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The purpose of this study is to explore whether immersive virtual reality (VR) can complement e-participation and help alleviate some major obstacles that hinder effective communication and collaboration. Immersive virtual reality (VR) can complement e-participation and help alleviate some major obstacles hindering effective communication and collaboration. VR technologies boost discussion participants' sense of presence and immersion; however, studying emerging VR technologies for their applicability to e-participation is challenging because of the lack of affordable and accessible infrastructures. In this paper, the authors present a novel framework for analyzing serious social VR engagements in the context of e-participation.

The authors propose a novel approach for artificial intelligence (AI)-supported, data-driven analysis of group engagements in immersive VR environments as an enabler for next-gen e-participation research. The authors propose a machine-learning-based VR interactions log analytics infrastructure to identify behavioral patterns. This paper includes features engineering to classify VR collaboration scenarios in four simulated e-participation engagements and a quantitative evaluation of the proposed approach performance.

The authors link theoretical dimensions of e-participation online interactions with specific user-behavioral patterns in VR engagements. The AI-powered immersive VR analytics infrastructure demonstrated good performance in automatically classifying behavioral scenarios in simulated e-participation engagements and the authors showed novel insights into the importance of specific features to perform this classification. The authors argue that our framework can be extended with more features and can cover additional patterns to enable future e-participation immersive VR research.

This research emphasizes technical means of supporting future e-participation research with a focus on immersive VR technologies as an enabler. This is the very first use-case for using this AI and data-driven infrastructure for real-time analytics in e-participation, and the authors plan to conduct more comprehensive studies using the same infrastructure.

The authors’ platform is ready to be used by researchers around the world. The authors have already received interest from researchers in the USA (Harvard University) and Israel and run collaborative online sessions.

The authors enable easy cloud access and simultaneous research session hosting 24/7 anywhere in the world at a very limited cost to e-participation researchers.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the very first attempt at building a dedicated AI-driven VR analytics infrastructure to study online e-participation engagements.

This study aims to examine the relationship between political regimes and e-government performance, with a focus on governments’ perspectives of e-government. First, the authors use United Nations (UN) E-government Development Index (EGDI) to establish the current patterns of e-government performance across different regime types, and then develop their own typology of the various perspectives of different political regime types to e-government adopted in the literature. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between e-government performance and regime types.

This study adopts a mixed-method research approach that involves quantitative (statistical databases) as well as qualitative (interviews) methods to go beyond the statistics and obtain interpretations of explored patterns of e-government performance and regime types. The research instruments for this study include the Jupyter open-source software used for drawing the relevant correlations, and validating the results using expert interviews.

The results of the analysis support the research hypothesis that democracies have better e-government implementation than autocracies. The findings suggest that the type of a political regime has an influence on the conceptualization of e-government, the implementation of its practices and subsequently the assessment of its performance.

This study relies on the UN EGDI and data from previous literature. the UN Index only measures the supply side of government outputs without taking into consideration their impact on citizens, which does not provide a holistic view of the whole picture. Therefore, the UN EGDI rankings do not necessarily imply citizen satisfaction or improved e-government.

From a practice point of view, this study gives information to government leaders as well as technical experts on how the political regime influences the government’s performance in e-government. In fact, this paper bridges the gap between theory and practice by calling policymakers to take different regime worldviews and motivations into consideration before setting e-government strategies or even assessing e-government performance. Considering the current global digital transformation, it should be ensured that practitioners take these regime specifications into consideration. In the long term, the results of this research will prove that setting up e-government or e-participation platforms is not enough as technology alone is not enough to strengthen democracy or let alone stimulate citizen engagement. When dealing with e-government initiatives, the focus should be broadened beyond the technological aspect and take the social and political motivations of governments into consideration.

From a theoretical standpoint, this study calls for a more holistic e-government performance indicator that could take the regime perspectives into consideration and integrate them into its evaluation process. An indicator that can accommodate the different objectives pursued by different regime types. This could also be achieved by setting two indicators with each one matching the perspective of the specific regime type, which takes us to Ashby’s “Law of Requisite Variety” (1991). The Law of Requisite Variety states that “the system must possess as much regulatory variety as can be expected from the environment” (Ashby, 1956). This law has some implications for this study. It implies that the regime worldview influences the requisite variety depending on the political context where e-government is being implemented. Because we have two regime worldviews, we need to have at least two responses (in this case indicators) that consider the variety of political contexts. Therefore, through appreciating the differences between these two worldviews, this study recommends using the Law of Requisite Variety to investigate the influence of political regimes on e-government. In the same way, in our repertoire of responses, we should not assume that one discipline has the answer but have a variety of cross-disciplinary responses.

