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This study aims to explore recent public sector trends, inter-organizational and cross-sector collaborations, and analyzes these in terms of implications for participative development of information systems (IS). These trends are understood as being part of emerging forms of e-government. Initial suggestions for how to develop IS in the new contexts are provided.

Three cases involving the trends described above, taking place in the Swedish emergency response system, are studied and used as basis for identified participative IS development challenges and suggested adaptation needs. Data collection involves semi-structured interviews, focus groups and future workshops.

The identified challenges concern balancing ideological versus practical needs, lack of resources, lack of know-how and design techniques and tool challenges. Some practical implications for participative IS development include more extensive focus on stakeholder and legal analysis, need for interdisciplinary design teams, merging of task and needs analysis for yet-undefined user tasks and using on-line alternatives for interacting with users.

The study is exploratory where the three cases are in different, but at the same time interrelated, collaboration contexts. The identified implications and challenges provide proposals that in future research can be applied, formalized and integrated when developing practically feasible participative IS development approaches.

It is argued that the results point toward a current emerging form of e-government initiatives directed toward certain demarcated groups of citizens actually carrying out certain tasks for their co-citizens and society rather than the broad masses, having far-reaching practical implications and complicating the issue of IS development.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to identify occupational groups who can act as semi-professional first responders, in order to shorten the response times to frequent emergencies, and second, to identify related opportunities, challenges and needs of training, emergency supplies and information technology (IT) support.

A case study approach was taken, combining future workshops, focus groups and an exercise. Network governance was used as an analytical lens.

The identified potential groups are security guards, home care personnel, fire services day personnel and facility service personnel. The results show that semi-professionals have a large potential to complement professional resources by carrying out first response or supportive actions vital to the emergency, partly by using already existing cars and equipment. The identified needs include additional basic equipment such as fire extinguishers and first-aid kits, training in basic firefighting, first aid and risk assessment, as well as mobile phone application-based IT support to manage alarms. The major challenges are organisational, economic and juridical, including ambiguities in responsibilities and related insurances. The analysis recognises the new collaboration as a hybrid form of hierarchical government and network governance.

The study suggests that using semi-professional resources can be one of many innovative solutions to recent public sector challenges that have put a huge strain on professional emergency response organisations.

The study provides a novel view of using semi-professional resources in emergency response, based on the joint perspectives of various occupational groups, and the fire services.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the re-development process of the Swedish Rescue Services Incident Reporting System from an organizational learning perspective with the purpose to suggest what is needed to enable long-term learning from rescue operations.

The study is carried out as a case study relying on interviews, participant observation and workshop methods. The study case is the Swedish Incident Reporting System.

The objectives expressed by the central agency leading the studied process aimed at implementing double-loop learning objectives by revising the incident reports and to improve future operations accordingly. In practice this objective was lost along the way, with the agency focussing on cosmetic changes to the report such as terminology, attributes and labels. Meanwhile the local rescue services expressed different and concrete needs, requiring new system functionality, case/experience based learning, process improvements and organizational development. A number of suggestions of such measures are provided by the study, to be used by rescue services and other response organizations.

The case stands out because the re-development process is driven by one stakeholder, with the ambition to include multiple stakeholders’ needs. The study should be of specific interest to fire rescue services world-wide. However, considering that many tasks, learning and evaluation aspects of rescue operations are similar regardless of type of first responder involved (e.g. in firefighting, traffic accidents, and cardiac arrests), the results are also of interest to emergency management in general.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the controlled information security project which is designed to investigate, assess and provide tools to improve the information security status in organizations with a focus on public agencies. A central question for the project is how information security issues are communicated within organizations, specifically underlining that communication is control in a cybernetic sense.

The research method applied can be expressed as applied general systems theory combined with design science. The project is carried out in a number of steps: to design modelling techniques and metrics for information security issues in organizations; to collect data from Swedish governmental agencies; to use the modelling techniques to model communication of information security in organizations from different perspectives; to apply metrics on the data in order to assess information security levels in the agencies; to identify gaps; and to identify needs for improvement.

The motivation for the research is that communication of information security issues within organizations tend to be insufficient and the mental connections between IT‐security and information security work are weak, which prohibits the organization from learning and adapting in its security work. An entity's authority depends on its ability to control and manage the variety in the 14 layers. The general control objectives needed were implied based on the information security management standard.

The paper focuses on mind to mind communication conditions and how to adapt mechanistic systems.