At Data for Policy CIC 2025 in The Hague, themed “Twin Transition in Data and Policy for a Sustainable and Inclusive Future,” we explored how emerging technologies—especially AI—and diverse data sources can support accountable, inclusive, and sustainable policymaking.
Across several full days of sessions, the event brought together transdisciplinary researchers, policy practitioners, and technology experts. Notable contributions included:
Research presentations – “Proactive-by-Design: The Future of Governance Beyond Bureaucracy?,” on the study we conduct with Paula Rodriguez Müller & Luca Tangi (European Commission JRC) and “The Data Agency Awakens: A New Era for Official Statistics” we prepared with Luca Di Gennaro Splendore
Panel on National Data Strategies in Europe: Learning from and for the Dutch Data Strategy, which I joined the conversation as a panelists, along with Tim Faber (Ministry of Interior & Kingdom Relations), Anne Fleur van Veenstra, Iryna Susha, Adrianna Michałowicz (chaired by Devin Diran & Thijmen van Gend)
finally, the paanel on Responsible AI and Data Science Revolutions: Implications for Public Benefit Research and Policy Making that I was honored to chair, with panelists representing Smart Data Foundryand the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), joined by Magdalena Getler, Oliver Berry, and Rosario Piazza.
Our discussion highlighted the immense potential of AI and data, but also the responsibilities that come with it. Key insights included:
Balancing optimism and realism: AI is transformative, but its adoption requires grounded, practical experience. It can support public benefit—if managed carefully;
Data quality over quantity: More data isn’t always better. Governance, documentation, bias mitigation, and transparency are essential for AI-readiness;
Embedding public trust: High-sensitivity contexts, such as health or finance, demand proportionality, oversight, and systems designed for inclusivity;
Human-in-the-loop mechanisms: Ensuring AI reflects human values and context is critical, even when those values are evolving;
Task-appropriate AI: Not every problem requires a large language model; careful alignment between technology and purpose is essential;
Data literacy for all: Understanding AI’s limitations and risks is as important as technical infrastructure;
Triangulating perspectives: Combining structured/unstructured and qualitative/quantitative data helps address bias, power imbalances, and complexity;
Sustainable and inclusive systems: Scalable infrastructure alone is insufficient; AI governance and operational design must prioritize long-term societal benefit.
As Amara’s Law reminds us: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run.” Our discussion echoed this sentiment: AI’s potential is enormous, but realizing it for public benefit requires careful design, governance, and collaboration.
The overarching theme through all days (beyond above) was clear: AI and data are not neutral tools. Their value for public policy depends on human-centered design, responsible governance, and active societal engagement. Tools alone won’t deliver public benefit—they must be operationalized thoughtfully, with attention to ethics, context, and inclusion.
Huge thanks to Sarah Giest, Bram Klievink, Zeynep Engin, and all participating institutions—Leiden University, TNO Vector, Cambridge University Press & Assessment, and The Hague Centre for Digital Governance—for creating the space for meaningful dialogue in such a rich, collaborative environment.
The CIC 2025 conversations reminded us: building a truly responsible, inclusive, resilient, and sustainable AI ecosystem is not just a technical challenge—it is a societal mission and each and every of us is part of it.
Call for Papers is now open for our track “Accountable and Inclusive Digital Ecosystems for Public Value Creation” at the 27th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o 2026). The conference will take place June 2–5, 2026, at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, USA.
This track continues and expands the work we initiated in 2024 and 2025 on public and open data ecosystems. Responding to new technological and societal realities, we broaden the focus this year toward AI-enabled, interoperable, sustainable, and human-centered digital ecosystems—their design, governance, and impact on public value creation.
Why this track? Why now?
Digital ecosystems are undergoing profound transformation. Emerging technologies—AI (including generative AI), interoperable data spaces, IoT, cloud–edge infrastructures, and new governance frameworks—now form the backbone of digital public action. These technologies unlock unprecedented opportunities for insight generation, collaboration, transparency, and service co-creation across sectors.
Yet they also introduce new challenges: ethics, accountability, trust, digital literacy, and inclusion. As governments and organizations navigate this shift, we need research that bridges technical innovation, institutional capacity, and societal expectations.
Our track provides a space for this conversation.
What the track explores
We invite contributions that examine the conceptual, technical, institutional, and societal dimensions of digital and data ecosystems, with an emphasis on accountability, sustainability, inclusivity, and public value.
