Over the past two decades, the objectives of public sector investment into information technology and electronic government have changed: from increasing the quality and efficiency of internal government operations, through delivering better public services and making them available across traditional and electronic channels, to facilitating administrative and institutional reform, engaging citizens in policy- and decision-making processes, and directly supporting policy and development goals within and across the health, education, economy, security and other sectors. To address these objectives, contributions are required from an increasing range of actors, including: political and government leaders, public managers, agency staff (management, technical and service-level), business and non-profit partners, and citizens. These actors need to possess the competences (knowledge, skills and attitudes) required to perform their respective (sometimes multiple) roles, and to work effectively together.

The minitrack is focused upon the acquisition, utilization, and continued development of the competencies required in the planning, development, and usage of public sector information technology and e-government. Of interest are enquiries and cases related to: actors and their responsibilities and roles; competencies requirement by different roles; competency-building approaches including academic and professional education, training, apprenticeship and capacity building; body of knowledge, competency frameworks and curriculum development; pedagogical approaches, learning innovation, technology and gaming; assessment methods, certification and licensing; and others. Also of interest are enquiries and cases related to the organizational environment: continued and institutionalized learning; competency-based personnel management; accreditation; professional societies and associations; internationalization and competency transfer.

Topics and research areas include, but are not limited to:

1. -E-government stakeholders and competency needs
   

2. -E-government knowledge requirements
   

3. -Literacy and skills for e-government
   

4. -E-competency frameworks and architectures
   

5. -E-government body of knowledge
   

6. -Curriculum design, maintenance and integration for e-government
   

7. -Planning and design of e-government education and training programs
   

8. -Learning methods, classroom innovation and pedagogy for e-government
   

9. -Open learning in e-government
   

10. -Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC) in e-government learning
    

11. -Technology, gaming and simulation in e-government learning
    

12. -Academic, professional and continued e-government education
    

13. -Development of e-government profession
    

14. -Professional and career development in e-government
    

15. -E-government competency-based management
    

16. -Retraining government practitioners for e-government
    

17. -E-government education policy and leadership
    

18. -Accreditation and licensing for e-government
    

19. -Government Chief Information Officer profession
    

20. -Conceptual and theoretical foundations for e-government education
    

21. -Benchmark and case studies in e-government education
    

22. -Foresight studies and future of e-government education
    

23. -Educational technologies in government
    

24. -Multimedia-based communication skills for citizens and civil servants
    

25. -Mobile multimedia-based communication skills for citizens and civil servants
    

26. -Natural versus legal language skills for government-citizen interaction
    

More co-chair information

Elsa Estevez, PhD, is an Academic Program Officer at UNU-IIST and a Senior Researcher at UNU-IIST Center for Electronic Governance (EGOV). She has many years of industrial, academic and management experience in Information Technology in banking, commerce, governance and pharmaceutical sectors. In the EGOV Center, she manages research and development projects, and organizes and teaches courses, workshops and schools; she contributed to building EGOV awareness and capacity in 20 developing and transition countries. In particular, Elsa Estevez chaired the jury of the 2nd Gulf Cooperation Council e-Government Award in Kuwait in 2011, and co-chaired 5 editions of the ICEGOV conference and 9 editions of the Workshop on Software Engineering, part of the Argentinean Congress on Computer Sciences. Her projects and activities were funded by Macao Foundation, IDRC and several national governments. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from the National University of the South, Argentina.

Wojciech Cellary, PhD, is a computer scientist, head of the Department of Information Technology at the Poznan University of Economics. In his professional career he worked at nine universities in Poland, France, and Italy. His research interests are currently focused on electronic business and government, information society, Internet technologies, and multimedia. He is an author of 11 books and over 150 scientific papers. He gives lectures on electronic business to over 700 students per year. He was a leader of many national and international scientific and industrial projects. He served as a consultant to several Polish ministries, Polish Parliament and Senate, as well as European Commission. He has been a main organizer of 37 scientific national and international conferences including last year the 6th European Ministerial eGovernment Conference and Exhibition “Borderless eGovernment Services for Europeans”, Poznan, Poland, which is a major European event in the area of e-government.

Jim Davies, PhD, studied mathematics at New College, Oxford, joining the Computing Laboratory in 1986 for a Masters' and doctorate. After working as a researcher and lecturer in computer science, at Oxford and Reading, he became a lecturer in software engineering at Oxford in 1995. He has led the Software Engineering Programme since 2000, and was made Professor of Software Engineering in 2006. Jim directs a program of advanced, professional education in software engineering, teaching advanced techniques to people working full-time in industry.  He is leading the development of semantics-driven technology for medical research and electronic governance, and a related program of work into the automatic generation of systems from re-usable models of structure and functionality.