TRACK 5 – Open government, civic participation, and engagement

António Tavares
University of Minho, Portugal
Efthimios Tambouris
University of Macedonia, Greece
Yogesh Dwivedi
Swansea University, United Kingdom

Digital technologies are instrumental in improving the openness, transparency, and accountability of institutions and the participation and engagement of citizens in societal activities. They offer governments the possibility to streamline and transform their communication processes and relationships with citizens, businesses, and other non-government actors through multiple digital channels. This more engaging governance model brings together the government and other stakeholders for discussion and policy-making decisions from the early stages of policy formulation until the monitoring of its implementation. It also provides open and linked data across all sectors of the economy, thus enhancing transparency, accountability, and springing entrepreneurship. This Track seeks innovative contributions in the form of new approaches, case studies or more theoretical and visionary papers that cross the boundaries of traditional bureaucracy and show the potential of e-Participation, e-Voting, collaborative and participatory online politics, and the future of digital democracy. This Track also invites papers on the application of crowdsourcing in the public sector to collect policy‑relevant information, knowledge, opinions, proposals, and ideas from citizens and public value co-creation with citizens and businesses. The role, adoption and use of social media to promote and transform civic participation and engagement is also a topic of interest of this Track.