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
Ethical and accountable AI, data governance, algorithmic transparency, privacy, security
Interoperability and trust frameworks, identity infrastructures, standards, reference architectures
Human–AI interaction, explainability, accessibility, inclusion in digital public services
Stakeholder engagement, empowerment, co-creation, digital literacy, data sovereignty
Institutional and organizational mechanisms for ecosystem governance and sustainable management
Open, public, and cross-sector data ecosystems, including data spaces and platform ecosystems
Social, economic, and environmental sustainability and other public value dimensions
Case studies from cities, communities, public-sector organizations, and multi-stakeholder collaborations
Impact assessments of digital ecosystems on individuals, organizations, and society
Connection to the dg.o 2026 theme
The conference theme—Collaborative Digital Transformation for Public Value Creation—aligns perfectly with our track’s purpose. Digital ecosystems represent socio-technical infrastructures where governance, technology, and societal needs intersect. Understanding how to make these ecosystems accountable, inclusive, and sustainable is essential for collaborative digital transformation and for delivering tangible societal outcomes.
Track chairs
Anastasija Nikiforova, University of Tartu (Estonia)
Anthony Simonofski, Université de Namur (Belgium)
Anneke Zuiderwijk – van Eijk, Delft University of Technology (Netherlands)
Manuel Pedro Rodríguez Bolívar, Universidad de Granada (Spain)
Together, we bring perspectives from digital government, data governance, public administration, information systems, and socio-technical ecosystem design.
We look forward to receiving your submissions and to advancing the conversation on how accountable, inclusive, and sustainable digital ecosystems can drive the next generation of public value creation.
If you have questions about fit or ideas you’d like to discuss, feel free to reach out.
Are you focusing on new topics emerging in the field of ICT and public sector, incl. public-private ecosystems? Then it is time to start preparing your submission for EGOV2023 – IFIP EGOV-CeDEM-EPARTEmerging Issues and Innovations Track (chairs: Anastasija Nikiforova, Marijn Janssen, Francesco Mureddu).
EGOV2023 – IFIP EGOV-CeDEM-EPART is one of the most recognized conference in e-Government, ICT and public administration and related topics, which this year will be hosted in Belgium, in the heart of Europe, by Ghent University and KU Leuven – both top 100 universities.
Innovation and application of emerging technologies is now more and more in the thinking of Governments at all levels. While it would be easy to consider the public sector as being less flexible or slow in adoption, presentations at recent EGOV-CeDEM-ePart conferences proved that one should not come to such a conclusion too easily. Upcoming technologies, innovative organizational solutions, or new avenues of involvement in public sector activities seem to be more commonplace – along with the potential issues and challenges that come with such endeavours. Policy-makers and public sector officials are now expected to embrace change, consider digital transformation, or improve governance practices. At the same time, public sector researchers are also influenced by new views, methods, tools and techniques.
🎯The goal of this track is to provide a platform for the discussion of new ideas, issues, problems, and solutions, that keep entering the public sphere. Ideas that are emerging but might not fit other conference tracks are also welcome. Focus may include but is not limited to:
💡 Looking ahead into social innovation
💡Future studies, the future of government, policy-making and democracy
💡New trends in public sector research such as Metaverse, Large Language Models (LLMs), generative AI and its implementations such as chatGPT, Claude, ChatSonic, Poe – benefits, risks, adoption and resistance to its adoption by the public sector and citizens;
💡Global challenges that go beyond nation states (such as migration, climate change etc.) and which require international collaboration of individual governments;
💡Digital transformation in public sector context;
💡The future of digital governance;
💡Public values in transforming the government;
💡The role of government in smart cities (incl. smart sustainable cities) and sustainable living;
💡The role of the public sector in Human-Centered Society known as Society 5.0;
💡Government in the metaverse;
💡Self-Service Structures for Inclusion;
💡Public-private sector collaboration and integration;
💡Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), smart contracts and blockchain;
💡Preparing for the policy challenges of future technologies;
💡Regulating misinformation;
💡New technologies for automated decision-making;
💡The future public sector use and regulation of latest AI or genAI solutions;
💡Public use as well as regulations of industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0 and the Internet of Things (IoT);
💡The relationships of governments and Fintech;
💡Upcoming issues of eVoting / internet voting including application of digital signatures in the public sector;
💡Online public community building;
💡Utilization of digital billboards;
💡Latest trends in co-creation and service delivery;
💡Discussion of new research methods that have not been applied in this context;
💡Application of role theory in the analysis of public sector functions and processes;
💡Forward looking insights from case studies – let it be successful or failed experiments.
