Enhancing Public Participation, Interaction, and Innovation in Government

Minitrack Description

This minitrack focuses on the interactions between the public, civil society, the private sector, and governments.

Governments around the world are seeking innovative ways to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and transparency of government. This track focuses on research that focuses on those goals, particularly through citizen participation, co-creation, and innovation in governmental procedures and practices facilitated through digital government-enabled services, resources, and technologies. The research areas can include participatory government; leveraging community knowledge through crowdsourcing; encouraging governance through transparency initiatives; supporting co-design and collaborative government through openness; using open and big data for policy- and decision-making; fostering openness through partnerships and collaborations with residents, civil society, and the private sector; promoting innovations in open data release, applications, and use; reducing corruption; studying how governments/governmental institutions might be influenced through openness and transparency efforts; and understanding innovation in government settings. This minitrack also includes research focused on the involvement of non-governmental actors in the development, use, and evaluation of e-Government and participatory government dynamics, initiatives, and systems, including research that develops and explores open and transparent government frameworks, theories, evaluation, and practice.

Open government is an approach which purposefully emphasizes and re-invigorates the basic principle of responsive, engaged, and innovative government. Through Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), committed administrative leadership, international initiatives such as the Open Government Partnership, countries around the world have now entered an era of unprecedented transparency of government operations and decision-making intended to lead to a more responsive, accountable, collaborative, participatory, innovative, and trustworthy government.

Additionally, involvement of the public and the private sector in the creation, design, and evaluation of e-Government initiatives, technologies, and services can lead to more effective digital tools for engagement and participation in the long run.

We welcome theoretical papers as well as quantitative and qualitative studies on the topics. Good case studies with strong implications for theory and practice also will be accepted.

Minitrack topics include, but are not limited to:

• Theories and quantitative and qualitative studies on open government
• Open/transparent government initiatives around the world
• Innovation in the public sector
• Technologies enabling/inhibiting open/transparent government
• Crowdsourcing in government
• Co-creation in government
• Collaborative design and participation by citizens
• E-Citizen, e-Democracy and e-Participation
• Participation and deliberation
• Freedom of information and transparency
• Studies of citizens and democratic processes in social media and/or virtual worlds
• Impact on society, communities, companies, and government
• Best practices and pitfalls in open government, public engagement, collaboration
• Technology-based approaches to making government information available
• Studies of the universal access requirements of e-Government
• Impact of policy on transparency and openness
• Methods, practices, and approaches to assess the success of open government efforts
• Privacy, security, and the right to know

More information on the minitrack chairs:

John Carlo Bertot, Ph.D./Syracuse, is Professor at the University of Maryland's College of Information Studies. He also serves as Co-Director of the Information Policy & Access Center. His research and teaching focus on information policy, equitable access, and public service innovation. He served as editor of Government Information Quarterly from 2000-2015, and is past-president of the Digital Government Society.

Scott P. Robertson, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he is also the founder and director of HICHI, the Hawaii Computer-Human Interaction Lab. He teaches and conducts research in the area of Human-Computer Interaction, specifically social networking and digital government. Scott earned his PhD from Yale University (1983), an M.A. in Psychology/Cognitive Science from California State University, Fullerton (1979), and a B.A. in Psychology from the University of California, Irvine (1976).

Mitch Cochran is the Information Systems Manager for the City of Monrovia, California. His research interests are governance, operations, and e-Government. He has been active in the Municipal Information Systems Association of California (MISAC), working on statewide audits and education programs. He earned a Masters in Homeland Security from Penn State (2008) and in Administration from UC Riverside (1984) along with a B.S. in Statistics from UC Riverside (1982).