CO3

Special issue call for papers from Information Technology & People

Submission deadline: 31st May, 2020

Special issue editors

Laura Alcaide Muñoz, University of Granada, Spain
Email: lauraam@ugr.es
Manuel Pedro Rodríguez Bolívar, University of Granada, Spain
Email: manuelp@ugr.es

Overview of Special Issue

The technological environment of Smart Cities stimulates the development of new services and new ways of providing public services driven to satisfy the citizens’ needs with the ultimate aim at increasing their quality of life (Zygiaris, 2013; Dameri, 2012). Under this urban environment, emerging technologies are taking a leading role in public sector reforms around urban service delivery and the promotion of public participatory spaces, creating more efficient and easily accessible spaces for enhancing collaboration in problem-solving issues and innovation (Meijer and Rodríguez, 2016; Rodríguez, 2018; Alcaide and Rodríguez, 2019). Indeed, the networked technologies have the potential for empowering people in policy design and implementation, and in the delivery of citizen-centric services
Thus, around the world, the governments are allocating a lot of resources to implement emerging technologies and generate new economic opportunities, improve service delivery and facilitate citizen engagement (Obedait et al., 2019; Viale Pereira et al., 2017). The ultimate aim is to focus government efforts on the increase of public value creation, through hearing citizen voices for a more democratic society and more citizen-centric services (Sorrentino and Niehaves, 2010).  It requires the citizens’ involvement in public decisions under the Smart City context, obtaining higher consensus and a better quality of life in a social sense. This participation in the design and implementation of public policies allows democratic societies to supply effective public services to citizens, companies and not-for-profit organizations, which creates public value for people (Dameri, 2012; Meijer et al., 2016).
Given the quick development of new emerging technologies like and the importance of the citizen-centric services in the progress and development of Smart Cities, it would be interesting and timely to know how local governments are using these new technologies to enhance public sector services as well as the impact that new technologies could have on its efficiency, the satisfaction of citizens’ needs, the improvement of information transparency in public services, the increase of the quality of life of citizens in the urban environment, etc. In brief, this special issue is driven to analyze the consequences and real impact that new emergent technologies could have on the development of Smart city initiatives regarding citizen-centric services (OECD, 2019).

Indicative List of Anticipated Themes

This special issue seeks a wide range of papers that deal with diverse projects of citizen-centric services as well as studies that favor progress in the field of knowledge of smart cities with the consequent impact and practical implications necessary to develop these initiatives. The following themes are the interest for the special issue:

•    Blockchain and DLT implementation in public services
•    Case studies focused on innovative technology implementations, social innovation, engagement and digital government service provision.
•    Chatbots in the design of public services
•    Emerging technologies in smart communities
•    Increase of quality of life using emerging technologies into smart urban environments
•    Integration of government data (big, open etc), services, and/or processes.
•    New forms and mechanisms of delivery with a specific focus on co-design, co-production and co-provision of services.
•    Organizational, managerial and governance aspects of government transformation and public services delivery.
•    Policies, strategies, culture and value foundations for ICT-enabled government innovation
•    Smart partnership
•    Smart services
•    Specific technological solutions to introduce innovative user-oriented approaches or new practices
•    The role of ICT, people and processes of digital government
•    The use of emerging technologies to face up current and future societal challenges.
•    The use of emerging technologies to improve design of policies and services

Important Dates

Initial paper submission deadline: 31st May, 2020
First round authors notification: 31st July, 2020
Invited revisions deadline: 15th September, 2020
Second round authors notification: 31st October, 2020
Final revision deadline: 30th November, 2020
Final authors notification: 15th December 2020
Project publication date: Spring 2021

Submissions Details

To view the author guideline for this journal, please visit:
https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/author_guidelines.htm?id=itp
Please submit your manuscript via our review website: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/itp