Track Chairs
Anastasija Nikiforova, Tartu University, Estonia
Marijn Janssen, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands
Francesco Mureddu, The Lisbon Council, Belgium
This time International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) EGOV-CeDEM-EPART will be hosted by KU Leuven and Ghent University, September 2024, while the deadline for submitting your paper is set to March, 2024.
25th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o2024)is coming with the revised list of tracks, where the special attention I invite you to draw to is a new track “Sustainable Public and Open Data Ecosystems” (chairs: Anastasija Nikiforova (University of Tartu, Estonia), Anthony Simonofski (Université de Namur ASBL, Belgium), Anneke Zuiderwijk (Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands) & Manuel Pedro Rodríguez Bolívar (University of Granada, Spain)).
Briefly about the track… Public and open data ecosystems promise the transformation of government data-driven actions, the fostering of public sector innovations and the collaborative smartification of cities, society and life, triggering value-adding sustainable development goals-compliant smart living and society 5.0 (Nikiforova, 2021, Nikiforova et al., 2023). Recent research found that concepts affecting and shaping the ecosystem are: 1) stakeholders / actors and their roles, 2) phases of the data lifecycle, in which a stakeholder participates in the ecosystem, 3) technical and technological infrastructure, 4) generic services and platforms, 5) human capacities and skills of both providers and consumers, 6) smart city domains (thematic categories) as the targeted areas for data reuse, 7) externalities affecting goals, policy, and resources, 8) level of (de)centralization of data sources – development, restrictions, 9) perception of importance and support from public officials, and 10) user interface, user experience, and usability (Lnenicka et al., 2021). The body of knowledge in the above areas (not to say about putting them all together) is very limited. New research is needed to help public managers and politicians for (1) implementing emerging technologies and technological innovations, (2) improving the achievement of sustainable development goals for increasing transparency, participation, and cooperation, and (3) meeting the stakeholders’ expectations, needs, regulations and demands.
This track welcomes contributions covering, but not limited to:
💡 The concepts of theoretical approaches toward Public Data ecosystems, Open Data ecosystems, Data Spaces, and Data Marketplaces;
💡Infrastructures supporting Public and Open Data Ecosystems;
💡The role of emerging technologies in Public and Open Data ecosystems;
💡Institutional aspects of implementing sustainable Public and Open Data Ecosystems;
💡Other sustainability dimensions of Public and Open Data Ecosystems;
💡Stakeholder-centric dimensions of Public and Open Data Ecosystems;
💡Case studies of Public and Open Data Ecosystems;
💡The impact of Public and Open Data Ecosystems on Individuals, Organizations and Society.
The track welcomes both contributions covering the current state-of-the-art of public data ecosystems (what components constitute them, what are the relationships between these components, what makes an ecosystem resilient and sustainable), incl. individual case studies reflecting best or bad practices, as well as those addressing how these ecosystems can be transformed into more sustainable ecosystems that will “fuel” or “smartify” society (Information Society aka Society 4.0 to Super Smart Society aka Society 5.0 transition), cities and various areas of life.
The track is very in line with the conference theme of DGO 2024, namely: Internet of Beings – Transforming Public Governance, where, “the Internet of Beings focuses on digital technologies that enable integration, people-centric, and creation of open platforms for collaborative multi-user to co-create services and products” (as mentioned in the theme description). Public and open data ecosystems can be considered as such open platforms, where data providers and data users find each other and collaborate and co-create to develop services and products useful for society. While digital technologies enable the development of public and open data ecosystems, the adoption of such ecosystems has been fragmented.
Is your research related to any of the above topics? Then do not wait – submit!
🗓️🗓️🗓️Important Dates:
January 26, 2024: Papers, workshops, tutorials, and panels are due Feb 1, 2021: Application deadline for doctoral colloquium March 8, 2024: Author notifications (papers, workshops, tutorials, panels)
Our new article titled “Towards High-Value Datasets determination for data-driven development: a systematic literature review” (Nikiforova A., Rizun N., Ciesielska M., Alexopoulos C., Miletič A.) is now available at arXiv with supplementary data published at Zenodo and waiting for your read! Moreover, this is not only my recommendation – The Living Library has included it in their collection, which as you can remember from my posts on another paper that was also recommended by them for the reading, seeks to provide actionable knowledge on governance innovation, informing and inspiring policymakers, practitioners, technologists, and researchers working at the intersection of governance, innovation, and technology in a timely, digestible and comprehensive manner, identifying the “signal in the noise” by curating research, best practices, points of view, new tools, and developments.
