TRACK 1: Collaborative Intelligence: Humans, Crowds, and Machines

Track chairs: Helen K. Liu (National Taiwan University, Taiwan), Seok-jin Eom (Seoul National University, South-Korea), Lisa Schmidthuber (Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria). 

In the public sector, crowdsourcing has been recently adopted for generating information, providing public services, and resolving public problems (Brabham 2009; Liu 2017; Mergel and Desouza 2013; Prpić, Taeihagh, and Melton 2015), while artificial intelligence has been advanced to learn, classify, or detect data sources and inputs from the public (Tambe, Cappelli, and Yakubovich 2019; Phillips 2017; Winter 2015). While the adoption of AI might have enhanced the citizen participations’ experiences as found in smart city (Hoseinzadeh et al. 2020) and 311 chatbot (Chatfield and Reddick 2018), there are also issues regarding any potential ethical or implementation challenges as well as how to best design a collaborative intelligence that include both human collective intelligence and artificial intelligence. 

Previous studies investigated how human, crowd, or machine can complement each other to enhance public decisions or services, as shown in healthcare (Sun and Medaglia 2019), bias and discretion reduction (Bullock 2019), and citizen-government communication through chatbots (Androutsopoulou et al. 2019). Furthermore, emerging collaborative intelligences have been built on a solid body of literature, including human-computer interaction (Correia, Melo, and Paiva 2019), hybrid human-machine (Dellermann et al. 2019), and collective hybrid intelligence (Moradi et al. 2019) to advance services and decision-making. Theoretical frameworks or best practices are needed to bring together these new developments for the public sector. For instance, Chen and Lee (2018) draw from e-government, collaborative governance, and network management to propose a collaborative data network for supporting information and decision-making in the public sector. Other public decisions on various traffic controls, disease preventions, and smart city planning would benefit from redesigning existing frameworks and regulations to accommodate those new developments.

This Call for Papers seeks to accumulate scholarly papers that explore the interactions of human, crowd, and/or machine and its associated strategies for designing collaborative intelligence. The track’s objectives include 1) identifying real-world practices and examples that have been implemented, 2) analyzing practices in the context of existing collaborative frameworks, 3) examining possible benefits, costs, risks, biases, or ethnic concerns or values to foster discussions, 4) creating actionable recommendations for public managers, AI developers, IT officers, and policy makers, and finally, 5) institutionalizing recommendations for collaborative intelligence in the public sector.

Overivew of subjects

  • Strategies for collaborative intelligence in the public sector
  • Strategies for collaborative platforms in government contexts
  • Designs for machine and human interaction for public services or policies 
  • Impacts of AI or IT on public engagement and crowdsourced data
  • Comparisons of outputs from AI, experts, and/or collective intelligence
  • Assessing bias in decision-making in AI experts, and/or collective intelligence 
  • Values in collaborative intelligence management and governance
  • Best practices of collaborative intelligence in the public sector
  • Ethical concerns for applying crowdsourced information and content
  • Ethical guidelines for applying AI on crowdsourced or user-generated data
  • And similar topics and relevant approaches

TRACK 2: Cross-border governance and service impact assessment

Track Chairs: Robert Krimmer (Tartu University, Estonia), Mihkel Solvak (Tartu University, Estonia) & Carsten Schmidt (Tartu University, Estonia)

The Single Digital Gateway Regulation (SDGR) mandates that cross-border access must be provided to 21 public services in 30 European countries by the end of 2023. These include services that affect all aspects of life, such as requesting a proof of residence or registering a vehicle. Providing such pervasive cross-border services requires the integration of many complex systems of various levels of technological development from different levels of governance across the EU and the EEA countries. Furthermore, making such changes of scope can have many different positive and negative effects, intended and unintended.

For these reasons, ideally every such policy intervention would be followed by an impact assessment (IA) and redesign effort. Unfortunately, the identification of causal effects of policies tends to come too late to make meaningful change. The development of digitalized services, which by design involve exchanging machine-readable data between registries, presents the opportunity to include IA into the design of the service, allowing for quantitative IA with low administrative burdens and ease-of-use for service consumers. 

