The 7th edition of the EGOSE international conference was held in a both face-to-face and online format due to the travel constraints caused by the COVID-19 pandemics constraints. As previously, it was organized in St. Petersburg (Russia) on 18-19 November 2020 by the ITMO University’s Centre for e-Government Technologies jointly with the North-West Institute of Management, Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA). In addition to the traditional for EGOSE set of conference topics, a specific feature of the 2020 event has been the inclusion of the participatory budgeting theme, as an invitation to share experiences of the EU project “Empowering Participatory Budgeting in the Baltic Sea Region” (EmPaci). Overall, the conference agenda covered the same diverse list of topics as before that make EGOSE unique in a wider Eurasian region, namely:
- eGovernance and Eurasian Integration
- Open Government Prospects
- Information Society and eGovernance
- Citizen Centred E-Government
- Building Smart City
- Smart City and Quality of Life
- eGovernance and Policy Modelling
- Participatory Governance and Participatory Budgeting
- Social Media: Tools for analysis, participation, and impact
- Big Data, Computer Analytics and Governance
- Cases and perspectives of the government transformations
59 papers coming from 12 counties were submitted for review by the Programme Committee whose members selected 23 research papers for publication in this volume. Prof. Dirk Draheim representing respectively the Information System Group at Tallinn University of Technology (TTÜ) delivered key-note plenary speeches, followed by three paper presentation sessions. Seven papers were presented and discussed at the first session dedicated to digital government services, policies, laws, practices. The second research session addressed the problematics of the digital society viewed from the perspective of openness, participation, trust and competences, as discussed in eight papers. Other eight papers presented at the third session reported the research results in the field of digital data science, with a special emphasis placed on methods and techniques used to build models and algorithms for research in, inter alia, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Each session was concluded by discussion.
The trend of the rising prominence of research in the area of machine learning and computational linguistics that emerged a few years back has been maintained at this conference as well. The area of digital government and society has revealed possible new emerging topics of research enquiry into surveillance and silver economy, in addition to such traditional topics as digital services, policies and comparative studies.
Accepted papers have been published in Volume 1349 of the Springer's Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS) Series, indexed by Scopus DBLP, Google Scholar, EI-Compendex, Mathematical Reviews, SCImago.
