Special Issue "Government 2.0"

Guest Editor
Dr. Elsa Estevez
Center for Electronic Governance, International Institute for Software Technology, United Nations University, Casa Silva Mendes, Est. do Engenheiro Trigo No. 4, Macao, China
E-Mail: elsa@iist.unu.edu
Phone: +853 8504 0491

Guest Editor
Dr. Gregory G. Curtin
¹ Bedrosian Center on Governance and the Public Enterprise, University of Southern California, USA
² Civic Resource Group, Suite 2175, 915 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90017, USA
E-Mail: gregc@civicresource.com
Phone: +1 213 225 1170

Dear Colleagues,

Web 2.0 technologies including blogs for journal writing, wikis for collaborative editing, mash-ups for combing contents, social media for interaction, virtual worlds for simulation, crowdsourcing for task outsourcing, and others redefine how we communicate, share our views and react to the issues that concern us. Aware of their potential, governments are adopting such technologies to engage citizens in developing policies, making decisions, enlisting support and mobilizing action towards a desirable social change, and generally to co-create a new form of government – Government 2.0.

The discussion what Government 2.0 precisely means is ongoing. However, the main objective converges on the application of web 2.0 technologies to proactively engage citizens and other stakeholders in government decisions and other governance processes beyond the election time frame, as well as to respond to their demands more effectively and efficiently.

This special issue of Future Internet focuses broadly on various aspects of Government 2.0, from technical and organizational, through social and political, to legal. Original contributions are welcome on the topics including but not limited to the following:

• Policy lifecycles for Government 2.0
• Policy frameworks for Government 2.0
• New legislation requirements for Government 2.0
• Privacy and data protection in Government 2.0
• Government 2.0 data sharing
• Government 2.0 security
• Government 2.0 risk assessment
• Inter-organizational collaboration in Government 2.0
• Government 2.0 services
• Government 2.0 infrastructure
• Harnessing new technologies in Government 2.0
• Citizen engagement through Government 2.0
• e-Participation in Government 2.0
• Citizen empowerment through Government 2.0
• Government 2.0 measurement systems
• Best practices in Government 2.0
• Government 2.0 for disaster prevention
• Government 2.0 for sustainable development
• Government 2.0 and Governance 2.0

Dr. Elsa Estevez
Guest Editor

Submission

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. Papers will be published continuously (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Future Internet is an international peer-reviewed Open Access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 300 CHF (Swiss Francs). English correction and/or formatting fees of 250 CHF (Swiss Francs) will be charged in certain cases for those articles accepted for publication that require extensive additional formatting and/or English corrections.

Kostas Zafiropoulos, Vasiliki Vrana and Dimitrios Vagianos Article: Bloggers’ Community Characteristics and Influence within Greek Political Blogosphere Future Internet 2012, 4(2), 396-412; doi:10.3390/fi4020396 Received: 27 February 2012; in revised form: 9 April 2012 / Accepted: 12 April 2012 / Published: 19 April 2012 Show/Hide Abstract | Download PDF Full-text (342 KB) | View HTML Full-text | Download PMC-XML Full-text Abstract: This paper investigates the properties of central or core political blogs. They can be located as clusters of blogs whose members have many incoming links. Other blogs form clouds around them in the sense that they link the core blogs. A case study records Greek political blogs and their incoming links reported through their blogrolls. The adjacency matrix from the blogs’ social network is analyzed and clusters are located. Three of them, those with the larger numbers of incoming links, may be considered to be central. Next, four measures of influence are used to test the influence of the central blogs. The findings suggest that there are many kinds of central blogs, influential and non-influential, and high influence does not always involve high hyperlinking.

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Title: Open Government Policy: The Research Challenges, the Research Agenda
Authors: Teresa Harrison, Meghan Cook *, Anthony Cresswell, Theresa Pardo, Taewoo Nam, Brian Burke
Affiliation: Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany, State University of New York
Abstract: The Obama Administration's Open Government Initiative is the policy framework that constitutes the US approach to Government 2.0. Chief among its objectives is the goal of increasing citizens' access to government data. However, to achieve this goal,  open government policy requires new approaches to public management, new strategies of information management, and new agreements about the metrics that best index desirable democratic outcomes.  In late April 2011, the Center for Technology in Government at the University at Albany brought together leaders from government, academia, and the non-profit community to discuss  these challenging issues.  In this paper, we present questions that comprise the research agenda produced through these discussions, map them to questions being raised in comparable efforts around the world, and then situate in the social science literatures that offer the most relevant starting points from which to address them.