Due to its multidisciplinary nature the study domain has two equally footed legs to stand on, that is, top-tier conferences, such as the HICSS DG Track in first place, and journals such as Government Information Quarterly in a likewise leading position among journals. The study domain is producing a steadily increasing output of peer-reviewed articles, which has recently reached a going rate of almost 1,800 publications annually, demonstrating the growing interest in the study domain. While with this increase the number of publication outlets has also risen, the Digital Government Track at HICSS has gained and maintained an extraordinarily prominent rank among academic outlets, which more often than not has served as the bellwether of new trends and topics. As the sample of publications introduced above shows, the study domain is diverse in themes, topics, and “narratives,” and the DG Track at HICSS has helped the study domain foster multidisciplinary exchanges on site and beyond.

Digital government (DG, or, as some still refer to it, e-government) is entering its third decade as an administrative practice as well as an academic study domain. Unlike in other areas, the bidirectional feedback and transfer of insights between practice and research has been a hallmark of digital government from its early stages onwards. Moreover, multiple disciplines have contributed to and informed both practice and research, which has made digital government a fascinating, dynamic, and multidisciplinary area.

For 20 years now, the academic track on digital government at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) has played an instrumental role at the forefront of advancing the understanding of potentialities, challenges, and uniqueness of this domain of study and its application, evolution, and implementation in public sectors around the world.

From humble beginnings as a single so-called “minitrack” in 2001, the Digital Government Track at HICSS has since morphed into the leading academic conference on the subject worldwide. Annually, between 50 and 60 completed research papers are accepted for on-site presentation and publication in the proceedings, which in order to be included have to have passed rigorous selection and stringent double-blind peer review processes. Over the past two decades the Digital Government Track at HICSS has accumulated a rich body of academic knowledge this way, which has frequently anticipated or even paved the path to new developments at the intersection of information, information technology and its various uses, people, and policies, along with public administrative processes and practices.

In 2020, the DG Track hosted a total of 14 topical minitracks (MTs), some of which intentionally overlap in part, while they maintain separate foci. These minitracks can be clustered into four major themes: (a) innovation, transformation, and administrative change, (b) cyber security, threat detection, and threat mitigation, (c) disaster preparedness and response, and (d) novel technologies and related challenges regarding DG. In the following, exemplary and outstanding contributions to the 2020 DG Track in each of the four thematic areas are introduced.

Innovation, Transformation, and Administrative Change (Thematic Area 1)

In this thematic cluster, quite a number of papers could have been chosen as representative. However, Daniel Rudmark’s paper entitled “Open Data Standards: Vertical Industry Standards to Unlock Digital Ecosystems” (Rudmark, 2020) stands out, since it focuses on a widely neglected although essential area with regard to innovation, transformation, and change in the public sector, that is, the lack of open data standards. Rudmark’s paper investigates data providers’ motives and approaches to establishing and implementing such open data standards, which would end or at least mitigate the incompatibilities of current open data formats. For the study the 2016 open public transport data redesign initiative of Sweden’s public transportation system served as a case in point. The Swedish planners had to evaluate several alternative avenues such as Google’s General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), the Nordic Public Transport Interface Standard (NOPTIS), which they had already used, and NeTEx as the technical standard for exchanging public transport data via XML documents. Since the European Union (EU) had blessed NeTEx as the traffic data standard, the Swedish lead agency Samtrafiken opted to walk away from the NOPTIS standard and adopt the Norwegian NeTEx profile, which had been in use for a while and had a flexible open trip planner component. Interestingly, even within the NeTEx specification, national profile implementations can differ to a degree that makes them incompatible. The conversion from NOPTIS to the Norwegian NetEx variant, however, proved to be not trivial, since some concepts were more detailed in one implementation than the other, and vice versa. Rudmark concludes that Samtrafiken opted for the Norwegian NeTEx variant for two reasons, the standardization recommendation of the EU along with certain pressures coming with it and the proven track record of the Norwegian profile implementation, which was reasonably close to the previous framework used.

While the NeTEx framework still allows for flexibility (and thus some incompatibility), the adoption of the Norwegian profile implementation by Samtrafiken in Sweden shows that digital ecologies can evolve and grow over time based on a given standard and framework potentially leading to reuses, innovations, and novel applications in larger geographies, which were previously not imaginable. The major takeaway from Rudmark’s contribution is that standardized open data frameworks are key to practically giving rise to digital ecologies that enable novel and sometimes unforeseen uses, added value, and new services benefiting citizens, businesses, and public-sector agencies alike.