The contribution of this study lies in going beyond the statistical analyses of the UN EGDI to come up with possible interpretations of the reasons why political regimes differ in their e-government performance and what could be the reasons behind such variations. Based on analyzing correlations between e-participation performance and regime types, and interviews with experts, two different e-government perspectives could be identified: one for democracies and one for autocracies. Through identifying the relationship between these perspectives and the e-government performance of each regime type, this study provides governments and policy makers with new evidence that different regime types have different motivations for developing their e-government performance. Hence, e-government policies and strategies ought to match particular political contexts.

The study investigates factors like media, tribal, religious and party politics' influence on Nigerias’ 2023 presidential election choice. It confirms dominant social media platforms and examines their influence on election polls, e-participation and political candidate choice. The main objectives of this study are to: investigate if tribal, religious and party politics affect the respondent’s choice of a presidential candidate, ascertain the respondent's most used social media platform for political engagement and determine how social media platforms influenced the election polls during the 2023 Nigerian presidential election.

A sample size of 384 registered voters was used to survey three states in Southeast Nigeria hinged on the technological acceptance model, the instrumentalist theory of ethnicity and the theory of reasoned action.

The study found that tribal politics did not influence political candidates during the 2023 Nigerian presidential election. However, religious and party politics influenced their choices as well as X (Twitter), found as the most used and most influential social media platform vital for enhancing participatory democracy and informing people at real-time.

The researchers experienced challenges such as ensuring that the respondents filled the questions appropriately to reduce the number of void questionnaires and a funding problem since they had yet to receive any grant to enhance the study.

The study commends improved Internet connectivity and accessibility among the citizens for increased political engagement on social media. It also recommends that the Nigerian government enforce the rule of law in politics to enable diverse tribes and religions to experience democratic e-participation and development without marginalisation or subjugation by incumbent power. The findings affirm that social media is apt in political communication during the 2023 presidential elections in Nigeria. The study is a contribution to knowledge, timely and original.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the epistemological tensions embedded within big data and data-driven technologies to advance a socio-political reconsideration of the public dimension in the assessment of their implementation.

This paper builds upon (and revisits) the European Union’s (EU) normative understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) and data-driven technologies, blending reflections rooted in philosophy of technology with issues of democratic participation in tech-related matters.

This paper proposes the conceptual design of sectorial and/or local-level e-participation platforms to ignite an ongoing discussion – involving experts, private actors, as well as cognizant citizens – over the implementation of data-driven technologies, to avoid siloed, tech-solutionist decisions.

This paper inscribes the EU’s normative approach to AI and data-driven technologies, as well as critical work on the governance of these technologies, into a broader political dimension, suggesting a way to democratically and epistocratically opening up the decisional processes over the development and implementation of these technologies and turn such processes into a systemic civic involvement.

This study uses a bibliometric approach to analyze the overall status of e-government research by revealing patterns and trends that would help gain a broad understanding of global developments in the field and future directions.

All documents related to e-government published from 2000 to 2019 were extracted from the Scopus and the Digital Government Reference Library databases. Bibexcel, Biblioshiny, and VOSviewer were used to perform the analyses and visualize the science mapping.

The results showed that 21,320 documents related to e-government research were published and cited 263,179 times. The annual growth rate of e-government research has reached 21.50%. The regression analysis showed that the growth rate is expected to increase gradually over the coming years. Despite the significant role that conference papers play in the e-government literature, the impact of articles far exceeds conference papers. The University of Albany (SUNY) has played an important role in e-government research in terms of production and impact. Furthermore, the study revealed some countries that are expected to play a prominent role in e-government research, as well as several topics that may attract more attention soon.

The results presented in this study and the comprehensive picture obtained about the e-government field make it an effective supplement to the expert evaluation. Thus, researchers, research managers, policymakers, institutions, funding agencies, and governments can rely on it.

This paper aims to check the E-Government Development Index (EGDI) of South Asian countries and then highlight the main challenges they are facing right now, which are causing South Asian countries to do good in the e-government sector.

The authors will be getting the EGDI data for South Asian countries through the United Nations website, and to visualize it for understanding, the authors will be taking the help of an Online Business intelligence tool. After successfully fetching data and presenting it in a proper format, the authors will be doing an analysis of the South Asian country’s EGDI score overall and also will check on individual indicator levels of EGDI.

Finally, the authors will be sharing the common improvement points which South Asian countries’ governments need to focus on to make their EGDI score better and get included in the list of top E-Government. With its help, countries will progress and get hand-in-hand with the world by providing the best governance practices to their citizens.

It is important to understand for South Asian countries that the e-government initiative is not just about transforming governance or providing quality services to citizens but also it is about being in sync with the world and competing with other countries in the development progress. So, they have to follow the e-government trends to get their country aligned with the world and attain progress country in a faster speed.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on explaining the concept of a smart citizen and in what way it is related to and dependent on smart government.

