Electronic Government

The EGOV-CeDEM-ePart 2019 represents the second-year edition after the merger of the IFIP WG 8.5 Electronic Government (EGOV), the IFIP WG 8.5 IFIP Electronic Participation (ePart), and the Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government Conference (CeDEM). The merged conference is dedicated to the broader area of electronic government, open government, smart governance, e-democracy, policy informatics, and electronic participation. Scholars from around the world have attended this premier academic forum for a long time, which has given EGOV a worldwide reputation as one of the top two conferences in the research domains of electronic, open, and smart government, as well as electronic participation. This year’s conference was held during September 2–4, 2019, in San Benedetto Del Tronto, and hosted by the University of Camerino, Italy. The call for papers attracted completed research papers, work-in-progress papers on ongoing research (including doctoral papers), project and case descriptions, as well as workshop and panel proposals. The submissions were assessed through a double-blind peer-review process, with at least two reviewers per submission. The conference tracks present advances in the socio-technological domain of the public sphere, demonstrating cutting-edge concepts, methods, and styles of investigation by multiple disciplines. The papers were distributed over the following tracks: • General E-Government and Open Government Track • General E-Democracy and eParticipation Track • Smart Cities (Government, Communities, and Regions) Track • AI, Data Analytics, and Automated Decision Making Track • Social Media Track • Social Innovation Track • Open Data: Social and Technical Aspects Track • Digital Society • Practitioners’ Track Among the full research paper submissions, 27 papers (empirical and conceptual) from the general E-Government and Open Government track, as well as the tracks on Smart Cities, AI, and Open Data were accepted for this year’s Springer LNCS EGOV proceedings (vol. 11685), whereas another 13 papers of completed research papers from the General ePart Track and the Policy Modeling and Policy Informatics Track went into the LNCS ePart proceedings (vol. 11686). The papers included in this volume have been clustered under the following headings: • E-Government Foundations • E-Government Services and Open Government • Open Data: Social and Technical Aspects • AI, Data Analytics, and Automated Decision Making • Smart Cities As in the previous years and per the recommendation of the Paper Awards Committee under the leadership of Gabriela Viale Pereira, Danube University Krems, Austria, the IFIP EGOV-CeDEM-ePart 2019 Conference Organizing Committee again granted outstanding paper awards in three distinct categories: • The most interdisciplinary and innovative research contribution • The most compelling critical research reflection • The most promising practical concept The winners in each category were announced in the award ceremony at the conference dinner, which has always been a highlight of the conferences. Many people make large events like this conference happen. We thank the members of the Program Committee and the additional reviewers for their great efforts in reviewing the submitted papers. We would like to express our gratitude to Andrea Polini, Barbara Re, and Flavio Corradini, and the team from University of Camerino for hosting the conference. The University of Camerino has a seven-decade long history, starting in 1336 when it was founded as Studium Generale. Today the university is ranked first among the small-scale Italian Universities (http://international. unicam.it/). University of Camerino is responsible for research and training in multiple areas and the local organization belongs to the Computer Science Division (http://computerscience.unicam.it). This is a vibrant and young research group that is part of the School of Science and Technology. The division has a research background in modeling, analysis, verification and deployment of distributed systems. They provide the following teaching programs: BSc in Informatics, MSc in Computer Science, and PhD in Computer Science