25th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o 2024)
Internet of Beings: Transforming Public Governance

11 - 14 June 2024
in National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan

The track delves into the transformative landscape shaped by the integration of emerging digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms, within diverse governmental domains. This track takes a process-oriented perspective to understand the nuanced and profound impacts of data-driven and algorithm-intensive governance in public organizations. While concerns about fairness and discrimination in algorithm-assisted decision-making are evident, this track also addresses the potential for algorithms to mitigate human limitations and enhance administrative efficiency. By exploring the transition from traditional Weberian bureaucracy to a system-augmented algorithmic bureaucracy, the track aims to decipher the intricate dynamics underpinning this evolution. Understanding the interplay between human and algorithmic capabilities becomes crucial as autonomous intelligent agents play a pivotal role in public organizations. This track aims to discuss the macro-level conditions, meso-level adaptations, and micro-level human competency improvements, propelling a dynamic and comprehensive dialogue on the future of human-AI collaboration in government.

The pace of AI adoption in governments has continued to grow at different levels of government and across different domains including in particular social protection and welfare, public order and safety, environmental and natural resource protection, health, pubic services, housing and education. However, the emergence and rapid diffusion of generative AI applications in society has led to a growing consensus for developing better AI safety practices and the need for comprehensive regulatory policies to address potential threats that these new AI applications pose to citizens. In response, there is a growing stock of AI Governance frameworks and tools to support not only AI developers but also AI practitioners in government organisations to ensure the responsible development and deployment of AI in transforming public services and policymaking. However, empirical studies of government use of AI technologies are sparse. Hence, the purpose of this track is to investigate how AI is being developed, implemented and adopted in governments at different levels, what AI is adding to governments, how the institutional contexts are shaping AI use in government, and how to ensure that AI adoption in government remains safe and beneficial to the public at large.

The “Beyond Bureaucracy” track explores innovations in e-government and e-democracy that place the citizen at the center of governance. While traditional lines of inquiry at the intersection of politics and technology focus on enhancing or supporting existing political institutions, there is an underexplored opportunity for citizens to use technology to shape the public sphere and to control government more directly. Internet optimists have long anticipated new, digital models of self-governance, including representative, direct, liquid, anarchic models. Critics have argued that technology cannot safely or desirably support greater citizen involvement. This track covers all aspects of direct, futuristic, radical, exploratory, and critical approaches to digital governance. These include the (un)desirability of using technology to support citizen self-governance; challenges to self-governance through technology; theoretical and empirical proposals; assessments of technologies to support governance; the impact of developing digital phenomena on self-governance (misinformation, bots, digital collective intelligence); and the ethical, technological, social, and political implications of existing and potential future models of public governance. The track also welcomes research and case studies on the innovative uses of technologies by NGOs and other non-government actors. The “Beyond Bureaucracy” track serves as a platform for pro/contra deliberations on the near and distant challenges and potentials of e-democracy.

The collaborative intelligence track aims to investigate how human, crowd, and machine can complement each other to enhance public services and policies, such as healthcare services, citizen-government communication, bias and discretion reduction, smart city planning, etc. However, while the adoption of AI may enhance the citizens’ participation experience, there are potential ethical issues and implementation challenges in designing an optimal collaborative intelligence that includes both human collective intelligence and artificial intelligence. The collaborative intelligence track invites researchers and practitioners to accumulate scholarly papers that explore the interactions of human, crowd, and/or machine. Possible topics include strategies for collaborative intelligence or platforms in the public sector, designs for machine and human interaction in public services or policy making, comparisons of outputs and bias from AI, experts, and/or collective intelligence, values in collaborative intelligence management and governance, best practices of collaborative intelligence in the public sector, ethical concerns or guidelines for applying collective intelligence, or other similar topics and relevant approaches.

This track is for papers that use computational methods in the domain of digital government. We welcome technical or behavioral studies that include computational approaches to scrutinize, analyze, model, and simulate social phenomena, to provide services to citizens, and to make data-driven decisions.

For this year's theme, we welcome papers related to empirical studies that include computational methods and/or big data to enable and enhance human interactions to co-create public services and products. In addition, we are open to other technical studies to develop new models and tools to enhance governments' service delivery, and to bring methodological innovations. We also welcome studies adopting design science approach to develop and evaluate technical artifacts, or studies reporting best practices of using artificial intelligence and machine learning for government practice and research.

