2020•06•26     Online

The twenty-first edition of the Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research – DG.O 2020 – was originally scheduled to take place in the largest metropolis of the Republic of Korea: Seoul. However, the pandemic brought by COVID-19 forced the conference to go fully online on 15-19 June 2020.

This year, the theme of DG.O focused on Intelligent Government in the Intelligent Information Society. The advent of the intelligent information society will introduce new technologies that combine artificial intelligence (AI) with Internet of Things, cloud computing, and big data. Along with the development of such intelligent information technologies, governments will increasingly face unprecedented challenges and complex problems in all areas of the society. The conference focuses on the role and capacity building of government and the new governance that would be required to timely address the challenges and opportunities that are brought by the new technologies and also to construct a trust-based society by achieving sustainable development in the intelligent information society.

UNU-EGOV researchers contributed to DG.O 2020 with two papers and two workshops. Digital transformation, governance and coordination models: A comparative study of Australia, Denmark and the Republic of Korea, written by researchers Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen and Zoran Jordanoski, focuses on a comparative study of three of the most connected countries in the world, with high-speed infrastructure widely available and high rates of internet use by businesses and individuals alike. The analysis finds that the success rate of the implementation of these countrie’s respective ICT/Digital/eGovernment strategies is high. A video presentation of the paper is available on our YouTube channel.

The other paper – Local context, global benchmarks: Recommendations for an adapted approach using the UN E-Government Development Index as an example – by Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen and Jeremy Millard (Danish Technological Institute) provides a brief overview of how e-Government benchmarks have evolved over time, why this has happened and what the consequences have been, with a particular focus on UNDESA’s biennial e-government surveys. A video presentation of the paper is available on our YouTube channel.

Regarding the workshops, which were also presented virtually, Mariana Lameira’s work – Discussing challenges and limitations of an experimental research design to test trust in local e-government – focused on the use of an ongoing experimental research design to be implemented in Portugal and the Republic of Korea. On the other hand, the workshop by UNU’s Delfina Soares, Soumaya Ben Dhaou and Mariana Lameiras – Evidence-based research for Intelligent Governments: Lessons learned from the Justice system – draws on the analysis of a concrete multi-method investigation developed for the Justice sector of an European country.