The advent of cross-border digital services presents the opportunity to extend this logic beyond national borders, though also introducing new challenges in data access. Designing service delivery channels with later impact assessment in mind will allow for precise evidence-based service redesign to target services more accurately, speed up the policy evaluation cycle and result in more efficient and effective cross-border governance. Developing and piloting impact assessments and proposing automation of IA in a cross-border setting is highly relevant for effective cross-border joint service governance.

This track seeks research on cross-border governance and developing related impact assessments. We invite contributions from various backgrounds and disciplines. Topics include but are not limited to:

  • (Organisational) interoperability for cross-border services;
  • (Perceived) impact of cross-border digital public services;
  • Application areas, opportunities, limitations, risks of reusing public sector data;
  • B2G and B2B data-sharing for the public interest;
  • Cross-border identity solutions for non-residents;
  • Data provision and consumption using data exchange layers, data aggregators, and direct base registry access;
  • Data Sovereignty in cross-border services/governance;
  • Eco-system approaches towards data sharing;
  • Governance of national and cross-border b2g and b2b data-sharing;
  • Identification and authentication, including how to tackle issues of identity and/or record matching;
  • Open data and shared data;
  • Open Source for cross-border services in the EU;
  • Principles, operational models, legal issues, and technological tools to establish trusted B2B and B2G data-sharing collaborations;
  • Digital service cost-effectiveness and cost-efficiency analysis, causal inference;
  • Data driven policy making, digital service A/B testing;
  • Provisioning of API in the Public Sector;
  • Real-time economy;
  • Approaches for the development of extensible and re-usable, content-agnostic technical building blocks;
  • Technical, Economic and Political Approaches to establishing Digital Single Market initiatives;

TRACK 3: Digital Government and Sustainable Development Goals 

Track chairs: Rony Medaglia (Copenhagen Business School, Denmark) & Gianluca Misuraca (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain)

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) are shaping the global agenda in multiple areas, including public opinion, policy, and research. The 17 SDGs, detailed in 169 targets, have an ambition of linking separate goals of sustainable development across different areas, into a unitary vision. The main consequence of this new vision has been to move the focus beyond the individual instances of e.g., environmental impacts of human activities, or economic inequalities, and to link them in a coherent system within the framework of the Agenda for the Sustainable Development 2030.

Digitalization has the potential to represent an integral part of achieving sustainable development goals, In particular, digital government can act as enabler to sustainability, equity and social inclusion and it represents a cross-cutting objective across several SDGs at both sectoral and horizontal level, with a crucial importance in particular for the goal 16 that aims to ´Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels´.

The focus of the SDGs on core values such as efficiency, equity, transparency, privacy, security, and trust is in line with this year’s dg.o theme of “Digital Innovations for Public Values: Inclusive Collaboration and Community”. SDG values are, in fact, public values, and digital government has the potential to sustain their achievement.

This track invites contributions focusing on the potential benefits and challenges of digital government in supporting the achievement of SDGs and the role of digital technologies to sustain policy developments at both horizontal and sectoral level, including in particular the impact on democratic innovation and institutional reforms of governance systems. As the sustainability agenda gains increasing attention worldwide, there is more than ever need for original, rigorous, and theoretically-informed research on how digital government can support or hinder SDGs.

We invite studies on the design, management and evaluation of policies and implementation of digital government strategies in relation to the UN SDGs at global, national and local level. Papers that can combine methodological rigour with practical relevance and policy implications are particularly welcome.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • SDGs in digital government policy, design, and implementation
  • Artificial Intelligence in government and SDGs
  • The Internet of Things in government and SDGs
  • Blockchain in government and SDGs
  • Digital government policies and SDGs
  • Digital government infrastructure and SDGs
  • Digital government and pandemics
  • Digital government and climate change
  • Smart cities and SDGs
  • Impact of technology on Democracy and ethical aspects of AI in relation to SDGs

TRACK 4: Human-centric innovation in smart cities

Track chairs: Bettina Distel (University of Münster, Germany), Hendrik Scholta (University of Münster, Germany), & Tobias Brandt (University of Münster, Germany)

