www.icsd.aegean.gr/is-lab

INFORMATION SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT

An ISI-Indexed Journal / Taylor & Francis Group

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/10580530.asp

 Special Issue on:

European Research on Electronic Citizen Participation and Engagement in Public Policy Making

Guest  Editors

Aims and Scope

The rapid development and the growing penetration of digital technologies provide rich opportunities for more extensive participation and engagement of citizens in public policy and decision making and in general for increasing the influence of society on government. They offer possibilities for strengthening political deliberation and establishing new participatory models of governance through electronic means which reduce existing limitations associated with time, location, cost and physical presence.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have the potential to support the provision of information concerning government activities, decisions and public policies, and also to increase both the quantity and quality of consultation with the citizens. Also, ICT has the potential to support both top-down government initiatives and ground-up civil society ones, both aiming at enhancing public participation in the decision processes and improving interaction between society and government. ICT enable the collection of huge amounts of citizens’ knowledge on the problems and needs that public policies attempt to address, and on proposed courses of government action and legislation. At the same time ICT also enable the exploitation of this knowledge for the assessment of the impact of various policy options on society, so that governments can make better and more informed decisions.

However, it is necessary investigate to what extent this potential is actually exploited, what is the impact of the existing exploitation, and which contextual factors affect positively or negatively this impact. Furthermore, it is important to discover new ways of exploiting this huge potential and using ICT for increasing citizens’ participation and engagement in public policy making, and to proceed to pilot applications of them in ‘real-life’ cases and conditions in order to assess their value, and if necessary improve and optimize them.

Especially in Europe, due to its long tradition of social state characterized by strong interaction with the society and intervention in order to secure social welfare and support of weak groups (European Social Model), there is a strong interest in the above ideas. For this reason in the last ten years there has been extensive financial support by several institutions, such as the European Commission and the National and Local Governments, of research in this domain of ICT-supported/mediated citizen participation and engagement in public policy making for investigating the above research questions. It is quite interesting to reflect on the results and conclusions of this research, and attempt to exploit them both in Europe and in other parts of the world, probably with adaptations to local histories and political traditions.    

This Special Issue of ‘Information Systems Management’ solicits original high quality papers presenting this ‘European Research on Electronic Citizen Participation and Engagement in Public Policy Making’. Topics of interest in this area include, but are not limited to:

•            Innovative forms of ICT use for supporting and enhancing citizens’ participation

•            Advanced systems for structured high quality deliberation

•            Social media platforms and their applications for supporting citizens’ participation

•            Textual analysis technologies, ontologies and taxonomies

•            Opinion mining and sentiment analysis

•            Data and argument visualization technologies

•            Federated content syndication systems for public participation

•            Trend monitoring and policy analysis

•            Policy modeling and impact assessment

•            Data-powered collective intelligence and action

•            Studying the impact and the overall value proposition of e-Participation

•            Methods for the evaluation of e-Participation      

•            Serious Games, simulation and virtual worlds for supporting policy making

•            Case studies from e-Participation and e-Consultation

•           Theoretical aspects towards a scientific base for ICT enabled Governance

Authors are invited to prepare original manuscripts of around 7500 words, exclusive of exhibits, according to the ‘Instructions for Authors’ web-page of the Journal:

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=1058-0530&linktype=44

At the end of each paper should be placed short biographical notes for all the authors, and also address for correspondence and e-mail address for the corresponding author.

Papers should be written in grammatically correct and coherent English. Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. All papers will be refereed through a peer review process. All submissions must provide:

- an abstract (max of 75 words)

- at least 3 keywords

- full author names and affiliations

- brief author bios

- an email address for the corresponding author

Prospective authors are welcome to submit an abstract to the Guest Editors for preliminary feedback on the appropriateness of their planned manuscript.

Send your manuscript to the corresponding Guest Editor, Prof. Euripidis N. Loukis ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

Schedule

•            Submission deadline: November 15, 2011

•            Completion of first review: January 15, 2012

•            Revisions deadline: March 15, 2011

•            Camera-ready deadline: April 15, 2012

•                 Tentative publication: Fall 2012