Mila Gascó

• PhD in Management (public management - public policy evaluation)
• Managing Director at University at Albany, State University of New York

This article aims to study and analyze, from a multidisciplinary point of view, the organizational and institutional transformations that public administration is experiencing due to a country’s transition to the information and knowledge society. Three specific goals are pursued: (a) studying the use of new technologies in the public administratio...

The transition to an information society requires the implementation of effective actions by the different actors of the new society and economy. The private sector has already started to get involved. It is now public administration’s turn, and, although far behind the business world, it has been provided with an important tool: the electronic gov...

This work is the result of the consultation, carried out by the authors in 2010, as a result of the exploratory field work that was conducted in order to shape the so-called Iberoamerican Interoperability Framework (Marco Iberoamericano de Interoperabilidad – MII), promoted by the Latin American Centre of Administration for Development (Centro Lati...

E-government interoperability is not something new. However, this term has grown in importance as a result of the need to design and offer more sophisticated and complex e-government services that, many times, require the collaboration of two or more public institutions. Meaningful research on this topic could therefore be helpful in providing a ba...

Innovation, and technological innovation in particular, can help city governments to meet the challenges of urban governance, to improve urban environments, to become more competitive and to address sustainability concerns. To prevent and manage these challenges, cities need to operate in an innovative way. In this context, the smart city approach...

Public libraries hold significant potential for advancing inclusive civic engagement in government Artificial Intelligence (AI) initiatives. Drawing on interviews with 34 staff members from three public libraries across the United States—Palo Alto Public Library (PAPL) in California, Queens Public Library (QPL) in New York, and Schaumburg Township...

Amid rapid urbanization, cities have to reinvent themselves (e.g., become 'smart') in response to complex problems, evolving quality of life demands, and a need to spur innovation and entrepreneurship. While prior research supports a holistic view of smart cities stressing various success factors, less is known about the role of community organizat...

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots in the public sector worldwide has increased in recent years. Despite its increasing use, public administration research in this area faces some limitations. First, much of the current research is theoretical and normative, lacking substantial empirical data to assess the results of chatbots. Second,...

With rapid urbanization, cities worldwide have sought innovative, sustainable solutions such as smart city initiatives to leverage technology and data to better manage this growth and the challenges it brings. Developing smart cities requires multi-stakeholder collaboration, including citizens who, as smart citizens, are aware and capable of using...

Although the use of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots in public organizations has increased in recent years, three crucial gaps remain unresolved. First, little empirical evidence has been produced to examine the deployment of chatbots in government contexts. Second, existing research does not distinguish clearly between the drivers of adoption...

Collaboration is increasingly perceived as essential for digital transformation in the public sector. Transforming services and internal operations through the use of information and communication technologies frequently requires the engagement of multiple stakeholders beyond government agencies. This is particularly important in the specific case...

In the last decade, open government has been considered a powerful tool for administrative reform and governance transformation, particularly through transparency improvements and citizen engagement strategies. Although extensive research has been conducted on open government during this period, most studies highlight its links to information acces...

The notion of sustainability has gained increasing popularity in smart city research. While numerous studies have focused on how smart city initiatives either undermine or contribute to sustainability, a few essential questions remain unanswered. First, a vast body of knowledge has been accumulated on the results of smart cities, particularly their...

Organizational capacity is required to explain what it takes for local governments to succeed in their digital transformation. However, the current literature largely ignores how local governments are adapting their organizational dynamics in order to change. This paper aims to contribute to better understanding how local governments enhance their...

Although previous studies on “smart cities” have acknowledged the participation of different actors in their development, there is limited research exploring the involvement of community-rooted organizations, such as public libraries, in specific smart city models and frameworks. In this article, we study the case of Chattanooga, Tennessee, to iden...

Given that information plays a decisive role in emergency management, scholars have been interested in how government agencies, first responders, and the general public could effectively acquire and disseminate emergency-related information. Existing research has made significant contributions in distinguishing various types of information-sharing...

In the last decade, the world has witnessed increasing investments in smart city initiatives, which frequently employ data and emerging technologies to tackle complex urban challenges. Although existing literature has acknowledged the potential benefits of smart cities, such as increasing economic development and improving urban operations, their s...