In the digital age, the transformation of a city to a smart city is in great motion as also indicated by the EU mission on climate-neutral and smart cities. Governments around the world are investing in the interconnection of virtual and non-virtual spaces, services are being increasingly provided digitally and proactively, and internal processes are often executed automatically. Such developments enable the integration of various areas of life the provision of new and innovative services to citizens, organizations, and businesses in the city ecosystem. These innovations go beyond the pure digitization of services and aim to achieve a more efficient, ecological and socially inclusive city. While advocates of these developments highlight positive effects on public value creation, the fast developments call critics to the scene. The pace with which new possibilities are evaluated and oftentimes put into practice, casts shadows on the idea of smart cities, sometimes turning it into dark dystopian image. The creation of a smart city hence risks becoming a technocratic frenzy where too much focus on technology and automation puts human beings in the background. This does not only entail questions of data (ab)use and data security. More than that, the interconnection and use of massive amounts of data in smart city ecosystems challenges human decision and sense-making authority. In the public sector in particular, where creation of public values is the core goal, balancing digital innovation on the one hand and human-centricity on the other hand becomes a major challenge in smart cities for both researchers and practitioners.

This track seeks research on smart cities that focusses on human-centric innovation. We invite contributions from various backgrounds and disciplines. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Effects of smart cities on human beings
  • Conceptual research on human-centricity and smart cities
  • Projects, platforms and applications in the smart city context
  • Human-centricity and artificial intelligence in smart cities
  • Trust and privacy issues in smart cities
  • Open data and open government, and trust
  • Smart city ethics
  • Data security in smart cities
  • Governance of digital sovereignty in smart cities
  • Data sharing and interoperability within and cross-border once-only
  • Proactive public services for a smart government
  • No-stop government, automation and human-centricity
  • Smart towns: digital concepts for small and medium-sized cities

TRACK 5: Social Media and Government 

Track chairs: Rodrigo Sandoval-Almazan (Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Mexico) & J. Ignacio Criado (university of Madrid, Spain)

Different digital innovations, such as social media and content sharing platforms, like other intelligent technologies, may challenge smarter cities, including governments and citizens’ interactions. For example, political opinion and polarization expressed in social media offer innovative (and sometimes unproductive) collective problem-solving and action modes. Governments have used social media for day-to-day communication and during emergencies to connect with citizens and organizations in two-way communications, such as providing critical information about evacuation routes and receiving timely tweets about damage in specific locations. At the same time, efficiency, equity, or efficacy concerns continue to rise as governments and political participants invest growing resources and energy in using social media. This research area needs a greater understanding of the organizational returns and social impact of this communication behavior and use. 

 The connection with the conference theme will be assured by the attention to related areas of research and practice. Papers selected for this track will advance knowledge, research, and practice in computational analysis, public policy, social and political participation, innovative governance, and public administration. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Intelligent cities and social media
  • Emergent technologies and social media communication
  • Intelligent government communication with social media and AI
  • The interplay between social media, transparency, participation, and collaboration.
  • Consequences of social media use on trust in government.
  • Social medial application to deliver governmental services.
  •  Policy design via social media.
  •  A civic and social engagement using social media.
  • Social media and disaster/emergency management.
  • Strategies to overcome fake news in social media.
  • Social media governance: strategies, policies, and applications.
  • Surveillance and privacy concerns arising from the use of social media.
  •  Using commercial channels to deliver governmental services. 
  • The ‘digital divide’ in social media use and effects.
  • Virtual/Augmented reality and social media.
  •  Social media, collective intelligence, and crowdsourcing.

TRACK 6: Sustainable Smart Cities

Track chairs: Leonidas Anthopoulos (University of Thessaly, Greece), Dongwook Kim (Seoul National University, Korea) & Soon Ae Chun (City University of New York, USA)

Smart Cities are enablers for smart growth, social coherence, and industrial transformation through technological innovations.  Industry 4.0 technologies, IoT, AI, 5G-readiness and big open data are only some of the key infrastructures that smart cities employ, while digital skills and extensive collaboration among the city stakeholders are key-elements that are being utilized for the digital transformation and for the smart governance of the local digital ecosystem. 

This year we are experiencing the post-epidemic mitigation period, where cities try to return to normality, establish their growth and prepare with planning against recent and future threats. The technology-based smart city innovations should make urban circularity and resilience as part of this planning. ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) circularity in cities appears to be more that the sum of multiplication of urban circular economies and it is increasingly the subject of policy innovations, urban strategies, and research & development agendas. Urban resilience on the other hand, expresses the ability of citizens and the community to keep on functioning and prospering despite the challenges that can face (i.e., inequity, poverty, violence, environmental threats etc.) and the shocks that can experience (i.e., disasters, terrorism/bioterrorism, pandemics). 

