Yannis Charalabidis : Workshop on Open Data in IFIP eGOV Conference

Call for Contributions

IFIP e-government conference EGOV 2011

28th August – 2nd September 2011, Delft, The Netherlands

Workshop on

« Open Governmental Data: from Governments to Science and Society»

Background of the Workshop / The ENGAGE project

Information and Communication Technologies have an unprecedented potential to improve the responsiveness of governments to the needs of citizens and have long been recognized as a key strategic tool to enable reforms in the public sector. During the last years, this potential of ICT has started to be dealt with in a multi-disciplinary way, giving birth to new research communities dealing with governance and policy modelling, modelling and simulation of complex systems, public administration information systems, open governance and social media. However, to this day, this potential has been exploited only non-systematically, as there are significant barriers that hinder the effective exploration, management and distribution of the vast amounts of available public sector data towards the research communities.

The main goal of the ENGAGE project 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.

Topics of the Workshop

The workshop is focussed on discussing the scientific base of ICT-enabled governance, based on open and linked data from the Public Sector. Various members will provide their view on open data and value-adding examples will be shown. Information and Communication Technologies have an unprecedented potential to improve the responsiveness of governments to the needs of citizens and have long been recognized as a key strategic tool to enable reforms in the public sector. New insights can be gained by combining data from different sources which are opened up. The opening of data and sharing of information from different sources can provide fresh insights and utilize the crowd not only in analyzing data, but also in interpreting it and creating original solutions. Yet, this potential is to this day non-systematically exploited, as there are significant barriers that hinder the effective exploration, management and distribution of the vast amounts of available public sector data towards the research communities. Governments at all levels are developing strategies that EU Regions and Member States are implementing when publishing public data on the web. The new European e-Government Action Plan 2011-2015 dedicates specific actions to Open Government and identifies two main sources of potential benefits: transparency and data re-use (Commission, 2010).

The main topics of the workshop are 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. Specific topics to be addressed are, but not limited to:

· Re-use of Public Sector Information

· Open and Linked Linked Data

· Open government information & intelligence for transparency

· Improvement of Transparency

· Citizens engagement and inclusion

· Future internet for collaborative governance

· Social networks and means of mass citizen participation

· Identity, privacy and trust in governance

· Collaborative Production of Services based on Open Data

· EU-wide implementation of cross-border services

· Other scientific approaches to ICT for governance and public sector’s open data

Target audience

· eGovernance Research Project Members

· European Commission, National Governments and Local Administration Officers

· Industry representatives, interested in cutting-edge advancements on eGovernance research

· Other registered participants from Industry and Academia

Submission and Selection Process

The workshop will accommodate both presentations and short position papers.

· Presentations should not exceed 12 slides, be delivered in MS Powerpoint and be accompanied by an 1 page text in MS Word (title, authors and abstract) in LNCS format guidelines available at: http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0. Open Data or relevant project presentations are welcome.

· Short position papers should not exceed 4 pages, including figures and references, and be delivered in MS Word (title, authors and abstract) in LNCS format guidelines available at: http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0.

All submissions should be made via email to the workshop corresponding chair, by 15th June 2011.

All accepted submissions to be published online by the ENGAGE project.

Important dates

Paper or presentation-abstract submission: 15th June 2011

Notification of acceptance: 1st July 2011

Days of the Conference: 28th August – 2nd September 2011

Workshop Chairs

Yannis Charalabidis (corresponding), 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

Workshop Programme Committee

Peter Bak, IBM Research Israel, Haifa Research Lab

Nils Barnickel, Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems, Germany