2017•09•19     Saint Petersburg

The Russian city of Saint Petersburg welcomed the IFIP EGOV-EPART 2017 conference, which took place between 4-7 September and was hosted by ITMO University (State University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics).

Organized by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 8.5 (Information Systems in Public Administration), the 5-track annual conference gathered in Russia researchers and experts from all over the world to meet and exchange current ideas and research on a range of issues addressed in the tracks on e-government, e-participation, open government, open and big data, policy modelling and informatics, and smart governance, government, cities, and regions.

Several UNU-EGOV researchers attended the conference to present papers, which are published in the conference proceedings published by Springer. In total, 5 paper presentations took place:

• Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen and Nata Goderdzishvili: Georgia on My Mind: a Study of the Role of Governance and Cooperation in Online Service Delivery in the Caucasus;
• Linda Veiga and Ibrahim Rohman: e-Government and the Shadow Economy: Evidence from Across the Globe;
• Luís Soares Barbosa and Luís Paulo Santos: Networks of Universities as a Tool for GCIO Education;
• Demetrios Sarantis and Delfina Soares: From a Literature Review to a Conceptual Framework for Health Sector Website’s Assessment;
• Soumaya Ben Dhaou: Towards a Repository of e-Government Capabilities.

The paper presented by Linda Veiga and Ibrahim Rohman received further attention as it was awarded the Most Innovative Research Contribution or Case Study award.

In addition to the paper presentations, a discussion panel on the theme Smart Governance for Smart Cities using Social Media was organized and moderated by Mariana Lameiras and Nuno Lopes. The panel discussed the potential to explore social media as one of the vehicles for providing smart governance for smart cities. The six guiding questions included questioning the role of social media to monitor and evaluate public services, to monitor social media discontent in order to avoid social movements, to detect problems, and as a means of empowering people, raising awareness, and promoting literacy.

Another contribution to the conference programme was performed by Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen, who chaired the session Governance and Participation. This session saw the presentation of three papers related the use of new technologies and good practices for civic engagement in St. Petersburg, and urban planning in Finland and the Netherlands. Morten was also part of the workshop Building Capacity for Smart City Governance, which discussed smart city governance as an emergent domain, particularly the need for strong governance and cooperation culture to ensure that a vision is successfully carried out with the desired outcomes.