Electronic Governance and Open Society: Challenges in Eurasia

Narratives influence our perception and determine how we look on social phenomena, the society and public politics. Since the introduction of the term e–Government and the usage of technical innovations in the public sector, three narratives seem to have emerged. A review of the 100 most cited papers and publications on e–Government has revealed that at the current state, the focus on narrative in publications on e–Government seem to be the democratic narrative, the technocratic narrative, and the tech–savvy narrative. Combined with a survey of \( n \)  = 417 participants, consisting of both civil society as well as IT user and IT experts, it turned out that there is a difference between various country groups regarding their perception of e–Government. Three country groups are analyzed, the established European democracies, the post-Soviet states and one overall country group. This paper aims to find out whether there is a difference in the perception of the introduced governmental initiatives between so–called established European democracies and post–Soviet states. The paper aims to find out in which country groups IT innovations that have been implemented by the public administration reflect a more democracy–based narrative compared to a more efficiency–based.

The main goal of the study is to identify shortcomings in the implementation of e-government mechanisms in Russian Federation and to propose recommendations for improving these mechanisms. Particular attention in the article is paid to current trends and problems in the field of e-government, which are based on high rates of technological development, informatization and digitalization. The relevance of this study lies in the need to improve the state system and its industries in the context of digitalization, as well as its dynamic transformations in order to meet the urgent needs of citizens. In this context, successful development and operation experience of e-government in the United Kingdom is indicative. In order to achieve the goal set in the study, the authors conduct a composite graphical analysis of the UK and Russian e-government websites. As a result of identifying the significant advantages of e-government in the UK, as well as taking into account the current challenges of digitalization and the needs of society, the authors develop recommendations for improving e-government mechanisms in Russia.

A standardized approach to assess e-Government services from a strategic perspective of the service providers is rarely found in the prior literature. The research objective of this study is to address the gap in the literature by developing an assessment framework. We identify the key criteria in the framework from themes of mature e-Governance following a meta-ethnography approach. Findings from this study suggest that key themes of a mature e-Governance are online presence, facilitating interaction, integrated ecosystem, online payments, and participatory e-Democracy. Subsequently, we developed an assessment framework using these themes. Furthermore, we validated the framework by assessing an Indian e-Government service. The framework may help practitioners in assessing e-Government services using a simple yet efficient approach, which may potentially emerge as a powerful tool for rating such services.

This article examines China’s Social Credit System to illustrate how information and communication technologies bring forth new forms of interaction between the state and its citizens. In particular, it asks how the transparency generated by the Social Credit System enables new forms of social control, trust, and self-regulation. The study provides a descriptive account of the Social Credit System’s basic design elements and the political intentions behind its implementation. Based on Foucault’s model of the panopticon, the study then derives three basic parameters, each of which relate to the system’s capacity to create transparency and to reconfigure government-citizen relations. The study finds that the system increases the control of the government over society, likely diminishes trust, and reduces the freedom to act. However, compared to the clientelism and arbitrary decision-making of previous decades, the precise and depersonalized standards of the Social Credit System can be seen as an improvement that enables individuals’ capacity to self-regulate. This theoretical and analytical study thus adds to the debate about how government through algorithms rearranges practices of state power and control.

E-invoicing is a rapidly growing e-service in Europe as well as in the world. It is identified as a substantially significant element in progressing towards the goals of ‘Digital Economy’ in the European Union. This paper focuses on identifying inefficiencies in e-invoicing systems currently in use and the opportunities to apply emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotic process automation, in order to increase efficiency and level of automatization. The study incorporates expert opinions and users’ perceptions in e-invoicing systems on the status quo and the necessities for higher automation. We focus on e-invoicing systems in the Baltic region consisting of the countries Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Based on the conducted research, the drawbacks in e-invoicing systems were identified related to operational, technological and information security-related. Furthermore, the automation opportunities and general requirements for automation were identified. The functionalities that can be improved are discovered as well discussed in this paper and the advantages of using emerging technologies in the context are explained. Based on research outcomes we propose a conceptual e-invoicing ecosystem and present recommendations for its application along the future work needed in that field.