This track relates to the emerging cybersecurity concerns and their solutions in the context of the DGO conference’s theme, Internet of Beings. While the Internet of Beings focuses on digital technologies that are people-centric with open platforms for collaboration, they also need to be safe, reliable, and trustworthy. The benefits of various digital technologies, including AI, IoT, blockchain, wearables, and big data can be compromised if these cybersecurity solutions do not get adequate attention. Generative AI, for example, has got much public attention for being biased, lacking authenticity, and simulating human beings in counterproductive ways for public good and even being criminalized. As public agencies transform their operations from face to face work schedules to work from anywhere, they face increased challenges of how to deliver public services effectively. The challenges are not only traditional viruses and ransomware demands, but also false narratives with the mimicry of human beings. Organizations need to be resilient and maintain their operations. Robustness even calls for organizations to be more proactive and sensitive to a range of perturbations from a security perspective. This track will examine the emerging pedagogical, public policy, and organizational dimensions of cybersecurity problems and solutions in this human context of being connected in the digital world. What should public and nonprofit managers do? What are the organizational guidelines to work in this environment? What are the pro and reactive policies that governments could take? How can we design resilient and robust organizations? We invite papers that broadly deal with these questions in the context of public and nonprofit organizations.

The Data-Driven Services in Government track aims to investigate how public sectors can complement services and policies through Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and all kinds of data, such as open data, big data, and linked data, etc. In 2019, the U.S. launched OPEN Government Data Act, taking a step further on implementation of open government data. The other important aspect is how to benefit from government data openess. Creating value from government data is of particular importance to many stakeholders, including governments, private sector, and citizens. But explaining how government data contribute to public value creation has also become a challenge. The Data-Driven Services in Government track invites researchers and practitioners to accumulate scholarly papers that explore the interactions of data application, data governance, and/or data policy, as well as data and public value. Possible topics include strategies for government open data sharing, data-driven services, data principles, value of data identification, creation and assessment, and best practices of public and private sector collaboration on data implementation, or other similar topics and relevant approaches.

The Digital Democracy & AI track aims to investigate how crowd, and machine can complement each other to enhance meaningful augmented participatory democratic approaches, such as citizen-government collaborative communication and planning, smart city planning, etc. However, while the adoption of AI may enhance the citizens’ participation experience, there are potential ethical issues and implementation challenges in designing an optimal collaborative intelligence that includes both human collective intelligence and artificial intelligence. The Digital Democracy & AI track invites researchers and practitioners to accumulate scholarly papers that explore the literature in four distinct areas: (i) the design and application of AI tools on enhancing democracy as a meaningful conversation; (ii) the design of collaborative planning and decision-making support methodologies and tools in digital social platforms; (iii) the importance of experiments in democracy and its social impact; and (iv) the ethical concerns or guidelines for applying AI-assisted tools, or other similar technologies and relevant approaches in data and democracy.

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) are shaping the global agenda in multiple areas, including public opinion, policy, and research. The 17 SDGs, detailed in 169 targets, have an ambition of linking separate goals of sustainable development across different areas, into a unitary vision. The main consequence of this new vision has been to move the focus beyond the individual instances of e.g., environmental impacts of human activities, or economic inequalities, and to link them in a coherent system within the framework of the Agenda for the Sustainable Development 2030.

Digital government can act as enabler to sustainability, equity and social inclusion and it represents a cross-cutting objective across several SDGs at both sectoral and horizontal level, with a crucial importance in particular for the goal 16 that aims to 'Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels'.

This track invites contributions focusing on the potential benefits and challenges of digital government in supporting the achievement of SDGs and the role of digital technologies to sustain policy developments at both horizontal and sectoral level, including in particular the impact on democratic innovation and institutional reforms of governance systems. We invite studies on the design, management and evaluation of policies and implementation of digital government strategies in relation to the UN SDGs at global, national and local level. Papers that can combine methodological rigor with practical relevance and policy implications are particularly welcome.