Inter-agency collaboration is increasingly important for digital government. Using collaborative governance frameworks and comparative case study of three cases of digital government in the Mexican states of Mexico, Puebla, and Yucatan, we extend current understanding of key determinants of effective inter-agency collaborations in digital governmen...

Despite the current popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) and a steady increase in publications over time, few studies have investigated AI in public contexts. As a result, assumptions about the drivers, challenges, and impacts of AI in government are far from conclusive. By using a case study that involves a large research university in Engla...

This paper investigates on long-term challenges faced by local governments. Using empirical evidence from Estonia, this paper aims to help fill a research gap in that there is a lack of a systematic approach on how to analyze common urban challenges via direct involvement of local governments. In terms of conceptual framework, a unique combination...

This article presents a synthesizing framework of the determinants of open innovation adoption in public organizations. We examine the fragmented literature and integrate earlier results. To provide a theoretical foundation to our understanding of open innovation adoption, we categorize determinants identified in the literature based on three theor...

With urbanization, cities around the world have experienced increasingly complex issues that are difficult to solve using traditional strategies. So, many local governments have started smart city initiatives in order to address community issues, improve quality of life, achieve sustainable development, and, overall, make their cities smarter. As a...

Cities throughout the world are changing. To respond to these changes mayors and other urban policy makers are investing heavily in innovations aimed at making their cities “smarter.” This essay presents the argument that making a city smarter rests on the capability of that city to create public value for those who live and work there. Such capabi...

Despite the efforts devoted to open government, transparency is mainly considered an issue for public organizations. However, various tasks such as public services delivery and management are being increasingly privatized or outsourced to public-private partnerships (PPPs). Our study aims to contribute towards bridging this gap by answering two res...

Recent disasters have highlighted the gap between existing urbancentric resilience models and the needs of rural communities, which are frequently marginalized. Large rural constituencies, encompassing vast and sparsely populated areas, lack broadband connectivity and rely predominantly on volunteer-based emergency workforce. The above are some of...

The globalisation of crime means there is an increasingly vital need for effective sharing of knowledge by police organisations across international borders. However, identifying the complexities and challenges of this aspect of international collaboration has been relatively neglected in previous research. The research reported in this paper there...

The topic of open justice has only been little explored perhaps due to its traditionally having been considered a “closed” field. There is still a need to know what open justice really means, to explore the use of information and technology in enabling open justice, and to understand what openness in the judiciary can do to improve government, soci...

Open government has become an important strategy for administrative reform in the last decade incentivizing many countries around the world to design and implement initiatives related to information access, transparency, participation, and collaboration. However, there is limited clarity about the definition of open government and its main conceptu...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most recent examples of a technology that has the potential to bridge the cyber world and the physical world. The IoT can be understood as the integration of a great number of small devices (including many types of sensors, which are components capable of detecting changes in its environment and converting...

In the last one or two years, the growing demand for an open state has sped up the adoption of ICT aimed at improving access to justice, making the judiciary more transparent, increasing cooperation between legal authorities, and strengthening the justice system itself. Of particular importance are interoperability initiatives since they guarantee...

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the study of sensors and the Internet of Things (IoT) from a government and public policy perspective. Since 2011, federal spending on IoT has been growing at a compound annual rate of ten percent. New technologies, such as sensors, and new kinds of data, such as big data, are creating new ways to...

This article examines the outcomes of open innovation (OI) and their contribution to public value by analysing 19 subnational civic hackathons across the US. Our analysis identifies three outcomes (digital prototypes, public engagement and relationship building, and government awareness of open data and OI) and lends support to the predominance of...

We describe the experience of a sample of US state child welfare organizations that are implementing, or deciding to transition, to a new model of information system, now explicitly recommended by the Department of Health and Human Services of the US Federal Government. The new Comprehensive Child Welfare Information System was intended to replace...

It has been advocated that sharing business data can generate public value. Still this information sharing often needs to be done on voluntary basis and that often poses major challenges. The main research question addressed in this paper is: How is voluntary information sharing to create public value achieved and what are the drivers and mechanism...

In rural areas, emergency preparedness and response (ERP) could be greatly affected by the lack of access to technology and the Internet and, therefore, to timely and accurate information about a natural or human-made disaster. This paper proposes a socio-technical framework that integrates a potential technology solution, with optimization methods...