Solid eID (electronic identification) infrastructures form the backbone of today’s digital transformation. In June 2014, the European Commission adopted the eIDAS regulation (electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions in the internal market) as a major initiative towards EU-wide eID interoperability; which receives massive attention in all EU member states in recent years. As a joint effort of Estonia and the Netherlands, this study provides a comparative case study on eIDAS implementation practices of the two countries. The aim was to analyze eIDAS implementation challenges of the two countries and to propose a variety of possible solutions to overcome them. During an action learning workshop in November 2019, key experts from Estonia and the Netherlands identified eIDAS implementation challenges and proposed possible solutions to the problems from the policy maker, the service provider and the user perspective. As a result, we identified five themes of common challenges: compliance issues, interpretation problems, different practices in member states, cooperation and collaboration barriers, and representation of legal persons. Proposed solutions do not only involve changes in the eIDAS regulation, but different actions to develop an eIDAS framework and to improve cross-border service provision - which has recently become an important topic among member states. Eventually, the study provides practical input to the ongoing eIDAS review process and can help member states to overcome eIDAS implementation challenges.

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), in its annual report in 2018, noted an unprecedented increase in the use of small unmanned aircrafts (UAS), which represents a serious challenge for regulators in terms of safety and security. Moreover, there is a general trend in the filing of special requests to the ICAO for preparing of harmonizing documents in the field of legal regulation of drones. According to recent research, both in Russia and abroad, drones are used in more than 50 sectors of the economy to solve more than 450 commercial tasks, which allows companies to increase profits, reduce costs, and optimize many processes. The TOP 5 areas of drone use include: medicine & health care; oil and gas industries; protection of nature reserves and forests; urban planning and surveying; delivery of light cargo by transport companies.

At the same time, considering the current practice, many specialists note the limited applicability of the tools provided for by UN Convention on International Civil Aviation and traditional air regulations in case of UAS, and the urgent need for further efforts to create specific rules and regulations.

At present, considering the increasing frequency of drone use, two main areas can be identified: civil (commercial, recreational) and public (state bodies for monitoring and monitoring compliance with legislation, military). The purpose of this study is to analyze the general state of legal regulation on the use of drones for public administration purposes, as well as to determine its main parameters and possible differences/deviations from the rules applicable for commercial use. The authors also formulate the basic principles that should allegedly become the basis for drafting of special rules for the public use of drones to ensure the necessary level of security and the required efficiency – to achieve the public goals by their using.

Young people’s involvement with their mobile devices is often considered a problem nowadays. However, with the new “learning on the go approach” it can be used for good: for learning purposes, in particular in higher education. The m-learning tools have the potential to turn learning into a more attractive, interesting and motivating process of acquiring new knowledge and developing competencies. At the same time, m-learning can be inclusive of people with special needs, who used to be detached from traditional educational services. In our paper we purpose an evaluation approach to mobile learning software accessibility based on accessibility guidelines and standards. We suggest a formalization of the approach and reducing it to a controlled process. The dedicated usage of mobile devices and m-learning software can assist in improving mental operations speed, executive control of information selection and decision-making, as well as optimize the memorization system. Such enhancements are particularly important for facilitating effective learning in the elderly and the people with disabilities.

Open Government encourages transparent, collaborative, and participatory governmental and administrative actions to promote a public administration that is effective, responsive and innovative. Germany signed up for Open Government Partnership in 2016 and since then it has promulgated two national action plans. Through its grass-roots level initiatives targeted at municipality and regional level German government wishes to enhance relation with its public. This paper aims at examining the German experience of initiating Open Government by reviewing the policy instruments at play and lessons that are involved in the implementation of this broadly government shaping movement. The paper first attempts to analyse the building blocks of German strategy that led to the first and later second National Action Plan for Open Government implementation. It also looks at important initiatives for enhanced citizen participation at the regional level, providing a best practice example. The paper concludes by sharing some important lessons that can not only be learnt for Germany itself but also for aspiring fellow Eurasian states and municipalities pursuing Open Government.