Solidarity helps creating common objectives, interests, and unity of action, fostering social cohesion and collaboration embodying human rights, active citizenship, inclusion, equity, empathy, and ethics, being one of the missions of Governments to build solidarity and social cohesion. Digitizing government adds new layers of complexity to this relation can scale up the positive and the negative impact of government on solidarity, and, in the latter case, undermine its own efficacy. On the other hand, solidarity can enhance digital government by triggering technological innovation, e.g., create tools to help vulnerable citizens during a crisis, or become a goal for such innovation, e.g., foster more equitable distribution of resources. The relationship between government, technology and solidarity is rich and intense and this track aims to bring together cases and reflections on the relation between solidarity and digital government.

This track addresses Bachelor and Master students and encourages them to submit and present their work at the conference. With this format, we aim to provide students with a first-hand experience of how research works and deepen their interest in academia. We want to attract the original work of students, facilitate a constructive and developmental double-blind peer-review process, and subsequent publication of their works. In contrast to the general research tracks, students will be the first authors of the papers in this track and present their work at the conference. We encourage supervisors to act as co-authors to ensure a scientifically guided paper development process. All topics in the area of digital government are welcome. For exemplary topics, please take a look at the topics listed in the other tracks. We are open to all conceptual and empirical papers that use all kinds of research methods. This track gives Bachelor and Master students the opportunity to actively contribute to the digital government community.

The concept of a digital platform government can be traced back to the UK's GOV.UK and the Obama administration's Open Government Initiative. There is no agreed-upon definition of the concept, so it is more productive to compare it with similar concepts. The digital platform government differs from e-government by focusing on process innovation and being a public-private partnership service model. It emphasizes active participation of stakeholders and the use of intelligent technologies. Both the digital platform government and e-government models emphasize online citizen participation, but the digital platform government allows citizens to have a more active role in government decision-making. The core public values pursued by the digital platform government include efficiency, accountability, fairness, participation, collaboration, transparency, narrowing the digital divide, and digital equity. The digital platform government is operated in various forms depending on its purpose or the role of the government. Scholars have proposed various types of digital platforms based on their purposes and the role of the government. With this broad understanding about digital platform government, we invite papers that explore the relationship between various digital platform government practices and core public values.

Digital transformation has become an essential part of the government’s strategic agenda, both at national and sub-national levels. Such governments seek to offer services through digital platforms with integrated citizen identification systems, digitization of governmental processes, with respect to the privacy of personal data, and digital inclusion of the most vulnerable population. However, digital transformation initiatives at the subnational level tend to present specific aspects when compared to national initiatives. On the one hand, this track highlights the challenges faced by subnational digital transformation initiatives in the public sector, as well as national governments that have acted to develop and integrate national digital transformation considering subnational aspects. On the other hand, it seeks to understand the capacities supporting digital transformation at the subnational level. The track’s objectives are: a) to identify real-world examples/cases of digital transformation projects at the subnational levels (states, regions, territories, provinces, municipalities, etc.); b) discuss the challenges to developing a digital and integrated government considering national and subnational aspects, especially in federative countries; c) seek to explain these cases in the context of existing or new theoretical frameworks, and, d) create actionable recommendations for researchers, professional developers, and digital government practitioners at the national and sub-national level.

In recent years, the concept of open government has gained significant attention as governments worldwide strive to enhance transparency, engage citizens, and modernize governance practices. The "Impact of Open Government" track aims to provide a platform for researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and stakeholders to delve into the multifaceted effects of open government initiatives. By examining the outcomes and implications of transparency, public participation, and the transformation of governance structures, this track seeks to foster a comprehensive understanding of open government's broader societal, political, and economic impacts.

Cyberinfrastructure—high performance and cloud computing, networks, storage, software, and the people who build and use these systems—represents a strategic investment for nations in order to pursue and achieve policy goals. Cyberinfrastructure drives the research and innovation that supports both basic and applied science, catalyzing industry and increasing productivity in private enterprises, as well as providing analysis, modeling and simulations for weather prediction, resource availability, public health research, and other critical elements that affect citizens’ lives. Government policies around infrastructure investments for support of research and development are a major factor in support of cyberinfrastructure that provides these functions. This track examines the policy initiatives that stimulate the development of cyberinfrastructure at the national level, models for supporting computational research and innovation, the development of next generation technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing, cooperative ventures such as the United States National Strategic Computing Reserve, the collaborative organizations that develop, implement, and maintain cyberinfrastructure, and the outcomes of cyberinfrastructure projects that impact the safety, well-being, productivity, and health of citizens.

