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Recent technological developments in the e-communications sector have lowered the threshold for users of information and communication technology (ICT) to enter the virtual domains of the Internet and to start playing other roles in... more
Recent technological developments in the e-communications sector have lowered the threshold for users of information and communication technology (ICT) to enter the virtual domains of the Internet and to start playing other roles in society. ICT users have shifted their role from passive receivers of information and media content towards an active role in becoming producers, like in user generated content, or owners of infrastructure components, like in WiFi hotspots. The end user is not 'just' end user anymore. The trend in technological innovations undoubtedly will encourage this role shifting even further. This raises policy issues such as for the governance of privately held components of publicly accessible infrastructures and such as issues of privacy and security in virtual worlds. These policy issues have a decentralized character that escapes formerly successful central policy arrangements. We claim that policy arrangements should explicitly include a role for end user participation and take the role for technology into account. Coordination mechanisms in Open Software Development are presented as a first starting point towards innovative policy arrangements.
Research Interests: Business, Information Technology, Intellectual Property, Community Engagement & Participation, Virtual Communities, and 15 moreCorporate Governance, Technology Management, Software Development, Space Technology, Information and Communication technology, Virtual Worlds, The Internet, User Generated Content, Protocols, Information and Communications Technology, Fading, Platform design, Communications Technology, Internet, and Application Software
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In the past fewyears, researchers and practitioners have highlighted the potential of Blockchain (BC) and distributed ledger technology to revolutionize government processes. Blockchain technology enables distributed power and embedded... more
In the past fewyears, researchers and practitioners have highlighted the potential of Blockchain (BC) and distributed ledger technology to revolutionize government processes. Blockchain technology enables distributed power and embedded security. As such, Blockchain is regarded as an innovative, general purpose technology, offering new ways of organization in many domains, including e-government for transactions and information exchange. However, due to its very characteristics of peer to peer information exchange, its distributed nature, the still developing technology, the involvement of new actors, roles, etc., the implementation of blockchain applications raise issues that need governance attention. BC initiatives have implications for citizen trust, privacy, inclusion and participation. Governmental organizations need a thorough understanding of the BC design principles, the possible applications in the domain of e-government and the exploration of governance mechanisms to deal with the limitations and challenges of the BC technology when used in a myriad of sectors, ranging from the financial and business sector to the social domains of healthcare and education. In this panel we explore the impact of block chain technology on all levels of government and create an awareness of effects or applications in society that raise governance issues.
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Circular economy and sustainability are high on the political agendas of governments. Governments, but also other actors like banks, insurance companies, and auditing firms play a key role in setting (regulatory) requirements, instruments... more
Circular economy and sustainability are high on the political agendas of governments. Governments, but also other actors like banks, insurance companies, and auditing firms play a key role in setting (regulatory) requirements, instruments and incentives, as well as monitoring mechanisms to stimulate and monitor CE activities. Governance of CE for ensuring that CE regulation and instruments are properly implemented is key, however, lack of visibility in CE flows poses a major challenge. Digital infrastructure innovations hold potential to provide visibility into the CE flows. However, so far, in the IS and eGovernment research, there is very limited research on how digital infrastructure innovations can enable and support CE governance. In this paper, therefore, we provide a framework and outline a research agenda on that topic.Information and Communication Technolog
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Traditionally, governments and companies store data to identify persons for services provision and interactions. The rise of self-sovereign identities (SSIs) based on blockchain technologies provides individuals with ownership and control... more
Traditionally, governments and companies store data to identify persons for services provision and interactions. The rise of self-sovereign identities (SSIs) based on blockchain technologies provides individuals with ownership and control over their personal data and allows them to share their data with others using a sort of “digital safe.” Fundamentally, people have the sole ownership of their identity data and control when and how it is shared, protecting their privacy. As these data need to be validated to be trusted, they may become a more important data source for digital information sharing and transactions than the formal source of identity controlled by governments. Furthermore, SSIs can be used for interacting digitally with any organization. These developments change the relationship between government, companies, and individuals. We explore information sharing and governance in the digital society using blockchain-based SSIs. In addition, the impact of SSIs on data stora...
