November 2013 NUI Galway Researchers Win Best Paper Award at Top UN Electronic Government Conference

Researchers at INSIGHT@NUI Galway have been awarded the ‘Best Paper Award for Completed Research’ at the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (ICEGOV), which was held in Korea recently. INSIGHT@NUI Galway, formerly known as DERI, hosts the Centre for Data Analytics and is an acknowledged leader in semantic web research.

The award-winning paper, ‘Harnessing the Duality of Participation - Social Software Infrastructure Design’, was co-authored by INSIGHT’s Lukasz Porwol and Dr Adegboyega Ojo, along with Dr John Breslin from the College of Engineering and Informatics.

The paper describes the design and implementation of the socio-technical infrastructure required for harnessing political deliberations on social media platforms, and outlines the challenges for implementing and sustaining such an infrastructure in governments.

The judges praised the manner in which the paper deciphered the area of citizen participation, translating it from art to science. In their comments they said that the paper investigated the very difficult and unbounded area of citizen participation and demystified the art of citizen involvement.

The judges described the paper as a pleasure to read, thoughtfully bringing the reader through the reasoning, research and issues that need to be understood and addressed to successfully ensure citizen participation.

Lukasz Porwol, the report’s lead author said “It’s great to be recognised for our work at such a high-profile conference, one of the biggest e-government events with participants from over 60 countries.”

The ICEGOV conference is attended each year by major stakeholders from academia, government, the UN system and other international organisations, civil society and the private sector involved in the technology-enabled transformation of government. The ICEGOV conference series was founded by the United Nations University and involves several UN organisations in its organisation to highlight its strong UN character.

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