The cutting-edge technologies used to enable smart cities should attempt to enhance their resilience, efficiency and competitiveness, to lessen social discriminations and to improve the local quality of life.  We call for research and development, theoretical constructs, and practical experiences in developing the Resilient Smart Cities. 

More specifically, key infrastructure enables citizens’ equal access to public and utility services, while it can generate early alerts and enable disaster monitoring, epidemic surveillance and infrastructure redundancy. On the other hand, digital skills enhance digital maturity; they make the citizens data and digital service prosumers; they bring the local community closer to the local digital transformation and generate new jobs; and enable collaboration and governance that make everyone understand its role and commit in this transition that transforms smart cities to intelligent spaces. 

This track invites research and practices in smart cities that describes smart cities development strategies, policy models, citizen engagement, and technology innovations.  Topics include but not limited to technological innovations for Inclusive and Resilient Smart Cities, in the area of public health, mobility, energy, education, public safety, structures, natural environment, and business, as well as related issues of cybersecurity and privacy, community-based infrastructure resilience, urban informatics and governance. 


TRACK 7: Artificial Intelligence for Governments of the Future

Track chairs: Sehl Mellouli (Université Laval, Canada), Marijn Janssen (Delft University of Technology) & Adegboyega Ojo (Maynooth University, Ireland)

Artificial intelligence (AI) represents a new major research area for Governments. It brings new techniques and tools such as machine learning, natural language processing, robotics, that can be applied in different domains such as transport, healthcare, security, or energy. With the advantages that AI can bring, governments are paying more and more attention to this technology. Governments are not only looking at the applications of AI but also at the impacts that AI can have on different levels of government. The purpose of this track is to investigate how AI can be used in governments at different levels and what AI can add to governments and how to conditions for responsible adoption of AI in public organisations. 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Impact and evaluation of AI 
  • AI enabling transformation
  • AI machine learning techniques 
  • AI natural language processing techniques 
  • Deep learning techniques 
  • AI adoption and acceptance 
  • AI for decision and policy-making
  • Legal issues related to AI
  • AI and data quality 
  • AI and privacy & security 
  • AI and governments’ services
  • AI impacts on IT teams 
  • AI maturity models
  • Bots for governments
  • Comparative studies
  • AI for sustainable development
  • AI Governance

TRACK 8: Beyond Bureaucracy: disruptive approaches to e-democracy and e-government

Track chairs: Alois Paulin (University of Public Administration and Finance Ludwigsburg, Germany) , Robert Müller-Török (University of Public Administration and Finance Ludwigsburg, Germany) & Zach Bastick (University of Oxford, UK)

Mainstream e-governance & e-democracy research focuses on supporting existing principles of public governance or aims to advance provision of governance by means of visionary high-tech approaches. The objectives of mainstream e-governance & e-democracy can thus best be described as serving the needs of existing public-domain organizations (e.g. existing law enforcement, or public administration) or emerging such organizations (e.g. organizations linked to data privacy, environment protection, fight against terrorism); to this end, technology and research in scope of established e-governance / e-democracy serve to push the limits of the “3Es” (efficiency, effectiveness, economy) of the respective providers of social functions.

Beyond Bureaucracy as an emerging field of research on the other hand, takes up the challenge of controlling and steering providers of social functions and the delivery of social functions by means of technology. This field searches for approaches and models towards a standardize-able sustainable fiat framework system upon which future social function provision could base. Like steering a remote-controlled vehicle, such system would allow future communities to steer their public apparatus by means of technology. Moreover, this field must respect the forces that impact the development of smart government ecosystems, within which Beyond Bureaucracy can emerge (i.e., data; openness; organization readiness; points, code and means of interaction).