Silver economy is dedicated to catering to the needs of the ageing population with innovative and technological solutions. The paper encompasses a de-tailed overview of the technology readiness and challenges of the silver generation towards ICT adaption. A hybrid approach is employed using the questionnaires and workshops to collect data. The main outcome creates the understanding of the hindering factors to ICT adaption for elderly people which if addressed can serve as the basis for new entrepreneurial opportunities. The present case is part of a larger set of research activities that will be conducted throughout the entire Baltic Sea Region in the coming years. The results of the research activities are aimed to be scale-able to serve the needs and requirements of other interested regions that are tackling similar matters regarding the ageing society.

Electronic participation data has a great potential for its application in studies of urban processes and systems. The popularity of e-participation services, which citizens use to report problems of urban improvement, housing and communal services, led to formation of massive datasets describing civic activity and subjective evaluation of urban environment quality. E-participation data has certain features that create distortions in the results of some research, e.g. when indirect evaluation of environmental or socioeconomic characteristics is concerned. One of the sources of such distortions are superusers. They are a small group of users whose activity is abnormally high. This abnormal activity has a significant impact on the distribution of messages. The fact that activity of e-participation service users is not equally distributed is well-known, however, a universal method of excluding the abnormal activity of superusers has never been proposed. This paper studies the distribution of activity of e-participation service users and proposes several methods of identifying and excluding peaks of increased activity of superusers in different territories and time intervals. The proposed methods were tested on data from the Russian portal “Our Saint Petersburg”. As a result, we have defined the optimal approaches to processing e-participation datasets for studies which are sensitive to the unequal distribution of subjective data.

In recent decades, the development of information and communication technologies has led to expansion of the range of communication channels used by the society. Cheaper, faster and more user-oriented communication channels, such as the Internet and social networks, have proven effective in implementing strategies for promoting goods and services in the private sector. They also demonstrated their popularity in the interaction of public authorities with citizens. Government websites, public services portals, and platforms for electronic public participation now largely determine the nature, quality, and areas of interaction in the public sector. But are the electronic channels a panacea, and will they replace completely the offline channels? The issue of choosing the optimal communication strategy becomes especially relevant when solving complex multidimensional issues of development and implementation of a public policy in any area. At different stages of the communication strategy life cycle, the tasks of interaction are different. The success in their completion is determined, in particular, by selection of the correct communication channel. This article discusses the attributes of different communication channels (online and offline) and using the example of the separate waste collection policy in St. Petersburg (Russia) provides recommendations on the usage of the most effective communication channels for the policy development and implementation. A formal procedure of the conjoint analysis is used as a way to analyze citizens’ preferred attributes of communication channels. The results of a survey conducted among the residents of St. Petersburg allow to conclude that online channels are not always the most preferable and effective ways of such communication.

Legitimacy is a vital source of stability in authoritarian political systems, and non-democracies are developing various tools to sustain it. The Internet is said to be one such tool, offering a variety of legitimizing effects, but the main discussion in this paper is around the referent object and the type of legitimation. This study attempts to explore how the diffusion of online tools is associated with different legitimation strategies of authoritarian countries, as measured by the Varieties of Democracy project. The analysis suggests that IT – tools diffusion is strongly and positively correlated with the rational-legal and performance types of legitimation. While the data is subject to variation, the results support an earlier claim that the proliferation of online tools is legitimation-driven and is applied to specific forms of legitimacy. This initial analysis will be further developed by including legitimation strategies into the causal Internet diffusion models.