This track includes research papers that critically examine the adoption and impact of Generative AI in government functions, policies, and public engagement. Its research papers provide in-depth examination of the associated challenges, ethical considerations, and regulatory and policy frameworks associated with the expanding applications of generative AI in government. Given its rapidly emerging transformations, the track aims to bridge research discussing potential theoretical underpinnings of generative AI implications for government, as well as research addressing practitioners’ experiences with generative AI in public governance. The themes included in this track are grouped in two pillars: 1) Research on the potential benefits of generative AI for government, such as its ability to improve policy making efficiency, personalize service delivery by tailoring services to individual needs and preferences through autonomous agents, enhance public engagement by providing citizens with a more interactive and engaging way to participate in government and receive services. 2) Research exploring the risks of generative AI in government settings, such as its potential to generate faulty information, being misused in citizen-government power dynamics, socio-economic impact, such as automation and job loss in public sector jobs, safeguarding against algorithmic bias, discrimination, abuse of power, among other ethical considerations of using generative AI in government, such as questions of transparency, inclusion, trust in government and accountability. Moreover, the track seeks comparative research papers that explore the emerging global policy interventions as well as legal and regulatory frameworks for governing generative AI in government settings. Finally, the track seeks research papers contextually examining generative AI application within diverse geographies, government settings and societal structures.

Citizen engagement has been mentioned as a barrier in several research focused on collecting more benefits from digital government strategies. Making public institutions open and transparent, and generating public value is a massive challenge that cannot prescind citizens’ participation in the process of thinking, discussing, modeling, approving, implementing, and evaluating public services and solutions. Consultation and participation processes have been bringing governments and society closer. However, there are new challenges to face, significantly in times when the trust of society in governments is compromised in many parts of the world and misinformation and disinformation issues are arising. Consequently, it is paramount to advance on understanding of engagement as an institutional, structural, social, cultural, and political phenomenon, as well as the individual cognitive process to decide to get involved at all levels, from town to nationwide public management discussion. This track focuses on discussing citizen engagement through active participation of citizens in the public discussion aiming at improving digital public services and digital government impact.

Digital technologies have vastly expanded our capacity to collect, manage, and analyze large amounts of high-resolution and instantaneous data about people's habits, preferences, and behaviours. Because their application entails extensive automation and surveillance, they have the potential to fundamentally reshape the nature of governance in a wide range of public service scenarios. For example, the transition to digital solutions can make it more difficult to assign accountability in public policy and undercut current privacy protection practices. It can also change the incentives for frontline officers in client interactions and transfer effective control over community decisions to private, often for-profit, contractors. This track invites scholarly papers that examine similar opportunities and challenges arising from digital technologies and assess the regulatory strategies policymakers have developed or should adopt in response. Relevant topics include algorithmic bias and mitigation, surveillance designs, biometric data management, data silo integration, and information commons.

The adoption and implementation of new ICTs by public organizations have been influenced by organizational factors such as the availability of resources (i.e. funding, infrastructure, technological knowledge, and personnel), leadership, trust, stakeholder involvement, organization’s structure and culture, as well as inter-organizational dynamics. Similarly, the adoption of ICTs in government and society has generated important impacts on the organizational processes, effectiveness, and innovativeness of public organizations, as well as the new governance structure of the government and the societal impacts. This track solicits research that examines the organizational factors that influence the adoption and implementation, and investigate the impacts, especially the value creation, of new and emerging innovative technologies such as smart city, artificial intelligence, data analytics, big data, open data, social media, citizen-centric technologies, and other novel technologies. Furthermore, this track seek research contribute the theories and practices of the adoption of innovative policies or practices that seek to facilitate the strategic use of various ICTs by public organizations.

