The week was full of impressions (positive) from the the 24th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research in the charming Gdańsk (Poland), which started with our workshop, followed by the keynote talk delivered by the former President of Poland & Nobel Prize laureate Lech Wałęsa, until the very last session & coming to my hometown and meeting John Malkovich there! Although this was already the 3rd working trip in the last 4 weeks and the 5th from the very beginning of June, during which I delivered two keynote lectures, presented two papers (with two more papers presented by my colleagues at other conferences), chaired the workshop with several more events & activities, it was still an absolutely great experience, where we finally had the 3rd edition of our workshop “Identification of high value dataset determinants: is there a silver bullet for efficient sustainability-oriented data-driven development?” as part of dg.o2023, which brought more than 20 participants, with whom we jointly tried to understand:

💡What can be the country-specific HVD determinants (aspects)? Incl. who should be the expected beneficiary of the availability of HVD? what are the current approaches towards HVD determination?

💡What mechanisms or methods can be put in place to determine them?

💡Can this be done (semi-)automatically?

💡How a framework for determining country-specific HVD could look like?

As part of the workshop, we also validated the results of our Towards High-Value Datasets determination for data-driven development: a systematic literature review (Anastasija Nikiforova, Nina Rizun, Magdalena Ciesielska, Charalampos Alexopoulos, Andrea Miletič) paper we expect to present to EGOV community, which has been already named a “sound in the noise” (we work hard to correspond to this characteristic!). As part of the above, we verified whether the findings from the literature are relevant, valid & complete discussing:

💡What can be data-centered characteristic of HVD? (and should they be predefined?)
💡What are the expected characteristics of the HVD determination indicators, i.e. (1) ex-ante / ex-post / both?, (2) qualitative / quantitative / both? (3) Internal (such as usage statistics) / external (e.g., report, indices, charters) / both?, (4) SMART / not necessarily? Diving then into the above questions, as well as evaluating relevance of indicators identified previously (lit-re & current practices / ad-hoc approaches & previous workshops)

Many thanks to everyone who participated in the ICEGOV, ICOD or DGO workshops (more than 60 people in total), as well as thanks to Maria, who was part of the ICOD workshop!

Thanks to the organizers, including but not limited to the local organizing committee – Gdansk University, Digital Government Society, Emerald Publishing – for giving an opportunity to have a good time and to finally meet the colleagues in person (some of whom never met before despite a relatively long collaboration)!