Research has been proposed to determine trends and dynamic of citizen’s trust in new C2G communication forms. The survey sheds a light to trust concept and its evidences in IT performance in public sector. A representative survey was conducted using a SCOT approach. From the 800 respondents to this survey, the sampling error was no higher than 4%, the level of reliability reached 95%. The questionnaire contained variables to evaluate the experience of use and the level of trust in new technologies in the interaction with the government. The study revealed an increase in citizens’ trust in communicating with government authorities via the Internet and in receiving state and municipal services in electronic form.

Although trust is considered a crucial driver of online human behavior, its conceptualization often poses a challenge to scholars, due to the multidimensional nature of the phenomenon and the variety of online contexts in which trust manifests itself. While many studies have been performed to reveal the dimensions of trust in certain online domains, little has been done to build a holistic model that describes trust relations across the domains. This study aims to address this by building an empirical multifactor model of cybersocial trust. Using data obtained via the public opinion survey in St. Petersburg, Russia, and exploratory factor analysis, we have revealed six key factors of online trust, each reflecting different forms of interactions with people, organizations, or institutions. Implications of this multidimensional model and further steps for research are also discussed.

The article considers an approach to the design of a universal upper level conceptual model of urban data and its application for the formation of a relational database for development and landscaping projects. The conceptual model of urban data is designed to solve the problem of fragmentation and fragmentation of urban data in the context of the need for urban specialists in data prepared for specific applications. The problem of data fragmentation is caused by the presence of different data sources that produce data according to their internal standards, but there are no requirements for structuring and ordering data at the top level. The conceptual model of urban data should solve this problem. The urban data model is based on the representation of the city as a system formed by the urban planning environment, people with the characteristics of their behavior in the city, as well as providing urban infrastructures. The article shows that the proposed approach can be used as a basis for designing a database for the applied problem of modeling the loyalty of citizens.

Currently chatbots, dialogue systems and intelligent assistants increasingly found in an equipment of everyday life, used in technical support of commercial organizations and in entertainment services. Systems for the English language have good groundwork. However, the process of “recognition” of a natural language associated with a number of difficulties caused by the need to have a significant initial database of dialogues, explore various architectures of neural networks, solve problems of the perception and morphology of the Russian language. In this regard, the purpose of this study is the development of a neural network model for natural Russian language processing, capable of becoming an open platform for the development of specialized dialogue systems. For this, design and training of dialog models of neural networks based on modifications of the Transformer architecture are proposed. Own parsers for extracting and post-processing dialogues in natural Russian from the Otvet@mail.Ru portal and public chat rooms in the Telegram messenger for training neural networks were developed. The data set, prepared with their help and now publicly available on the Internet, contains more than 22.5 million question-answer pairs in natural Russian language. The prepared data set in various configurations applied when training a number of neural network models designed by modifying the Sequence2Sequence, Transformer and text2text architectures. The final version of developed neural network model generates answers to any user message up to 200 characters and is integrated into a dialogue system implemented using the client-server architecture for user interaction with the chat bot.

The trend of data-driven Government sets the priority of a data-centric paradigm for the development of digital government. It also maintains the use of linked open data as the basis for information sharing. Even though today when many countries have made a significant breakthrough, this task has turned out to be rather challenging for most of them and for Russia as well. Following the key criteria highlighted and proved for our assessment in 2018 we re-consider the results revealing Russian e-government readiness for the digital transformation basically in linked open data production. New challenges posed by the implementation of recently accepted data strategies in Russia set the objective of this research to check how the situation changed over the past two years. Due to the role of statistics in Open Government Data we give the review existing international practice in Linked Open Statistical data and shortly present ongoing research initiatives of The Russian Federal State Statistics Service. Expanding our previous recommendations, we advise to consider the competence gained in existing research and development and use it for implementing the state strategies with the focus on LO(S)D.

