Friday, December 17, 2010

New Book on Open Governance by Springer: Call for Chapter Proposals

CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS
Empowering Open and Collaborative Governance:
Technologies and Methods for On-line Citizen Engagement
in Public Policy Making

A book to be published by Springer Verlag - http://www.springer.com

A book edited by:
                   
Yannis Charalabidis
University of the Aegean, Greece

Sotirios Koussouris
National Technical University of Athens

Introduction
Moving towards the direction of open governance roadmaps as adopted worldwide, on-line citizen engagement stands out as a new domain, important both for decision makers and citizens. Over the last decade, there has been a variety of projects and initiatives powered by policy makers, researchers, ICT vendors and citizens, that are targeting the actively citizen involvement through various digital platforms and means.  Such attempts promote ideas and solutions that could help minimize the democratic deficit and to support the active re-engagement of citizens to the decision making process, thus making governance more open, transparent, interactive and trustworthy.
In parallel, new attempts for evidence-based decision making and citizen involvement now include methods for massive data visualization, interactive argumentation, linked governmental data as well as connected social media platforms and collaborative systems over cloud infrastructures.

Objective of the Book
This title aims at providing the latest research findings such as theoretical foundations, principles, methodologies, architectures, technical frameworks, cases and lessons learnt within the domain of open governance and on-line citizen engagement. The book will constitute a new approach to addressing the issue of implementing open collaborative governance solutions and initiatives, providing both research and practice results. Unique characteristics that distinguish the publication from existing titles are the systematic analysis of the domain, the all-around view of political, legal, technical and user-oriented aspects and the inclusion of reviews, case reports and evaluation of international initiatives. The book will contribute to the systematic analysis and publication of cutting-edge methods, tools and approaches for assisting the relevant stakeholders in their quest for a more efficient participative public policy debate, allowing the utilisation of the capabilities provided by ICT.
These research findings are organized along the following main areas of contribution:
·         Public policy debate foundations: Processes and methods for scoping, planning, evaluating and transforming citizen engagement
·         Information and Communication Technologies for citizen participation
·         Future research directions of open, collaborative ICT-enabled governance
Since Open and Collaborative Governance is a multi-disciplinary domain, new research challenges are bound to touch on Semantics, Social Media Platforms, Web Service Technologies, Social Sciences, Service Oriented Architectures and Model Driven approaches.

Target Audience
The audience of the book includes researchers and practitioners in the Electronic Governance domain, public administration officials, policy makers and decision drivers at local, national or international levels, engaged both in design and creation of policies and services, , university students and professors of Computer, Social, Political an Management sciences, ICT industry staff engaged in eGovernance and Policy Modelling projects and solutions, and participants of related FP7 research and CIP/PSP innovation projects.

Recommended Chapter topics
On “Public policy debate foundation”
·       Models & metrics for assessing the public debate at various level
·       Methods for the evaluation of eParticipation, from the policy maker, the administration, the citizen and the researcher/practitioner perspectives
·       Studying the impact and the overall value proposition of eParticipation initiatives
·       Case studies from eParticipation or other public policy debate implementations involving cross-country, multilingual deliberation
On “Information and Communication Technologies for citizen participation”
·       Tools for implementing large public debates
·       Textual analysis technologies, ontologies and taxonomies
·       Federated content syndication systems for public participation, enabling the deployment of ubiquitous, citizen-driven, open data infrastructures
·       Data and argument visualisation technologies
·       Sentiment analysis and opinion mining, trend monitoring and policy analysis
·       Social media platforms and their applications for supporting citizen participation
·       Serious Games, simulation and virtual worlds for facilitating Policy Modelling
On “Future research directions of open, collaborative ICT-enabled governance”
·       Theoretical Frameworks of eGovernance processes
·       Research on a Model-based collaborative governance
·       Data-powered collective intelligence and action
·       Addressing Digital Divide and Social Exclusion through eGovernance
·       Governmental Service Infrastructures
·       Future Internet and eGovernance
·       Theoretical aspects towards a scientific base for ICT enabled Governance

Submission Procedure

Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit on or before 1st February 2011, a 2-3 page chapter proposal, in plain Word format, explaining the mission and contents of the proposed chapter. Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by February 15, 2011 about the status of their proposals and sent chapter guidelines. Full chapters are expected to be submitted by 1st June 2011. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis.