The OGD is seen as a political and socio-economic phenomenon that promises to promote civic engagement and stimulate public sector innovations in various areas of public life. However, to bring the expected benefits, data must be reused and transformed into value-added products or services. This, in turn, sets another precondition for data that are expected to not only be available and comply with open data principles, but also be of value, i.e., of interest for reuse by the end-user. This refers to the notion of ‘high-value dataset’ (HVD). HVD are defined as datasets whose re-use is expected to create the most value for society, the economy, and the environment, contributing to the creation of “value-added services, applications and new, high-quality and decent jobs, and of the number of potential beneficiaries of the value-added services and applications based on those datasets” (Directive, 2019). HVD was recognized by the European Data Portal as a key trend in the OGD area in 2022, which is not included in the annual Open Data Maturity Report.
There has been some progress in this area over the last years, which refers to a list of initiatives and studies carried out by several organizations and communities, where at the European level, probably most notable progress has been made by the European Commission in the Open Data Directive (originally Public Sector Information Directive (PSI Directive), i.e. Directive (EU) 2019/1024 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 June 2019 on open data and the re-use of public sector information, according to which there are six thematic data categories of HVD – (1) geospatial, (2) earth observation and environment, (3) meteorological, (4) statistics, (5) companies and company ownership, (6) mobility data are considered as of high value. Further, a list of specific HVDs and the arrangements for their publication was developed and made available as “Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2023/138 of 21 December 2022 laying down a list of specific high-value datasets and the arrangements for their publication and re-use” (Commission, 2023) that can be seen as seeking for greater harmonization and interoperability of public sector data and data sharing across EU countries with reference to specific datasets, their granularity, key attributes, geographic coverage, requirements for their re-use, including licence (Creative Commons BY 4.0, any equivalent, or less restrictive open licence), specific format where appropriate, frequency of updates and timeliness, availability in machine-readable format, accessibility via API and bulk download, supported with metadata describing the data within the scope of the INSPIRE data themes that shall contain specific minimum set of the required metadata elements, description of the data structure and semantics, the use of controlled vocabularies and taxonomies (if relevant) etc. In addition, the Semantic Interoperability Community (SEMIC) is constantly hosting webinars on DCAT-AP (Data Catalogue Vocabulary Application Profile) for HVD to discuss with OGD portal owners, OGD publishers and enthusiasts the best approaches to use DCAT-AP to describe HVD and ensure their further findability, accessibility, and reusability.
In other words while it can be seen that progress has been made in this area, an examination of the above documents reveals that these datasets rather form a list of “mandatory” or “open by default”, sometimes also referred to as “base” or “core” datasets, aiming at open data interoperability with a high level of priority and a relatively equal level of value for most countries, which contributed to the development and promotion of a more mature open data ecosystem and OGD initiative. Depending on the specifics of a region and country – geographical location, social, current environment, social, economic issues, culture, ethnicity, likelihood of crises and / or catastrophes, (under)developed industries/ sectors and market specificities, and development trajectories, i.e., priorities. Depending on the above, more datasets can be recognized as having high value within a particular country or region (Utamachant & Anutariya, 2018; Huyer & Blank, 2020; Nikiforova, 2021). For example, meteorological data describing sea level rise can be of great value in the Netherlands as it has a strong impact on citizens and businesses as more than 1/3 of the country is below sea level, however, the same data will be less valuable for less affected to countries, such as Italy and France (Huyer & Blank, 2020). We believe that additional factors such as ongoing smart cities initiatives, as well as the Sustainable Development Goals, the current state of countries and cities in relation to their implementation and established priorities affect this list as well.
We find it is important to support the identification of country specific HVD that, in turn, could increase user interest ]by transforming data into innovative solution and services. Although this fact is recognized by countries and some local and regional efforts, mostly undertaken by governments with little support from the scientific and academia community, they are mainly faced with problems in the form of delays in their development or complete failure, or ending up with some set of HVD, but little information about how this was actually done. These ad-hoc attempts remain closed and not reusable, which is contrary to both the general OGD philosophy and the HVD-centric philosophy that is expected to be standardized. Most of them are ex-post or a combination of the ex-ante and ex-post, making the process of identifying them more resource-intensive, with an effect only visible after potentially valuable datasets have been discovered, published, and kept maintained, with the need for further evaluation of their impact, which is a resource-consuming task. All in all, it is considered that there is no standardized approach to assisting chief data officers in identifying HVDs, resulting in a failure in consistent identification and maintenance of HVDs.