In the study, a decision support system for governance in the field of law was developed and the existing decision making model to conduct linguistic expertise of inaccurate public information in online media and social networks was improved, taking into account the human factor. The results of the proposed system are presented in a set of the formed recommendations, based on which the user makes a decision. The specific feature of the decision support system (DSS) is that it works with several types of false information in accordance with the Russian legislation against “fake news” addressed in the study. The adapted algorithms of Bayes classification were studied and built for effective work of the decision-making and classification module of false information. These algorithms were implemented in the system and a computational experiment on text classification was performed. The study examined the features of the Russian legislation on false information dissemination, and described the components and functionality of the proposed intelligent legal DSS, as well as its efficiency. This solution implies a widespread use of systems, application packages, special software and legal support for analytical work, obtaining forecasts and conclusions on the processes under study based on databases and expert judgment, considering the human factor and active influence of the controlled system on the governance process.

Semi-structured interviews with South Korean experts were conducted to explore enabling and limiting factors influencing open commutation of scholarly outputs and data in public health emergencies, such as the COVID-19 outbreak. The study provided a set of contextual/external, institutional/regulatory, resource, and individual/motivational factors with some relevant examples. The results revealed the highest importance of institutional/regulatory factors in such situations. The findings might be useful for a country’s comprehensive Open Science policy development as a component of future outbreak preparedness.

The article is devoted to methods of simulating population and social environment in agent-based computational economy models: the agent model of the spatial development of the Russian Federation and the model of anemia dynamics among Russian population. We present structure of the models and their databases. Information support of the model is based on statistical yearbooks, SPARK-Interfax database, RLMS survey results and websites of the ministries, including demographic structure of the population, production, import, export, employment, financial characteristics of organizations and households and other parameters. Since this information is presented in different sources, it is necessary to convert it to the structure that matches the input tables. For this task we use iterative proportional fitting algorithm; as an example we show sequence of iterations for aggregating information about the regional labor market. The model database is filled with the objects, which are generated using initial modeling data; all required interrelations are set among them. Simulation results show objects that have been created in the Russian Federation and in a separate region.

The problem of intimate partner violence (IPV), which has become more acute under quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic, affects millions of people and families around the world. It is extremely difficult for victims to disclose their experience of IPV and seek help from the relevant services. They prefer to search for help from people of their kind, on the Internet, in particular. Nevertheless, the forms, types of violence, people’s stance and the sentiment of opinions regarding violence are particularly diverse.

The paper proposes a method for creating an annotated corpus of texts through crowdsourcing. Using the methodology of the crowdsourcing study by M. Sabou et al., the authors expand and supplement it with important points specific to burning social problems, such as compiling search queries, describing data processing, as well as evaluating the relevance of the data obtained. The key result of the study is the first Russian annotated IPV text corpus.

The main type of crowdsourcing presented in the paper is volunteer crowdsourcing, based on the annotators’ loyalty to the problem under study. Despite the fact that the possibilities of its application are increasingly expanding, the scientific community still lacks a set of guidelines similar to traditional and expert methods for creating annotated corpora.

COVID-19 crisis has caused the growth of popularity of conspiracy theories disseminated by opinion leaders as well as anonymous actors via social media. This trend poses a danger because supporters of fake agendas contribute to spreading disinformation, deny the real risks, break the rules, and even undertake some unlawful actions. Since March 2020 Russian Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor) initiated blocking fake news about coronavirus on social media but some of them remained available to the public. In our study, we considered the agenda on conspiracy theories presented in the posts on the most popular Russian SNS VKontakte. The initial database contained 2342689 posts published between March 30 and May 12, 2020.

After the interpretation of the results of topic modeling, we found that conspiracy-related posts comprised a small share among all popular COVID-related posts on VKontakte. Content analysis showed that only about a half of the posts with information on conspiracy theories about COVID-19 was devoted to the promotion of conspiracy arguments but the sufficient share related to the debate on alternative versions or criticism. It was revealed that the most popular theory presented in posts on Vkontakte can be described as “anti-vax/politicized” version of “the chipping theory” which found the link between coronavirus and “planned chipping” of population via “mass vaccination”.

The structure of the agenda on COVID-related conspiracy theories is described. The key features of the analyzed agenda on conspiracy theories and practical applications are discussed.