Call for papers: dg.o 2017

The dg.o 2017: 18th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research will be held June 7-9, 2017 in City University of New York. The theme of this year is "Innovations and Transformations in Government" with 8 Tracks. I am co-chairing the Track 8: Open Government Data Policies & Politics. We welcome academic and practical contributions from around the world on the topics including but not limited to the issues of power and politics on open data, open government, data-driven policy innovations and citizen engagement that address various socio-political and institutional challenges. (See below)

Track 8. Open Government Data Policies & Politics

Track chairs: Boyi Li (b.li@exeter.ac.uk) and Kyung Ryul Park (k.park5@lse.ac.uk)

A growing body of literature has been focused on the benefits, motivations, as well as best practices to adopt open data in government sectors. Many theorizing efforts regard institutional structures as critical barriers to promote open innovation paradigm in public sector. In this track, we discuss the impact and change of these institutional structures by inviting research papers that examine open data initiatives as either government policies or politics. The policy lens critically analyses the policy documents and reveals how open data policies are drafted, interpreted and implemented in a specific context. The politics lens is mainly concerned with the power relations between the state, civil society, and business. It leads to a critical reflection on the agenda of open data movement in the context of power structures of informational capitalism. Therefore, we particularly welcome the content and discourse analysis of open data documents, and the storytelling of government-business collaboration in open data innovations.

Technological advances, such as big data and collective intelligence, together with policy innovations including open government, open data, and the creation of new public data labs have been a catalyst for disruptive innovations in government, causing radical re-thinking of the traditional assumptions and expectations regarding how governments should function. Public goods and services once considered exclusively the responsibility of government agencies are now often initiated and produced through collaborations with citizens, non-profits, and/or private sector partners.

The main conference theme will highlight challenges and solutions in harnessing innovations and transformations in government. Innovative designs in all aspects of government, including people, services, data, policy, governance, collaboration, and democracy, require leadership talent, creative ideas and implementation strategies, and clear success criteria for evaluating solutions.

For information on the conference - http://dgo2017.dgsociety.org