around us: the use of the Internet as a platform to gather and diffuse information has been deployed to the casting of official data about politics provided by unofficial subjects, like citizens, whistle-blowers and so on. The increased data availability on behaviour and decisions of governors and administrators may profoundly alter their agenda and the relationships with the citizens, introducing a broader public control. However this change may also encounter a lot of limitations, which can lower its strength and relevance. This paper is a first step of a research programme on such phenomenon, its characteristics, novelty, and limits.

Exploring Collective Action Dynamics in Online Communities from a Critical Realist Perspective

Scholars have been increasingly studying Online Communities (OCs) for a variety of purposes, focusing on issues like individual motivation, knowledge sharing, and governance structure. Few studies focused on the entanglement among technology, people, and organizational structures that support working dynamics within OCs. This paper addresses this issue by exploring causal mechanisms sustaining the collective actions of OCs through a retroduction process. Based on the study of the OC of an Italian political movement, the Five Star Movement, the concept of affordance is involved to describe the generative mechanisms and new affordances are identified on collective action within OCs. Our work contributes to a deeper understanding of the OCs phenomenon, explaining how the different components (people, technology, and organization) interact within a specific mechanism to achieve a specific result.

New Internet-Based Relationships Between Citizens and Governments in the Public Space: Challenges for an Integrated System Design

This paper deals with the recent phenomenon of original and official data about the activity of governments and public administrations distributed through the Internet by private subjects. In this paper, adopting a design research approach, we discuss four recent cases and the software artifacts that were used in them. The aim of the paper is that of deriving a descriptive design theory for a software artifact for improving citizens’ capacity to act in the public space.

IT Value in Public Administrations: A Model Proposal for e-Procurement

Recent studies have affirmed the necessity of a discontinuity in the method of investigating the value produced in organisations by IT. Existing studies have in common a prevailing (when not exclusive) attention paid to the private sector, as testified by the frequent use of income or financial indicators to measure benefits. These approaches however cannot be directly applied to public utility organisations like Public Administrations. Taking into account this scenario, the present exploratory work looks at the analysis of IT investments in the public sector by identifying a viable approach to research in this domain. To move towards this objective, procurement management has been taken as the field to be observed, and an Italian public Local Healthcare Agency which has managed several e-procurement projects has been analysed. This case represents a valuable context for examination and discussion because the outcomes of each project were evaluated in detail. A rich IT Value Model devoted to the private sector has been adopted and discussed, and later some resulting adaptations are suggested, together with some hints and limitations.

The Interplay between Practitioners and Technological Experts in the Design Process of an Archaeology Information System

This case describes the design and development process of a computer-based information system for the management of archaeological finds and related documents. Adaptive Structuration Theory is used as the conceptual framework to analyse the role and actions of different people involved in the design and development process, during the different stages of the case. The case addresses key issues, such as an initiative taking place in an organizational context where users show different needs, profiles and levels of information technology literacy. It focuses primarily on the interactions between practitioners and technological experts during the design and development process. Another matter of interest comes from the fact that, in this sector, no other information system for finds management was already available. Moreover, this case targets the domain of archaeology that has not received so much attention by Information Systems literature to date.

Tensions in Online Communities: The Case of a Mass Size eParticipation Initiative

While Online Communities (OCs) are increasingly used to involve people in organizations and societies, few studies focus on how OC influence political decision making within eParticipation initiatives. This issue is explored through an interpretive case-study of the Italian Five Star Movement (M5S), a mass-size eParticipation political initiative recently founded by private citizens. The use of OCs is a common strategy to involve groups of people to easily connect on-line, cooperating on common and shared interests. We here focus on understanding the internal and external forces influencing on the OCs, to better understand how to manage such OCs within the eParticipation domain. We do so by introducing the concept of tensions, to describe the states that these contrasting forces produce on the OCs, addressing the research question: what tensions occur in OCs for eParticipation? Our work contributes to a deeper understanding of the OCs phenomenon within the eParticipation domain, while also provides avenues for further research.