In line with the conference theme, the track explores how digital government can allow public values can emerge. The track is specifically interested in how technology can enable this through new or renewed political structures and processes. The track covers an array of timely and highly relevant topics including:

  • Bottom-up or grass-roots online responses to COVID-19 
  • Designing collaborative or inclusive government
  • Human, crowd, and machine intelligence in the service of democracy
  • New limitations to self-governance, e.g. bots, misinformation, algorithmic obscurity
  • New possibilities to self-governance, e.g. direct democracy, liquid democracy
  • Normative evaluations of the desirability of governance through technology
  • Theoretical or empirical proposals or analyses of new forms of governance 
  • Ethics and morals in digital governance
  • Participatory governance, budgeting
  • Artificial Intelligence for policymaking

TRACK 9: Data-driven Governance through Information Retrieval and Decision Support Systems

Track chairs: Charalampos Alexopoulos (University of the Aegean, Greece) & Shefali Virkar (Danube University Krems, Austria)

Decision making may be broadly thought of as the process of making choices through the identification of a dilemma or decision point or point of divergence. Data-driven Governance corresponds to a new way of accessing, retrieving and analysing appropriate and/or relevant information towards more effective and efficient policy and decision making. Complex governance systems and digitalisation result in the production of large amounts of various kinds of information that need to be retrieved and processed in order to provide meaningful insights, assess the relative significance of alternative solutions against a set of values or preferences and finally support decision and policy making. This involves the information retrieval from various sources and domains, the semantic annotation of data and text as well as the processing of large quantities through high performance computing. 

Advanced decision support systems (DSS) and tools are increasingly being used in digital governance in order to support, or indeed facilitate, long-term and sustainable policy and decision-making. An example of such a system could be derived from the legal domain, in an effort of retrieving and processing legal information providing legal analytics. However, the potential for synergies between sophisticated decision support technologies and advanced big data search and retrieval infrastructures has not yet been fully explored. 

The purpose of this track is to critically examine this interrelationship in the pursuit of improved digital governance and the associated benefits, challenges and risks. This track encourages the submission of high-quality and original papers on the theory, experimentation, and practice of information retrieval and decision support systems towards better (data-driven) governance; this primarily includes sources of textual information but could also include numerical data and multi-modal information. This track addresses a range of similar or related research questions, topics and practices regarding sophisticated information retrieval infrastructures and advanced decision systems, support tools and services.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Technical, political, social, economic aspects of Information Retrieval
  • Development of technologies for advanced Information Retrieval
  • Information retrieval for better information quality
  • Information retrieval for better decision making under conditions of uncertainty or risk
  • Text mining techniques for analysis
  • Decision support systems types, issues and risks
  • Open government data infrastructures for decision making
  • Legal information analytics for governance
  • Environmental data infrastructures 
  • Crisis management infrastructures
  • Semantic data interoperability and ontological approaches
  • Decision making theory and models as the basis for advanced DSS
  • Development of technologies for advanced Decision Support
  • Smart decision making
  • Technical, political, social, economic aspects of DSS 
  • Decision support analytics
  • Big, Open, Linked Data Analytics and Management
  • User aspects, including information interaction, contextualisation, personalisation, simulation, characterisation, and behaviours
  • System and foundational aspects, including retrieval models and architectures, content analysis and classification, recommendation algorithms, query processing and ranking, efficiency and scalability
  • Machine learning, deep learning and neural models, natural language processing, and graph models applied to information retrieval and interaction
  • Applications such as web search, recommender systems, web and social media apps, professional and domain-specific search, novel interfaces to search tools, intelligent search, and conversational agents
  • Evaluation research, including new metrics and novel methods for the measurement and evaluation of retrieval systems, users, and/or applications
  • Relevant case studies.

TRACK 10: GovTech & Data strategy planning

Track Chairs: Nitesh Bharosa (Delft University of Technology), Hun-Yeong Kwon (Korea University, South Korea) & Dirk Draheim (TalTech, Estonia)

GovTech refers to socio-technical solutions provided by market parties for facilitating processes in the public sector. Across the globe, market parties are providing GovTech solutions to citizens and public agencies that surpass the functionalities and user experience of existing digital government systems. Many GovTech solutions build on advanced technologies such as digital wallets, trust services, AI and blockchain to deliver more tailored and user-friendly services. However, many governments are struggling with policy development on GovTech. This requires comprehensive agendas of national data strategies development. The role of a data strategy is to provide departments and agencies with a roadmap for more strategic use of data. Looking at the status quo, while data has become a key enabler of digital innovation and economic advance, the world is competing in strategical renovation considering data use, open, assessment, risk management, and dysfunction control. This track invites papers focusing on this niche in GovTech and national data strategies. 


