This is the 11th edition of the workshop series labeled “Web and the City - The Web and Smart Cities”, which started back in Florence in 2015 and kept on taking place every year in conjunction with the WWW conference series. Last year the workshop was held in Singapore. Each year the focus of the workshop is actualized, and this year the workshop focuses on the Responsible web and Responsible AI in cities and communities. In the era of digital twinning, AI, and the metaverse (so-called citiverse for cities), and under the UN 2030 Agenda for sustainable growth and resilience, cities are being transformed into virtual spaces that enable service automation and value generation to their communities and enterprises. Moreover, AI and web intelligence generate new types of opportunities, including generating automated transactions in these virtual spaces, which must preserve human-perceived consequences, fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics. This workshop aims to focus on how the Web transforms cities into responsibly intelligent virtual environments.

This is the 10^th edition of the workshop series labeled “AW4City – Web Applications and Smart Cities”, which started back in Florence in 2015 and kept on taking place every year in conjunction with the WWW conference series. Last year the workshop was held in Austin, Texas. The workshop series aims to investigate the Web and Web applications’ role in establishing smart city (SC) promises. The workshop series aim to investigate the role of the Web and of Web applications in SC growth. This year, the workshop focuses on the new era of the Web and web intelligence in cities and communities. In the era of digital twinning and metaverse (so-called citiverse for cities), and under the UN 2030 Agenda for sustainable growth, cities are being transformed into virtual spaces that generate new types of value and new experiences to their citizens and enterprises that can enhance living and offer new opportunities for economic growth. Moreover, AI and web intelligence generate new types of automated transactions in these virtual spaces, while they can utilize data spaces and standardization for optimal data flow. This workshop aims to demonstrate how the Web transforms cities into new virtual environments.

City digital transformation is being performed across the globe and it is being supported by several initiatives and policy groups. Nevertheless, this transformation is mainly technology oriented. Although there have been several interesting and impactful outcomes, like solutions for enhancing municipal efficiency and local living, the results lag behind expectations. Real transformation should also change structures and address the whole range from social to technical aspects. People-centricity in this transformation is an emerging topic that is attracting attention and some initiatives have launched. People-centric transformation can be defined as a multi-stakeholder approach to digital transformation that realizes sustainability, inclusiveness, prosperity, and human rights for the benefit of all. The aim of this special issue is to better understand all aspects of citizen centricity and how it can change the orientation of city digital transformation process. The special issue highlights the main elements of people-centricity in cities: inclusiveness, openness, engagement and empowerment via securing citizen awareness, data privacy, service simplification and transparency, and technological availability and observability.

This is the 9th edition of the workshop series labeled "AW4City - Web Applications and Smart Cities", which started back in Florence in 2015 and kept on taking place every year in conjunction with the WWW conference series. Last year the workshop was held virtually in Lyon, France. The workshop series aims to investigate the Web and Web applications' role in establishing smart city (SC) promises. The workshop series aim to investigate the role of the Web and of Web applications in SC growth. This year, the workshop focuses on the role of the web in social coherence. cities appear to play a crucial role in securing humanity against social threats and generating sustainable and circular cities. In this regard, cities attempt to secure social sustainability and coherence (e.g., deal with affordable energy, poverty, hunger, equal opportunities in education, jobs, and health, etc.) and enhance their performance to become friendlier and able to host their increasing populations. Additionally, new types of business appear (e.g., for smart energy), while the co-existence of autonomous things and people generate another challenge that cities have started phasing. This workshop aims to demonstrate how web applications Apps can Web intelligence serve communities.

This is the 8th edition of the workshop series labeled "AW4City - Web Applications and Smart Cities", which started back in Florence in 2015 and kept on taking place every year in conjunction with the WWW conference series. Last year the workshop was held virtually in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The workshop series aims to investigate the Web and Web applications' role in establishing smart city (SC) promises. The workshop series aim to investigate the role of the Web and of Web applications in SC growth. This year, the workshop focuses on the role of the web in smart environment. In the era of cities and under the UN 2030 Agenda and the European Green deal for sustainable growth, cities appear to play crucial role in securing humanity against environmental threats and generate sustainable and circular cities. In this regard, cities attempt to improve their forms (e.g., more compact, and eco-friendlier) and performance to become friendlier and able to host their increasing populations. Additionally, new types of business appear (e.g., that utilize IoT and data, manage e-waste and recycle), while the co-existence of autonomous things and people generate another challenge that cities have been started phasing. This workshop aims to demonstrate how web applications, Apps and Web Intelligence can serve smart environment in general.

