Ann Macintosh – författare

New information technologies are being applied swiftly to all levels of government service: local, county, regional and even national and international. Information technology (IT) is being used to improve data management and data sharing, planning and decision support, service delivery, and more. Application areas affected by government mandates to improve e-government service include healthcare and safety; law enforcement, security, and justice; education; land use; and many others. DIGITAL GOVERNMENT: E-Government Research, Case Studies, and Implementation provides the field with a definitive, interdisciplinary, and understandable review of recent IT and related research of particular importance to digital government. The book also includes explorations of current and future policy implications, and case studies of successful applications in a variety of government settings.

The rapid development and the growing penetration of information and communication technologies (ICT) provide tremendous opportunities for a wide and cost effective application of the ideas of participative democracy and public participation in government decision and policy making. ICT can drive dramatic transformations in the quantity and quality of communication and interaction of government organizations with citizens, revitalizing and strengthening the modern representative democracy which currently faces big problems of reduced citizens’ trust and involvement.

This book deals with the application of these e-participation ideas in the special and ‘difficult’, and at the same time highly interesting, national context of Southern Europe and the Balkans. The first chapter provides an overview of e-participation concepts and practices whilst the following chapters analyse pilot applications of e-participation concepts in eight different Southern European and Balkan countries (Spain, France, Italy, Slovenia, Serbia, Albania, Greece, Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM)). They cover both the ‘classical’ e-participation paradigm, based on official e-participation spaces created, operated and controlled by government organizations as well as emerging new e-participation paradigms including e-participation based on web 2.0 social media, and ‘scientific-level’ e-participation, based on opening government data to the scientific community.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies.

The rapid development and the growing penetration of information and communication technologies (ICT) provide tremendous opportunities for a wide and cost effective application of the ideas of participative democracy and public participation in government decision and policy making. ICT can drive dramatic transformations in the quantity and quality of communication and interaction of government organizations with citizens, revitalizing and strengthening the modern representative democracy which currently faces big problems of reduced citizens’ trust and involvement.

This book deals with the application of these e-participation ideas in the special and ‘difficult’, and at the same time highly interesting, national context of Southern Europe and the Balkans. The first chapter provides an overview of e-participation concepts and practices whilst the following chapters analyse pilot applications of e-participation concepts in eight different Southern European and Balkan countries (Spain, France, Italy, Slovenia, Serbia, Albania, Greece, Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM)). They cover both the ‘classical’ e-participation paradigm, based on official e-participation spaces created, operated and controlled by government organizations as well as emerging new e-participation paradigms including e-participation based on web 2.0 social media, and ‘scientific-level’ e-participation, based on opening government data to the scientific community.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies.

The papers in this volume are the refereed application papers presented at AI-2005, the Twenty-fifth SGAI International Conference on Innovative Techniques and Applications of Artificial Intelligence, held in Cambridge in December 2005.

The papers present new and innovative developments in the field, divided into sections on Synthesis and Prediction, Scheduling and Search, Diagnosis and Monitoring, Classification and Design, and Analysis and Evaluation.

This is the thirteenth volume in the Applications and Innovations series. The series serves as a key reference on the use of AI Technology to enable organisations to solve complex problems and gain significant business benefits.

The Technical Stream papers are published as a companion volume under the title Research and Development in Intelligent Systems XXII.