To study this specific use case, researchers use “Qualitative Research.” For the review of the literature, the authors used an indirect citation. Additionally, VOSviewer software was used to evaluate the research data for this paper.

As researchers, the authors will explain how smart governments lay the foundation for transforming an ordinary citizen into a smart citizen. Also, they will be highlighting the significance and importance of citizens becoming smart in the future and how it will give an edge to any country over others in terms of development and growth.

After it, the authors will be sharing the essential qualities that are joined together to make a smart citizen and able to distinguish between a common citizen and smart citizen. Finally, creating an understanding of it, the emphasis will be on the facilities and services smart citizens will get under a smart government, which will eventually increase the smartness of the citizens.

The implementation of digital twin in e-government services will become the future of public service delivery. It has a great promise for significantly optimizing e-government service delivery in public services because digital twin can be leveraged to achieve value co-creation, which can be turned for innovation and new knowledge creation. The purpose of this study is to fill a knowledge gap in the domain of e-government with digital twin enabled.

This study examined the concept of digital twins in the context of e-government for innovation management. This research applied exploratory research discussing a dynamic and interpretive model that examines the main factors to consider when developing digital twins for the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s integration of e-government services. This study begins with a thorough assessment and then evaluates the results to propose a model that would be used as a benchmark for future research. Secondary data was gathered from a variety of previously published primary research sources, including peer-reviewed journals, case studies, periodicals, newspapers and books.

E-government with digital twin platform will become increasingly integral to business or public value creation and can be managed individually as people and organizations expect much greater value for their well-being that is linked to a number of better outcomes. E-government with digital twin will no longer to be seen as a static web service but the next enabling platform to offer a comprehensive digital advisory for each and every user. The digital twin’s goal is to extract all of a user’s digital activity processes and thoroughly analyze them across all of e-services. When there are crucial issues or problems that need to be alerted to the (physical) user, the digital twin will present options, solutions and recommendations based on the entire gathered data continuum.

This study is conducted to provide a better understanding of the digital twin’s impact on public service delivery in the future. When it comes to e-government, a digital twin is a digital representation of an individual with the ability to integrate e-government services (such as e-citizenship, e-employment, e-participation, e-business, e-commerce, e-health, e-learning, e-regulation, e-entertainment and so on) with nearly real-time data and advanced analytics. Individuals will be able to improve, discover, foresee and make better and faster decisions as a result of the digital twin. The proposed model shows a future scenario for e-government services, in which the key principle of Industrial Revolution 4.0, Cyber Physical Systems, is accommodated by digital twins.

This study provides academics, policymakers and practitioners in the fields of technology, public and/or private service delivery and public policy, with the opportunity to define priorities, processes and outcomes of e-government services and thereby benefit more directly from the findings of the study. This study presents some novel insights into e-government services the use of digital twins to optimize public service delivery.

In today's dynamic and competitive environment, innovation is a key requirement for hotels to survive, be profitable and sustain their competitive advantages. However, because the study of innovation in the hospitality industry has only developed recently, little is still known about its determining factors. Given this, this study aims to theorize and test with empirical data the effects of two key dimensions of strategic planning (i.e. participation and flexibility) on innovation.

Using a fully standardized questionnaire, data were gathered from a sample of 150 hotels in Dubai, by a professional market research firm, through face-to-face interviews. The study hypotheses are tested with partial least squares structural equation models. The study has three limitations: first, its data are cross-sectional and the analyses are post hoc; second, it uses single informants; and third, the sample was primarily from a single setting, i.e. Dubai.

The study argues that participation and flexibility in strategic planning are positively related. It also argues that flexibility is positively related to innovation and that flexibility mediates the effects of participation in strategic planning on innovation. Empirical support is found for all the examined relationships.

The study takes place in a unique setting (i.e. Dubai, United Arab Emirates) where research on organizational innovation has been rather limited to date. The findings have important implications for the stream of literature in this field and for practitioners and sustaining competitive advantages of hotels.

The purpose of this study is to explore the discrepancies between the services provided by municipalities through e-Government portals and the services sought by residents in the context of smart cities.

This research investigates the information and services delivered by municipalities via e-Government portals and the services that residents wish to access through these portals. A mind map representation of ideas from 707 participants is used to visually illustrate the proposed e-Government portal structure based on user recommendations.

The findings reveal that existing e-Government portals fall short in offering a comprehensive range of e-services desired by residents. The results highlight the need for municipal e-Government websites to grant residents access to a diverse array of services and information. It is crucial to note that the specific services may fluctuate over time and between cities, reflecting the evolving needs of residents and the capabilities of municipalities.

This study is original in its focus on bridging the gap between existing e-Government portals and residents’ preferences, using a mind map representation to visually illustrate the proposed portal structure based on user recommendations. The research emphasizes the importance of considering residents’ needs in terms of services and functionalities and adapting websites accordingly.