Important Dates

Proposal Chapters Due:            1st February 2011
Full Chapters Due:                     1st June 2011
Camera – Ready Chapters Due: 1st October  2011
Final Publication Due:                Winter 2011-2012

Inquiries and submissions can be forwarded electronically to:
Ass. Prof. Yannis Charalabidis
University of the Aegean
Lymperis Building, 83200 Karlovassi, Samos, Greece
e-mail: yannisx@aegean.gr

The CFC is also available as a PDF, here

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

SMART 2010 - 1st International Workshop on Service Modelling and Representation Techniques

The SMART workshop was held in conjunction with the Service Wave conference in Ghent, on 13th December 2010, and addressed issues related to modelling holistic service systems. Going beyond Web services or SOA, SMART aims to contribute to a holistic approach of designing, building and managing IT-enabled real-world services.

SMART workshop major focus is on service specific aspects like co-creation mechanics, service network structure and dynamics, service value exchange, service interaction processes as well as service flexibility, variation and customization to name just a few.  SMART 2010 included the following presentations:

  • Arne Berre Keynote Speech
  • Konstadinos Kutsikos and Gregoris Mentzas: A Service Portfolio Model for Value Creation in Networked Enterprise Systems
  • Erik Wittern and Christian Zirpins: On the Use of Feature Models for Service Design: the Case of Value Representation
  • Yan Wang and Willem-Jan van den Heuvel: Towards A Hybrid Simulation Modelling Framework for Service Networks
  • Yehia TAHER, Willem-Jan Van Den Heuvel and Sotirios Koussouris: Empowering Citizens in Public Service Design and Delivery: a Reference Model and Methodology
  • Susan Stucky, Melissa Cefkin, Yolanda Rankin and Ben Shaw: Modeling the Co-creation of Value in Complex IT Service Engagements
  • Yannis Charalabidis and Fenareti Lampathaki: A Description Framework for Digital Public Services
  • Aditya Ghose: The Business Service Representation Language: A Preliminary Report


In the discussion that followed, several issues were discussed, relating to a unified modelling method for services of any kind, service collaboration patterns and service value modelling and simulation.

Organising Committee 
Yannis Charalabidis, NTUA
Christos Georgousopoulos, INTRASOFT International S.A.
Alan Hartman, IBM
Willem-Jan van den Heuvel, Uni Tilburg
Anshu N Jain, IBM
Antonis Ramfos, INTRASOFT International S.A.
Christian Zirpins, KI

A view of the COCKPIT project presentation 

For more information on Service Wave: http://servicewave.eu/2010/
For more information on the SMART Workshop: http://www.cockpit-project.eu/smart2010

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Mobile Development Fiesta at Aegean University: Android training

Mobile development training in University of Aegean continued with Google Android, on 8th December 2010.   More than 30 pre-graduate and post-graduate students attended the course on Android mobile development platform,which took place within the curriculum of the Information and Communication Systems Engineering (ICSD) Department, more specifically the "Software Engineering" lesson, organised by the Information Systems Lab.


Ioannis Panagiotopoulos, an Android Development Engineer at Athens Technology Centre (ATC)  delivered more a hands-on training on the new features of  Android, including sample applications development and marketing.

The mobile development training in ICSD - Uni Aegean is one of the activities leading to the empowerment of a students and graduate young engineers team for developing innovative, free mobile applications for citizens and businesses, for academic and research purposes.
 
Ioannis Panagiotopoulos and students at Android training