Information Polity

2023 Information Polity

doi: 10.3233/ip-239010

Hansen, Mille Edith Kjærsgaard; Crusoe, Jonathan; Melin, Ulf

2023 Information Polity

doi: 10.3233/ip-211534

The intangible and (often) young nature of socio-technical phenomena makes them difficult to understand and communicate. Researchers and practitioners have responded by applying metaphors, prescribing an epistemological structure to these phenomena. While metaphors are frequently applied, researchers have paid limited attention to their applications and limitations. To address this gap, we applied a mixed-method approach, exploring the communities’ applications of metaphors for the conceptual development of socio-technical phenomena, using two communities: Open Government Data and IT Development and Maintenance. We synthesised 21 articles and two books into an emergent analytical framework, Communities’ Applications Of Metaphors (CAOM). We collected empirical material for each community’s academic and practical sides between 2015–2020, resulting in 100 articles and 263 documents. We conducted a word frequency analysis and an in-depth analysis of the empirical material, drawing on CAOM. The contributions are the emergent CAOM framework with the key concepts of metaphors’ usage, expression, and assemblages of metaphors. We conclude that the application of metaphors in communities is influenced by community type and metaphors’ role, while the topic influences metaphor selection. Metaphors are combined to create new ways of reasoning. We recommend that governments draw on action-oriented metaphors when writing policies for socio-technical phenomena, while digital government researchers should include action-oriented elements when they develop metaphors, which can help practitioners put new knowledge into practice.

Renteria, Cesar; Varela-Castro, Samanta

2023 Information Polity

doi: 10.3233/ip-211520

Digital platforms are suitable alternatives to help governments open policy-making and public service delivery to external ideas. Platforms are very flexible and customizable, which makes them effective for a variety of participatory purposes, such as co-creation, co-production, innovation, or transactions. However, this diversity makes it difficult to define how different technical designs could shape the performance of these platforms. Literature has described different types of platforms, based on their participatory goals, but we still do not know enough about the diversity of platforms in terms of technical design. To address this gap, we conducted a cluster analysis to find patterns in the technical design of 52 participatory platforms worldwide. We observed three main architectures: Ideas for the City; Decisions and Debates; and Mapping. These findings are one step forward to better understanding how digital platforms could impose certain dynamics on the participatory processes.

Legard, Sveinung; McShane, Ian; Ruano, José Manuel

2023 Information Polity

doi: 10.3233/ip-220035

E-participation research has mainly been concerned with the spread of e-participation technologies, but less with why some government organizations choose to use digital tools to consult citizens (e-consultation) whereas others go further and include them in the decision-making processes (e-decision making). This article is an in-depth, comparative case-study of the adoption of e-participation platforms in Oslo, Melbourne and Madrid, and develops an alternative explanatory framework using theories of institutional entrepreneurship and change. It shows that conventional adoption theory – focusing on resource slack, socio-economic development, competition and top-down mandates – is not able to account for the differences between these cases, and argues that the degree of e-participation should be understood as an outcome of the type and agenda of change agents, the level of institutional discretion, the strength of institutional defenders, and the resources of the change agents.

Jiang, Huaxiong

2023 Information Polity

doi: 10.3233/ip-220030

Smart governance technologies are emergent information and communication technologies (ICT), which amid the COVID-19 pandemic have been widely used to govern COVID’s impacts. However, very few studies have provided insight into the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) of smart governance technologies under COVID-19. This prevents the widespread usage of smart governance technologies across cities and countries and impedes their usefulness during emergencies. This study combines knowledge of emergency management theory and planning support systems (PSS) to frame the functional usefulness of smart governance technologies in handling practical tasks amid the COVID-19 state of emergency into a task-technology fit model. By employing qualitative content analysis to collect views and insights from the international news-based cases (n= 69), we identify SWOT of smart governance technologies under COVID-19. Results indicate that usefulness of smart governance technologies is reflected in task-handling in the ex-post emergency phases of response (e.g., provide e-health service, tracing and tracking) and recovery (e.g., improve e-government services, enhance collaboration for renewal), whereas few applications focus on tasks in the ex-ante emergency phases of mitigation (e.g., hazard analysis, vulnerability assessment) and preparedness (e.g., planning, training and exercises). Main findings lead to a conclusion that hidden capacities of smart governance technologies can be fully achieved if policy makers and practitioners can focus on the full range of tasks and demands before, amid, or after emergencies and identify collaborative opportunities for technological development.

Hofstra, Roos; Michels, Ank; Meijer, Albert

2023 Information Polity

doi: 10.3233/ip-211540

In terms of the inclusivity of democracy, both the opportunities and risks of using digital media have been highlighted in the literature. Empirical research into the use of digital media and the inclusivity of citizen participation, however, is limited. More specifically, we have a limited understand of the relation between the ‘richness’ of digital media and the inclusivity of citizen engagement The introduction of digital participation by governments during the COVID-19 pandemic presents a highly interesting situation for studying the relation between digital participation and the inclusivity of citizen engagement. This paper presents an assessment of five cases in the Netherlands to explore to what extent the media richness of digital participation affects the inclusivity of citizen engagement. Our findings present few indications for the exclusion of citizens and, in contrast, highlight the participation of more citizens when access was facilitated through digital media. The overall picture that emerges is that especially lean digital tools, webinars, enhance inclusivity in terms of access but only richer tools, interactive platforms, also facilitate participation as interaction with citizens. To our surprise, we found that hybrid forms of participation fall short in providing opportunities for inclusive interaction. We end the paper by recommending governments to realize both broad and in-depth inclusive democracy by sequential use of lean media – webinars – to boost the access to participation and rich media – platforms and offline meetings – for interactions with citizens.

Mankevich, Vasili; Magnusson, Johan; Svahn, Fredrik

2023 Information Polity

doi: 10.3233/ip-220012

The increasing diffusion of digital government has led to numerous reports on both significant progress and failure in terms of digital transformation. Previous research highlights the role of digital competence as a pre-requisite for successful digital transformation, yet few studies have addressed the actual state of digital competence demand in the public sector. We study the development of digital competence demand in the Swedish public sector for the period 2006–2020. Utilizing a complete, open dataset of all job postings, we find that the digital competence demand in public sector recruitment has significantly increased. At the same time, the public sector lags behind the private in terms of digital competence demand. These findings are discussed from the perspectives of both the need for further research into human resource-related aspects of digital government and the national digital government policy. We also discuss the potential impact of disruptive events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2009 financial crisis on digital competence demand.

Fest, Isabelle C.

2023 Information Polity

doi: 10.3233/ip-239006

Islam, Md. Ashraful; Bhuiyan, Md. Al-Fahad

2023 Information Polity

doi: 10.3233/ip-239011

Social media has gained significant influence in shaping communication strategies for the public sector in the modern era. Governments across the globe are embracing these platforms to actively interact with the public, promoting transparency and trust. This article focuses on the adoption of social media in the public sector of Bangladesh. Most government agencies in Bangladesh are found to utilize social media to varying extents, with Facebook being the dominant platform. However, these social media accounts primarily function as traditional one-way communication channels with limited civic engagement. Additionally, numerous government websites contain non-functional or incorrect social media links, thus hindering effective social media communication through these sites.