Smart cities utilize the ICT to enhance different aspects of living of local communities through data-driven innovations to “improve” information services, transactions, and socialization. The ICT includes sensor-based IoT for data collection, powerful cloud-based data management, data analytics, and automated AI and Machine Learning models that are the backbone of the city transformations and innovations. While the initial focuses on the efficiency and information improvement are still underwork, we also need smart city initiatives to emphasize people-centric cities that can be sustainable, with advanced and self-evolved public services, with engaged communities and responsible private sector innovations. Rapid technology advancement, especially Generative AI, metaverse using VR and AR, drones and 5G/6G Telecommunications, opens a new horizon for future smart cities where people’s experience and engagement will be the center of innovations.

This track calls for the people-centric smart city innovations in the era of “Citiverse”, smart city in the metaverse era, that consider the human aspects, such as public good innovations that utilize the advanced ICT but ensure for engaging, equitable, fair, responsible, resilient, and sustainable services in response to the people’s needs and values in the normal and crisis times. The track calls for smart city research and practices in general, with special emphasis on those addressing the people-centricity topic such as raising awareness; empowering and engaging community in the CitiVerse era etc. Findings can range from ideations, theories/design models, implementation cases, and to evaluation studies that employ the advance ICT in maximizing the people’s engagement, experience, diversity, equity, resilience and sustainability, overcoming potential risks from unresponsible application of the advanced ICT. This topic is timely for smart city, and addresses this year’s topic for co-designed and people-centric public services in the era of metaverse.

The potential of social media and government maintains its growing interest for scholars and managers in parallel with the evolution of technologies and advances in the field. As it has been experienced during the last years, this area of digital government research is one of the most dynamic including the attention to new audiences, metrics, platforms, uses, and regarding evolving every year. During the last years, we have learned about the risks for governments and political institutions using social media. At the same time innovation capabilities have emerge from the last evolutions of social media and government. Among other issues, TikTok or virtual reality, and other social platforms and areas have abruptly emerged as global players in the entertainment sector, promoting government and other actors to engage with new audiences and social groups. Besides, some political and public institutions challenges remain in process of evolution. Here, some of the key aspects include polarization of the public sphere, growing claims about the potential harm of social media for our democratic communities, or the potential limitations of institutional communications with citizens because of the lack of trained human resources and government specialists. For this year's theme, we especially will welcome papers related to the conference's central theme – the Internet of Beings focuses on digital technologies that enable integration, are people-centric, and the creation of open platforms for collaborative multi-user to co-create services and products. Particularly, the post-COVID-19 has forced government, private, and non-profit agencies worldwide to find new ways to deliver services, and this is especially important using social media technologies. In addition, we are open to other aspects of governments' service delivery and social media, including theoretical and conceptual advancements, methodological and data innovations, or case and practical implications coming from diverse contexts. We will welcome papers on both traditional and emerging issues, including opportunities, risks, and policies in public services delivery in cross-national contexts, social media motivations to use and audiences, political mobilizations and polarization, social media contents and sentiment analysis, fake news, artificial intelligence and algorithms-based systems and virtual agents in government, instant messaging apps in government, entertainment platforms for political engagement, or social media for crisis and emergency management. Also, we will continue working on including exciting research questions, rigorous empirical studies, and in-depth case studies to enrich the theories, research methods, data, and available cases and practical applications in this research area.

Public and open data ecosystems promise the transformation of government data-driven actions, the fostering of public sector innovations and the collaborative smartification of cities, society and life, triggering value-adding sustainable development goals-compliant smart living and society 5.0. New research is needed to help public managers and politicians for (1) implementing emerging technologies and technological innovations, (2) improving the achievement of sustainable development goals for increasing transparency, participation, and cooperation, and (3) meeting the stakeholders’ expectations, needs, regulations and demands. This track welcomes contributions covering, but not limited to:

• The concepts of theoretical approaches toward Public Data ecosystems, Open Data ecosystems, Data Spaces, and Data Marketplaces;
• Infrastructures supporting Public and Open Data Ecosystems;
• The role of emerging technologies in Public and Open Data ecosystems;
• Institutional aspects of implementing sustainable Public and Open Data Ecosystems;
• Other sustainability dimensions of Public and Open Data Ecosystems;
• Stakeholder-centric dimensions of Public and Open Data Ecosystems;
• Case studies of Public and Open Data Ecosystems;
• The impact of Public and Open Data Ecosystems on Individuals, Organizations and Society.