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Many of today’s essential services depend on infrastructure-based systems such as the energy, the telecommunications and the public transport system. These systems consist of interdependent subsystems that coevolve over time. The... more
Many of today’s essential services depend on infrastructure-based systems such as the energy, the telecommunications and the public transport system. These systems consist of interdependent subsystems that coevolve over time. The governance of these systems is performed by many different types of public and private actors. In addition these systems are subject to technological innovation. End users of their services rely on the quality and provision of these infrastructure-based systems. In order to mitigate unwanted societal outcomes such as outages, high consumer prices and underperformance of service quality, these systems are regulated. These infrastructure-based systems are defined as complex socio-technical systems (CSTS); a concept that denotes that the system’s functioning is dependent on the interactions between the technical, the social and the institutional components of the system. Due to their large scale size and the required upfront investments in infrastructural elem...
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Translation of the abstract into Arabic. (PDF 244Â kb)
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Recent technological developments in the e-communications sector have lowered the threshold for users of information and communication technology (ICT) to enter the virtual domains of the Internet and to start playing other roles in... more
Recent technological developments in the e-communications sector have lowered the threshold for users of information and communication technology (ICT) to enter the virtual domains of the Internet and to start playing other roles in society. ICT users have shifted their role from passive receivers of information and media content towards an active role in becoming producers, like in user generated content, or owners of infrastructure components, like in WiFi hotspots. The end user is not 'just' end user anymore. The trend in technological innovations undoubtedly will encourage this role shifting even further. This raises policy issues such as for the governance of privately held components of publicly accessible infrastructures and such as issues of privacy and security in virtual worlds. These policy issues have a decentralized character that escapes formerly successful central policy arrangements. We claim that policy arrangements should explicitly include a role for end user participation and take the role for technology into account. Coordination mechanisms in Open Software Development are presented as a first starting point towards innovative policy arrangements.
Research Interests: Business, Information Technology, Intellectual Property, Community Engagement & Participation, Virtual Communities, and 12 moreTechnology Management, Software Development, Space Technology, Information and Communication technology, Virtual Worlds, User Generated Content, Protocols, Fading, Platform design, Communications Technology, Internet, and Application Software
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The paper argues that a new categoiy of infrastructures is emerging, user-driven, self-organizing and with decentralized control: Inverse Infrastructures (IIs). lis are not well-understood. Moreover, they represent a paradigm shift in... more
The paper argues that a new categoiy of infrastructures is emerging, user-driven, self-organizing and with decentralized control: Inverse Infrastructures (IIs). lis are not well-understood. Moreover, they represent a paradigm shift in infrastructure development. Their bottom-up development shows tension with the current socio-institutional framework for infrastructures. Internationally infrastructure laws and policies are based on a top-down and centralized view of infrastructures. Regulation is based on a control paradigm that does not fit the characteristics of inverse infrastructures and has no ways to deal with them. Policy (re)design is needed in the face of inverse infrastructure emergence. The paper analyses how these self-organizing infrastructures emerge and develop by focusing on coordination issues. Coordination is central to self-organization. Two clusters of II cases are analyzed on what triggers coordination and how subsequent coordination takes place (coordination mechanisms). Theoretical concepts are drawn from standardization theoiy, from studies on Open Source Software communities, andfrom theories of self-organizing systems (i.e. Complex Adaptive Systems and System-of-Systems theoiy). The two clusters of II cases are peer-to-peer networks (e.g. Napster, Gnutella and Joost) and wireless networks (Wireless Leiden and FON). The paper concludes that, similar to the behavior of ant colonies, II emergence can be understood as an accumulation of local attempts to optimize a situation. Complex citizen and citizen-company partnerships evolve which compete with existing infrastructure provisions and touch on public values (e.g. privacy, copyright). A policy response is needed.
