Experimenting with collaboration in the Smart City: Legal and governance structures of Urban Living Labs

Urban Living Labs (ULLs) have been implemented in many cities, but their organizational and legal structure has not often been analyzed. ULLs aim to provide a space for different parties to research, develop, and test solutions to urban problems whilst engaging with local communities. Their experimental approach to urban innovation and to...

Sustainable development goals as accountability mechanism? A case study of Dutch infrastructure agencies

The UN sustainable development goals (SDGs) were adopted by the United Nations as a “universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity.” These goals prove to have a strong appeal to managers in both public and private sectors. Despite the popularity of the goals, little is...

The perils and pitfalls of explainable AI: Strategies for explaining algorithmic decision-making

Governments look at explainable artificial intelligence's (XAI) potential to tackle the criticisms of the opaqueness of algorithmic decision-making with AI. Although XAI is appealing as a solution for automated decisions, the wicked nature of the challenges governments face complicates the use of XAI. Wickedness means that the facts that define...

How to sustain sustainability monitoring in cities: Lessons from 49 community indicator initiatives across 10 Latin American countries

Since the 1990s, many countries have witnessed the emergence of organizations publishing environmental, social, and quality-of-life indicators at a city level in order to promote public aware-ness, democratic participation, and sustainability policies. Many such initiatives are short-lived, however, and reasons for their success and failure...

Unraveling Transparency and Accountability in Blockchain

Blockchain technology is heralded for improving trust and can provide a new approach for creating transparency and promoting accountability of government activities. However, it is still not clear how and in what ways blockchain technologies can improve this. This study examines the mechanisms and capability of blockchain technology to...

Data science empowering the public: Data-driven dashboards for transparent and accountable decision-making in smart cities

Dashboards visualize a consolidated set data for a certain purpose which enables users to see what is happening and to initiate actions. Dashboards can be used by governments to support their decision-making and policy processes or to communicate and interact with the public. The objective of this paper is to understand and to support the...

Designing and Evaluation Transparency in Open Government

One of the objectives of opening data is the creation of transparency. However, transparency is an ill-defined concept. My PhD thesis aims to help designers, architects and policy-makers develop portals and applications to enable transparency for the diverse society. Literature will be reviewed to understand the concept of transparency and to...

The Impact of Social Business Process Management on Policy-making in e-Government

The combination of social media and Business Process Management (BPM) has given rise to the emerging field of “social BPM”. The new development of social BPM is expected to provide benefits like flexibility for knowledge-intensive processes, like policy-making. The goal of this paper is to understand the impact of social BPM on policy-making. We...

Towards an ambidextrous government: Strategies for balancing exploration and exploitation in open government

Governments are often putting their efforts in the operation and execution of existing services without having the means to innovate. Ambidexterity is the ability to operate existing services and to innovate at the same time Ambidexterity is a concept originating from organizational studies in the private sector and is hardly used in the public...