Empowering Open and Collaborative Governance

Yannis Charalabidis is an assistant professor at the University of the Aegean, in the area of e-Governance information systems, coordinating policy making, research and pilot application projects for governments and enterprises worldwide.  Over the last 15 years he has been the coordinator or technical leader in numerous European and national research projects in the areas of e-Business and e-Governance.  In addition, Yannis is a contributing member in several standardisation and technology policy committees. He publishes and teaches on government service systems, enterprise interoperability, government transformation and citizen participation; and he was the Best Paper Award winner of the EGOV 2008 Conference, Best e-Government Paper Nominee in the 42nd HICSS Conference, and 1st Prize Nominee in the 2009 European e-Government Awards.Sotirios Koussouris holds a PhD in information systems and business process management and an MBA in techno-economic systems. He has over seven years of experience in information systems and telecommunication technologies with special skills in areas like e-Government technologies and applications, e-Participation, social media, and business process modelling. Over the last years, he has worked on numerous European and national projects on e-Government and e-Participation; and has published extensively on these topics in international journals and at conferences.

• Section I - Public Policy Debate Foundations: Processes and Methods for Scoping, Planning, Evaluating and Transforming Citizen Engagement.- Democratic Legitimacy and Recruitment Strategies in eParticipation Projects.- Collaboration for Open Innovation Processes in Public Administrations.- An Integrated Methodology for the Evaluation of ePetitions.- Assessing a Measurement Model for Digital Political Participation: A Multidisciplinary Point of View.- Online Engagement from the Grassroots: Reflecting on over a Decade of ePetitioning Experience in Europe and the UK.- Evaluating eParticipation Projects and Lessons Learnt.- Section II - Information and Communication Technologies for Citizen Participation.- Knowing the Law as a Pre-Requisite to Participative eGovernment: the Role of Semantic Technologies.- Regional Participation Model to Engage Citizens in Distant Decision Making.- Visualisation of Online Discussion Forums.- Distributed Discussion: An Integrated eParticipation Model for Engaging Young People in Technology Policy.- Open Collaboration in Policy Development: Concept and Architecture to Integrate Scenario Development and Formal Policy Modelling.- Section III - Future Research Directions of Open, Collaborative ICT-enabled Governance.- ICT as the Facilitator of Postmodern and Empowered Forms of Citizenship – Myth or Reality?.- A Critical Analysis of EU-Funded eParticipation.- ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling: Visionary Directions and Research Paths.

"The collection of articles in this book covers the subject of empowering open and collaborative governance comprehensively and demonstrates the diversity of tools and methods, when tackling the issues and concerns in research and practice. (...). It provides an important contribution for researchers of all forms of digital governance." From the foreword by Ann Macintosh, University of Leeds, UK