TRACK 11: Organizational Factors, Adoption Issues and Digital Government Impacts

Track chairs: Jing Zhang (Clark University, USA), Chris Hinnant (Florida State University, USA) & Lei Zheng (Fudan University, China)

To build intelligent government and intelligent society, public organizations employ advanced information and communication technologies (ICTs) to facilitate communication and transactions with many stakeholders such as residents, private sector businesses, non-profit organizations, and other government agencies. The adoption and implementation of new ICTs by public organizations is influenced by organizational factors such as the availability of resources (i.e. funding, infrastructure, technological knowledge, and personnel), leadership, trust, stakeholder involvement, organization’s structure and culture, as well as inter-organizational dynamics if the initiative cut across multiple organizations. Similarly, the adoption of ICTs in government and society has generated important impacts on the organizational processes, effectiveness, and innovativeness of public organizations, as well as the new governance structure of the government and the smartness of the society. In this context, this track solicits research that examines the organizational factors that influence the adoption and implementation, and impact of new and emerging innovative technologies such as smart governance, artificial intelligence, open data, social media, citizen-centric technologies, and other novel technologies that rely on open and large data sets. Furthermore, this track seek research on the adoption of innovative policies or practices that seek to facilitate the strategic use of various ICTs by public organizations.


TRACK 12. Blockchain-based applications for e-Government

Track Chairs: Jolien Ubacht (Delft University of Technology), Svein Ølnes (Western Norway Research Institute, Norway) & Sélinde van Engelenburg (Delft University of Technology)

Digital innovations for public services require solid analysis of extant information architectures, processes and involved stakeholders in order to develop design criteria for the implementation of the digital innovation. Governmental organizations need a thorough understanding of the blockchain design principles, the possible applications in the domain of e-government and the exploration of governance mechanisms to deal with the limitations and challenges of the BC technology. Case studies can contribute to gain this understanding and as such illustrate where the potentials of blockchain technologies are in G2G, B2G and C2G processes. The rise of the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence present new challenges for the integration and responsible use of blockchain-based applications.

Moreover, the innovation needs to be assessed on its contribution to the creation of public values, in order to mitigate unwanted effects. Now that blockchain-based applications for public services are not only explored, developed but also implemented and scaling up, we can draw lessons learnt. Therefore, this track on blockchain-based applications for e-Government, will benefit from papers that address several stages of the development of blockchain-based applications. In view of the theme of the d.go2022 conference, we particularly also invite use cases on the level of smart cities, inclusion of citizens and government to citizens (G2C) applications.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Case studies into blockchain-based applications in G2G, B2G and G2C processes
  • Design criteria for blockchain-based applications
  • Blockchain for Good: examples of how blockchain can contribute to inclusive societies, the social domain, healthcare, and circular economy
  • Self-Sovereign Identities
  • Privacy issues in blockchain-based applications (e.g. GDPR)
  • Integration of blockchain, artificial intelligence, IoT to address societal challenges and/or for data analytics and enhanced public services
  • Challenges for responsible and sustainable blockchain-based applications
  • Theoretical studies that address potential governance issues in blockchain-based applications
  • Interoperability of distributed ledgers for trans-sectoral applications
  • Evaluations or overviews of blockchain-based applications in G2G, B2G and C2G
  • The potential of blockchain for electronic voting
  • Governance issues of blockchain, e.g. how to organize governance of decentralized applications?

TRACK 13. Legal Informatics

Track Chairs: Peter Parycek (Frauenhofer Fokus, Germany), Charalabidis Yannis (University of the Aegean, Greece) & Anna-Sophie Novak (Danube University Krems, Austria)

The application of ICT technologies in the administrative and legal field pose great challenges for both technicians and legal professionals. Additionally, there is the question of how these applied technologies can and/or must be legally regulated. Many of these technologies rely on the use of large amounts of data. In this context, questions arise as to how data usage might be regulated in order to generate the greatest possible benefit for society. With these challenges in mind, we invite papers on the legal, technical, ethical, theoretical and practical questions that arise within the multidisciplinary field of legal informatics. This track invites research and practices concerning the theory and interdisciplinary foundations for the use of artificial intelligence techniques in the legal domain, legal implications of big data applications (challenges to privacy, autonomy, governance, equity, and fairness), a legislative framework for legal informatics on a European and national level and better regulation. Specific interest areas include the field of privacy (policies, regulations, strategies, recommendations), models of legal and ethical knowledge, including concepts (legal ontologies), rules, cases, principles, values, procedures and society models, legal interactions of autonomous agents and digital institutions and applications and use cases.