Cyber Security, Threat Detection, and Threat Mitigation (Thematic Area 2)

Over the years the DG Track at HICSS has seen a number of thematic areas develop from humble beginnings to solid, recurring, and important elements in the overall academic discussion inside DG. For example, the Cyber Security MT (since 2006) and the Insider Threat MT (since 2012) have presented studies on cyber security-related topics in the public sector. In 2020, these two established MTs were joined by a newcomer, the Cyber Deception for Defense MT, which attracted a total of 11 accepted papers, which is an unusually high number for a new MT, indicating that its particular focus had become an urgent avenue of study in DG. Ever more sophisticated cyber attacks have been a reality of networked operations in both the public and private sectors for at least the last 25 years. With growing sophistication of attacks, defensive measures have accounted for this moving target from initially static protective measures such as firewalls, through real-time asset and traffic monitoring along with virus detection and elimination mechanisms, fake targets such as honeypots and honey nets, to self-shielding dynamic architectures. Among the latter concepts the role of cyber deception for defensive purposes has been gaining traction. The basic idea starts with the assessment that sophisticated attacks on an organization’s cyber infrastructure and its assets are facts of daily routine. Cyber deception tactics attempt to credibly pose fake targets, which attackers might perceive as sufficiently rewarding, so as to lure such attacks in different directions and away from the real targets, making it increasingly costly and time-consuming to maintain the attack. In so doing, the defenders learn more about the nature of the attack and the tactics of the attacker, which feeds back to more effective defensive deception mechanisms.

Cleotilde Gonzalez and friends present a research framework under the title “Design of Dynamic and Personalized Deception: A research framework and new insights for cyber defense” (Gonzalez et al., 2020) that investigates the benefits of various dynamic cyber defense strategies. The study uses game theory-based cyber attack and defense games such as the so-called Stackelberg Security Games (SSG) with the aim of dynamically designing and maximizing the effectiveness of deceptive signals. In their approach the researchers used four SSGs with increasing complexity (that is, the “box game,” the “insider attack game,” “HackIT,” and “CyberVAN”), for the first three of which they developed computationally represented adaptive cognitive models of “human attackers” whom they fed with personalized signals for maximum deceptive credibility. Deception tactics, such as masking (that is, hiding real assets) and decoying (that is, luring the attacker into a fake “honey” environment), and signaling tactics along with interaction mechanisms, were used for playing the four SSGs with human attackers. These experiments informed the study regarding the effectiveness of various deception tactics and interaction mechanisms so that respective algorithms of higher sophistication could be developed.

Disaster Preparedness and Response (Thematic Area 3)

The still relatively young 21st century has already been labeled the “century of disasters” by some authors (Marsella, 2012), and responding to disasters is an important part of any government’s mission to keep its citizens, businesses, and assets safe and secure. Information and communication technologies, while introducing some additional dependencies and vulnerabilities, have nevertheless become essential tools in disaster response management. For a number of years DG research has acknowledged the need for and contributed studies in this particular area, and respective publications have become an integral part of the DG Track. In 2020, Green and Blanford’s paper entitled “Refugee Camp Pollution Estimates Using Automated Feature Extraction” (Green & Blanford, 2020) demonstrated the use of advanced algorithmic methodologies to support responders in managing the globally unfolding refugee crisis. Mass migrations present major challenges to relief organizations, for example, in the case when 671,000 Rohingya hastily left Myanmar for Bangladesh in 2018 and built makeshift camp structures with an unknown number of people occupying them. The relief organizations began to rely on satellite imagery to count the structures and estimate the occupancy rates in a slow and manual fashion.

The researchers were interested in the feasibility of an automated analysis of the frequently updated cartographic material from satellite imagery to support the biweekly estimate of refugee counts for both the Bangladesh government agency and the respective United Nations refugee organization (UNHCR). The automated calculation was based on spectral and spatial analyses and classification of building features. While the manual accuracy of the classifications was slightly higher for buildings, the automated analysis turned out to be higher for non-building areas. Per building type an average number of persons was calculated based on the respective space coverage of 3.5 to 4.5 square meters per person. While the accuracy of manual extractions, classifications, and calculations might have been very slightly higher than the automated ones, the latter could be performed within 30 minutes whereas the manual version would have required hours. The authors point to several techniques for further improving the automated approach; however, the researchers were satisfied with the usefulness of the overall approach and the tool they had developed.