The realisation of citizen-centric services in the public sector requires breaking traditional silos and transforming existing institutional structures and processes. Recent transformation efforts undertaken in government institutions have embraced business process re-engineering (BPR) concepts championed by the private sector over decades ago to facilitate such change. While public opinion continues to differ about these transformation efforts' success, there is little evidence to explain the influence of BPR on their success or failure. This paper explores BPR led public sector transformation efforts in two local authorities in Europe to evaluate the outcomes realised for both government and citizens. Empirical evidence reveals that while transformation efforts contributed towards improving efficiency and integrating processes across functions in the public sector, the institutional structures evolved into a collection of reshaped and newly formed siloes, which were distinctly focused on delivering a citizen-centric service.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to help in providing a better understanding of the application of blockchain technology in the context of the banking and finance sectors. The aim is to outline blockchain's benefits, opportunities, costs, risks as well as challenges of the technology in the context of banking and finance services. Design/methodology/approach: Careful examination of the extant literature, including utilising relevant academic-based research databases has been carried out. It covered reviewing various research contributions published in peer-reviewed journals, academic reports, as well as technical reports to help in identifying related benefits, opportunities, costs and risks. Findings: The findings reveal that there are limited contributions in utilising blockchain in the banking and finance sectors when compared with other sectors. As such, the study highlighted the relevant perspective of benefits, opportunities, costs and risks within such sectors. Practical implications: This study helps in offering a focal point to banking and financial sector managers and decision-makers for realising the value and offerings of blockchain technology as well as associated strategies and programmes. Originality/value: This study highlights the need for a holistic understanding of the various aspects of cost, benefits, risk and opportunities to create blockchain applications that work for banking and finance sectors

The adoption of blockchain technologies require the consideration of a broad range of factors, over and above the predominantly technology focus of most current work. Whilst scholarly literature on blockchain technology is only beginning to emerge, majority are focused on the technicalities of the technology and tend to ignore the organizational complexities of adopting the technology. Drawing from a focused review of literature, this paper proposed a conceptual framework for adoption of blockchain technology capturing the complex relationships between institutional, market and technical factors. The framework highlights that varying outcomes are possible, and the change process is focal as this shapes the form blockchain applications take. Factors presented in the framework (institutional, market and technical) interact and mutually influence each other. The proposed framework can be used by organisations as a reference point for adopting blockchain applications and by scholars to expand, refine and evaluate research into blockchain technology.

Governments across the word are under pressure to adopt new technologies and to innovate and transform their processes. Some governments have introduced the role of Chief Information Officer (CIO) to facilitate these innovations though adoption of new technologies. The traditional CIO role of improving operational efficiency is now shifting towards exploring new IT-enabled opportunities required in digital transformation. In this context, CIO capabilities are expanding to be more involved in administrative processes and digital transformation, however, their organizational role seem to lag behind. This paper is aimed at evaluating the current role of CIOs and to provide policy recommendations to strengthen their role. Data was collected during a session in which roles and capabilities of CIOs were discussed. In particular, we found that often the CIO was positioned as having an IT role, whereas a more organizational role was needed. CIOs should develop capabilities to support digital transformation and to develop architecture that is adaptive and agile. The expectations of the CIO and the role of the CIO need to be better aligned.