Technologies are a challenge for governance, but they also offer opportunities. This is all the more true for the legal sector. Here, there are opportunities to support lengthy legislative processes or administrative procedures with novel technologies, to regulate new technologies in such a way that as many people as possible can benefit, and to think of novel and innovative ways to use data in a way that adds value to society as a whole.

With these challenges in mind, we invite papers on the legal, technical, societal, ethical, theoretical and practical questions that arise within the multidisciplinary field of legal informatics:

    • Contributions to the theory and interdisciplinary foundations digitizing the legal domain;
    • Legal challenges regarding digital decision-making;
    • Representation languages and formalisms for legal knowledge;
    • Models of legal and ethical knowledge, including concepts (legal ontologies), rules, cases, principles, values, procedures and society models;
    • Models of legal interactions of autonomous agents and digital institutions,
    • Legal implications of big data applications: challenges to privacy, autonomy, governance, equity, and fairness ;
    • Legislative framework for legal informatics on a European and national level; Better regulation
    • Privacy: policies, regulations, strategies, recommendations; 
    • Open Data regulations on a European and national level in the context of legal informatics
  • Applications and use cases: implementations of legal informatics systems under realistic conditions

Track 14. Digital Transformation in Governments

Track chairs:  Beatriz Barreto Brasileiro Lanza (CTG SUNY & IDB, Brazil), Thiago José Tavares Ávila ( Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Brazil), Maria Alexandra Cunha *Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Brazil)

Digital transformation has become an essential part of the government’s strategic agenda, both at national and sub-national levels. Such governments seek to offer services through digital platforms with integrated citizen identification systems, digitization of governmental processes, with respect to the privacy of personal data, and digital inclusion of the most vulnerable population. However, digital transformation initiatives at the subnational level tend to present specific aspects when compared to national initiatives. On the one hand, this track highlights the challenges faced by subnational digital transformation initiatives in the public sector, as well as national governments that have acted to develop and integrate national digital transformation considering subnational aspects. On the other hand, it seeks to understand the capacities supporting the digital transformation at the subnational level. The track’s objectives are: a) to identify real-world examples/cases of digital transformation projects at the subnational levels (states, regions, Länder, provinces, municipalities, etc.); b) discuss the challenges to develop a digital and integrated government considering national and subnational aspects, especially in federative countries; c) seek to explain these cases in the context of existing or new theoretical frameworks, and, d) create actionable recommendations for researchers, professional developers, and digital government practitioners at the national and subnational level.

This topic stands out for prioritizing the investigation of digital transformation in subnational governments, seeking to understand and identify the most relevant aspects of subnational initiatives aimed at building more digital governments. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Citizen’s digital and secure identification;
  • Protection of users’ personal data;
  • Development of new models aimed at the relationship between the government and the Citizen (Citizenship Relationship Management – CzRM), specially using multi or omnichannel experiences.
  • Promotion of transparency, openness and sharing of public data with a view to endowing public sector business processes with greater intelligence and automation of repetitive tasks;
  • Incorporation of new technologies for the production and management of public sector knowledge such as Artificial Intelligence, as well as for increasing the security and trust of digital relationships, based on blockchain and similar technologies;
  • Mechanisms for social participation in improving and monitoring the quality of public service offerings, as well as promoting the role of citizens in proposing improvements in service delivery procedures and the development of public policies;
  • Collaborative governance instruments that provide greater stakeholder engagement in the value generated by the public sector, including the development of institutional arrangements and cooperation aimed at sharing and strengthening the capacities necessary for the development of the digital government;
  • Challenges of the digital divide in the digital government era;
  • Gender and Human Rights issues in the digital government era;
  • Institutional relations, cooperation, arrangements and partnerships for Digital Government;
  • Federative relations for Digital Government development.