Thus, we refer to this topic. As you can now from my blog it is not the first attempt we take. The very first activity related to this topic was taken by me back in 2019, where I studied this topic in Latvian settings, i.e. a stakeholder-centered determination of High-Value Data sets for Latvia was done as a response for the call made by the national OGD initiative, whose results were submitted to the holders of Latvia’s open data portal (Ministry of Environmental Protection and Regional Development) and used to prepare external reports submitted to Publications Office of the European Union). Later, several countries joined my study, namely, Poland, Greece, Croatia and Peru, and together with the colleagues we conducted several workshops that took place as part of international conferences, on which I posted before here and here.
This time, we conducted more theoretical study seeking for establishing a rich knowledge base for determining HVD, while the validation of identified indicators (as part of this study and derived from government reports) is expected to take place during the workshops with open (government) data and / or e-government experts. All in all, we focused on identifying all efforts taken with the reference to this topic. In other words, the objective was to examine how HVD determination has been reflected in the literature over the years and what has been found by these studies to date, incl. the indicators used in them, involved stakeholders, data-related aspects, and frameworks, which was done by conducting a Systematic Literature Review with the following research questions (RQ) defined to achieve the set objective:
(RQ1) how is the value of the open government data perceived / defined? In which contexts has the topic of HVD been investigated by previous research (e.g., research disciplines, countries)? Are local efforts being made at the country levels to identify the datasets that provide the most value to stakeholders of the local open data ecosystem?
(RQ1.1) How the high-value data are defined, if this definition differs from the definition introduced in the PSI /OD Directive,
(RQ1.2) What datasets are considered to be of higher value in terms of data nature, data type, data format, data dynamism?
(RQ2) What indicators are used to determine high-value datasets? How can these indicators be classified? Can they be measured? And whether this can be done (semi-)automatically?
(RQ3) Whether there is a framework for determining country specific HVD? In other words, is it possible to determine what datasets are of particular value and interest for their further reuse and value creation, taking into account the specificities of the country under consideration, e.g., culture, geography, ethnicity, likelihood of crises and/or catastrophes.
Although neither OGD, nor the importance of the value of data are new topics, scholarly publications dedicated to the topic of HVD are still very limited. This points out the limited body of knowledge on this topic, thereby making this study unique and constituting a call for action. Nevertheless, during this study, we have established some knowledge based on HVD determination-related aspects, including several definitions of HVD, data-related aspects, stakeholders, some indicators and approaches that can now be used as a basis for establishing a discussion of what a framework for determining HVD should look like, which, along with the input we received from a series of international workshops with open (government) data experts, covering more indicators and approaches found to be used in practice, could enrich the common understanding of the goal, thereby contributing to the next open data wave (van Loenen & Šalamon, 2022).
Sounds interesting? Want to know more? Read the article -> here! Please cite the paper as: Nikiforova, A., Rizun, N., Ciesielska, M., Alexopoulos, C., Miletič, A. (2023). Towards High-Value Datasets determination for data-driven development: a systematic literature review. In: Lindgren, I., Csáki, C., Kalampokis, E., Janssen, M.,, Viale Pereira, G., Virkar, S., Tambouris, E., Zuiderwijk, A. Electronic Government. EGOV 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Cham
References
Nikiforova, A. (2021, October). Towards enrichment of the open government data: a stakeholder-centered determination of High-Value Data sets for Latvia. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (pp. 367-372).
Directive (EU) 2019/1024 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 June 2019 on open data and the re-use of public sector information (recast)
Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2023/138 of 21 December 2022 laying down a list of specific high-value datasets and the arrangements for their publication and re-use
Huyer, E., Blank, M. (2020). Analytical Report 15: High-value datasets: understanding the perspective of data providers. Publications Office of the European Union, 2020 doi:10.2830/363773
Utamachant, P., & Anutariya, C. (2018, July). An analysis of high-value datasets: a case study of Thailand’s open government data. In 2018 15th international joint conference on computer science and software engineering (JCSSE) (pp. 1-6). IEEE
van Loenen, B., & Šalamon, D. (2022). Trends and Prospects of Opening Data in Problem Driven Societies. Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems: INDECS, 20(2), II-IV
Anastasija Nikiforova, PhD 