Smart cities have attracted an extensive and emerging interest from both science and industry with an increasing number of international examples emerging from all over the world. However, despite the significant role that smart cities can play to deal with recent urban challenges, the concept has been being criticized for not being able to realize its potential and for being a vendor hype. This paper reviews different conceptualization, benchmarks and evaluations of the smart city concept. Eight different classes of smart city conceptualization models have been discovered, which structure the unified conceptualization model and concern smart city facilities (i.e., energy, water, IoT etc.), services (i.e., health, education etc.), governance, planning and management, architecture, data and people. Benchmarking though is still ambiguous and different perspectives are followed by the researchers that measure -and recently monitor- various factors, which somehow exceed typical technological or urban characteristics. This can be attributed to the broadness of the smart city concept. This paper sheds light to parameters that can be measured and controlled in an attempt to improve smart city potential and leaves space for corresponding future research. More specifically, smart city progress, local capacity, vulnerabilities for resilience and policy impact are only some of the variants that scholars pay attention to measure and control.

Purpose: Many governments are working toward a vision of government-wide transformation that strives to achieve an open, transparent and accountable government while providing responsive services. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the concept of transparency-by-design to advance open government. Design/methodology/approach: The opening of data, the deployment of tools and instruments to engage the public, collaboration among public organizations and between governments and the public are important drivers for open government. The authors review transparency-by-design concepts. Findings: To successfully achieve open government, fundamental changes in practice and new research on governments as open systems are needed. In particular, the creation of “transparency-by-design” is a key aspect in which transparency is a key system development requirement, and the systems ensure that data are disclosed to the public for creating transparency. Research limitations/implications: Although transparency-by-design is an intuitive concept, more research is needed in what constitutes information and communication technology-mediated transparency and how it can be realized. Practical implications: Governments should embrace transparency-by-design to open more data sets and come closer to achieving open government. Originality/value: Transparency-by-design is a new concept that has not given any attention yet in the literature.

Innovation is vital to find new solutions to problems, increase quality, and improve profitability. Big open linked data (BOLD) is a fledgling and rapidly evolving field that creates new opportunities for innovation. However, none of the existing literature has yet considered the interrelationships between antecedents of innovation through BOLD. This research contributes to knowledge building through utilising interpretive structural modelling to organise nineteen factors linked to innovation using BOLD identified by experts in the field. The findings show that almost all the variables fall within the linkage cluster, thus having high driving and dependence powers, demonstrating the volatility of the process. It was also found that technical infrastructure, data quality, and external pressure form the fundamental foundations for innovation through BOLD. Deriving a framework to encourage and manage innovation through BOLD offers important theoretical and practical contributions.

Smart services concern the core element of a smart city, since they support the realization of urban "intelligence" in terms of people, economy, governance, environment, mobility and leaving. Smart services aim to enhance quality of life within a city and in this respect to improve "livability". The types and purposes of smart services cannot be easily pre-defined, since they are the outcome of innovation, which cannot be pre-defined either, but instead it is the product of citizens' and businesses' creativity. However, standard bodies that work on smart city definition have described smart city portfolios, which are suggested to city policy makers and potential entrepreneurs. The aim of this paper is to validate whether standardized smart service portfolios are being followed by smart cities in practice. In this regard, a set of more than 70 smart cities are examined and their smart services are matched to these portfolios. The outcomes are extremely important and leave space for future research in this regard.

Smart cities have attracted an extensive and emerging interest from both science and industry with an increasing number of international examples emerging from all over the world. However, despite the significant role that smart cities can play to deal with recent urban challenges, the concept has been being criticized for not being able to realize its potential and for being a vendor hype. This paper reviews different conceptualization, benchmarks and evaluations of the smart city concept. Eight different classes of smart city conceptualization models have been discovered, which structure the unified conceptualization model and concern smart city facilities (i.e., energy, water, IoT etc.), services (i.e., health, education etc.), governance, planning and management, architecture, data and people. Benchmarking though is still ambiguous and different perspectives are followed by the researchers that measure -and recently monitor- various factors, which somehow exceed typical technological or urban characteristics. This can be attributed to the broadness of the smart city concept. This paper sheds light to parameters that can be measured and controlled in an attempt to improve smart city potential and leaves space for corresponding future research. More specifically, smart city progress, local capacity, vulnerabilities for resilience and policy impact are only some of the variants that scholars pay attention to measure and control.