Novel Technologies and Related Challenges (Thematic Area 4)

In recent years, among various other novel technologies, distributed ledger technologies (DLT) such as Blockchain (BC) along with cryptocurrencies based on Blockchain architectures like Bitcoin and Ethereum have drawn increasing academic and practice attention. The volume of cryptocurrencies caps in the range of $270b-$282b in recent months with the aforementioned top two cryptocurrencies representing about 70 percent of the total market capitalization. While cryptocurrencies, which provide anonymity and (in theory) safety and security against theft, represent one instantiation of novel products and services in the emerging financial-technical (fintech) environment, other uses of DLT/BC beyond and outside the fintech arena have also cropped up, such as unfalsifiable record keeping in public records, real estate, healthcare, art, law, supply chains, and voting among others. 

Co-authors Scholl, Pomeshchikov, and Rodríguez Bolívar studied the emergence of government regulations in this developing field. Under the title “Early Regulations of Distributed Ledger Technology/Blockchain providers: A comparative study” (Scholl et al., 2020) the authors presented and compared the cases of three small jurisdictions, that is, Gibraltar, Malta, and Liechtenstein, and their distinct approaches to regulating these novel services. In contrast to some early protagonists of cryptocurrencies who promoted total anonymity and self-regulation, these smaller jurisdictions had the shared understanding that regulation would give both service providers and their clients protection against abuses and fraud and a reliable regulatory and economic environment, in which novel services could be offered, while security and safety standards such as national and international laws regarding anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism could be observed. The three jurisdictions basically viewed DLT/BC service regulations as a major opportunity for attracting novel business models and revenue streams. As the study found, the three jurisdictions pursued fairly distinct approaches. While Gibraltar and Liechtenstein refrained from delving into regulating technology implementations, Malta founded a technology testing agency and invented the function of certification agents, which made the certification process all but straightforward. The former two jurisdictions devised a technology-unspecific regulation based on principles and safety measures as well as a monitoring system of ongoing operations. Liechtenstein went farthest in envisioning a whole new “token economy,” which would expand beyond security and utility tokens. The authors conclude that the involvement and lead of large jurisdictions like the US and the EU in the formulation of internationally harmonized regulatory frameworks might be needed for this new service industry to break through.

Hans J. Scholl serves as a full professor at the Information School in the University of Washington in Seattle, WA, USA. He has created and chaired the Digital Government Track at HICSS for almost 20 years. In recent years, he was joined by co-chairs Lemuria Carter (2017-2018) and John Bertot (2019-2020).

References

Gonzalez, C., Aggarwal, P., Lebiere, C., & Cranford, E. (2020, 7-10 January). Design of Dynamic and Personalized Deception: A Research Framework and New Insights. Proceedings of the 53rd Hawaii International Conference on System Science (HICSS-53), Maui, HI, USA.

Green, B., & Blanford, J. (2020, 7-10 January). Refugee Camp Population Estimates Using Automated Feature Extraction. Proceedings of the 53rd Hawaii International Conference on System Science (HICSS-53), Maui, HI, USA.

Marsella, A. J. (2012). Getting Prepared for a Century of Disasters. PsycCRITIQUES, 57(40), EId 2. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029704 

Rudmark, D. (2020, 7-10 January). Open Data Standards: Vertical Industry Standards to Unlock Digital Ecosystems. Proceedings of the 53rd Hawaii International Conference on System Science (HICSS-53), Maui, HI, USA.

Scholl, H. J. (2020, 06/15/2020). The Digital Government Reference Library (DGRL). University of Washington, The Information School. Retrieved 06/15 from http://faculty.washington.edu/jscholl/dgrl/

Scholl, H. J., Pomeshchikov, R., & Rodríguez Bolívar, M. P. (2020, 7-10 January). Early Regulations of Distributed Ledger Technology/Blockchain Providers: A Comparative Case Study. Proceedings of the 53rd Hawaii International Conference on System Science (HICSS-53), Maui, HI, USA.