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Within a few years, the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) is expected to be commercially available. This system is the European implementation of third generation mobile telecommunication and is expected to be the successor... more
Within a few years, the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) is expected to be commercially available. This system is the European implementation of third generation mobile telecommunication and is expected to be the successor of second generation systems like GSM (Global System for Mobile communication). A key uncertainty is how and at what speed the customer take-up of UMTS is likely to proceed, especially in relation to the current use of second generation systems. This question is of importance to telecom operators because it could significantly influence their strategic decision making. Since this problem involves strategic, long term considerations and it does not have the level of detailed specification required for more exact forecasting techniques, a System Dynamics approach was used to build a Powersim model. The model takes into account the key factors in the take-up and migration process and allows the user to simulate different scenarios of UMTS take-up in t...
The regulatory arena in network-based industries In recent years the trend in network-based industries is from state monopoly ownership to operation and management by investor-owned companies. This trend towards liberalisation and... more
The regulatory arena in network-based industries In recent years the trend in network-based industries is from state monopoly ownership to operation and management by investor-owned companies. This trend towards liberalisation and privatisation promoting competition changed the roles of and relationships between private and public bodies. New views on the role of government led to a redesign of institutional frameworks in which government involvement was placed at arm's length of regulation and operations, shifting its focus towards policy development. Independent national regulatory authorities (NRAs) were installed to perform the role of monitoring network-based industries. Formal mechanisms were designed to ensure the accountability of these regulatory authorities to the other players in the regulatory arena. Moreover, NRAs are subject to a wide variety of performance assessments. These assessments tend to concentrate on the efficiency and effectiveness of NRAs. The results ...
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Following open data policies worldwide, an increasing number of public organisations has now published open data that is free to be used by anyone. However, despite the significant increase in use of this open data, the open data... more
Following open data policies worldwide, an increasing number of public organisations has now published open data that is free to be used by anyone. However, despite the significant increase in use of this open data, the open data providers are mostly not aware of their users and the way in which the data is actually re-used. This is rooted in the principle that open data should be free to use without prior user registration in order to avoid any unnecessary barriers for reuse of the data. However, understanding use and user needs of open data is important to improve the provision of open data and the successful implementation of open data policies. We explored the use of log files of the actual use of open data to identify the users and to explore how the open data is being used. By means of a case study in which we apply log file analytics to the Dutch open geographical data portal we show that this approach is promising for analysing open data use. This approach will yield many ne...
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Blockchain technologies offer new ways of organizing information architectures for information sharing amongst a multitude of agents in complex socio-technical systems. However, transferring the experience gained with blockchain from the... more
Blockchain technologies offer new ways of organizing information architectures for information sharing amongst a multitude of agents in complex socio-technical systems. However, transferring the experience gained with blockchain from the crypotocurrency domain to business-to-business (B2B) setting is challenging and some of the blockchain inherent characteristics hamper pilots from scaling up towards a global blockchain-enabled information sharing business-to-business (B2B) architecture. In this paper we derive specific design principles and rules to explicitly address these blockchain scalability issues in a B2B context. To do so we analyse the evolution of the Global Trade Digitization (GTD1) blockchain architecture that is developed to share data in international supply chains all over the world by taking an information infrastructure perspective and by means of the design principles and rules of Hanseth and Lyytinen (2010) which were derived using the case of the Internet. Our l...
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Many students have difficulties with specifying, planning and carrying out their individual master thesis project within the nominal time allotted to it in their study programme. We propose to explore the potential of using virtual agents... more
Many students have difficulties with specifying, planning and carrying out their individual master thesis project within the nominal time allotted to it in their study programme. We propose to explore the potential of using virtual agents as buddies for the master thesis execution phase. A Learn2Learn buddy that matches with learning styles will be prototyped and tested with representatives of the target group and their coaches.