E-voting implantation is happening at a slower pace than anticipated. A plethora of technical and social challenges hinder a deeper implementation. In this article, the problem is addressed by applying a practical evaluation framework to two of the most relevant e-voting tools: Helios Voting and iVote from Scytl. The framework is strongly based on...

Local governments around the world are exploring different strategies to become smarter: more efficient, sustainable, and highly interconnected. However, many actors outside government need to be involved too. For instance, public libraries have the potential to play a very important role in the development of smart and connected communities, due t...

Despite the claimed benefits of e-voting initiatives, wider adoption of e-voting mechanisms and implementation processes is slower than expected. Several technical, social, and cultural challenges hinder generability and applicability of e-voting. Amongst them, the evaluation and harmonization of e-voting systems, given different legal and statutor...

Previous studies have infrequently addressed the dynamic interactions among social, technical, and organizational variables in open government data initiatives. In addition, organization level models have neglected to explain the role of management in decision-making processes about technology and data. This article contributes to addressing this g...

Open innovation practices and research have only minimally been expanded to the public sector. Interestingly enough, the few works that have focused on this topic have granted technology a key role that expands the benefits of open innovation processes but, also, adds challenges. This article summarizes some of the contributions to the idea of ICT-...

Smart community is a term that has been recently used to characterize efforts to transform communities and make them more sustainable, efficient, transparent, and where citizen participation is the norm. Information technologies are many times seen as enablers of these potential changes. In smart communities, the role of public libraries is key. Th...

We describe the experience of a sample of US state child welfare agencies currently deciding whether to transition to a new model of information system, now explicitly recommended by the US federal government. The new model is inspired by enterprise-level data intensive thinking and promises to enable states to design systems that complement state...

This study explored how citizens and governments used microblogging for communication during the water contamination incident in Shanghai, China. Based on analysis of both citizen and government microblogging posts, this study showed citizens can use microblogging to engage in the emergency response in four different ways, while governments mainly...

Smart Internet-based infrastructure is one thing but will be ignored without the public's continuing engagement.

In book edited by: T. Brandsen, B. Verschuere & T. Steen. Co-production and Co-creation: Engaging citizens in public services.

In book edited by: T. Brandsen, B. Verschuere & T. Steen. Co-production and Co-creation: Engaging citizens in public services.

Confronted with a range of complex challenges, cities and their governments are faced with increasing pressure to improve their innovation capacity. In recent efforts to do so, creating innovation labs within the city government’s organizational structure has become a popular solution. This article relies on the experience of the city of Barcelona...

Catalunya té una llarga experiència en votacions electròniques, que, de fet, es remunten vint anys enrere fins a les eleccions autonòmiques de 1995, però es tracta de meres proves pilot no vinculants que miren de fomentar aquest nou format de decisió. Les eleccions de 2003 repetiren l’experiment, i el referèndum sobre la Constitució europea, el 200...

In the last decade, governments around the world have created open government data (OGD) repositories to make government data more accessible and usable by the public, mostly motivated by values such as improved government transparency, citizen collaboration and participation, and spurring innovation. The basic assumption is that once data are more...

In the last decade, governments around the world have created open government data (OGD) repositories to make government data more accessible and usable by the public, mostly motivated by values such as improved government transparency, citizen collaboration and participation, and spurring innovation. The basic assumption is that once data are more...

The use of social media during crises has been explored in a variety of natural and man-made crisis situations. Yet, most of these studies have focused exclusively on the communication strategies and messages sent by crisis responders. Surprisingly little research has been done on how crisis publics (i.e., those people interested in or affected by...

Innovation is a recurring theme in public administration. Governments around the world are always exploring innovation alternatives. However, the way public organizations innovate has evolved in the last few years from “in-house” innovation to open innovation. Although the literature is rich in references to innovation in the private sector, how op...

In recent years, the role of the citizen in the delivery of government services is being reinterpreted, changing their role from passive consumers to partners or co-producer of services. This trend is consistent with the core values of the open data movement: Innovation, collaboration, and participation. In this paper, we introduce three cases of c...

Microblogging has been increasingly used by governments and citizens in emergency response. This paper aims to explore how citizens use microblogging to participate in emergency situations. By analyzing microblog data during the 2013 Water Contamination Emergency in Shanghai, this paper shows that citizens used microblogging platforms as a bottom-u...

Open government initiatives have become a defining goal for public administrators around the world. However, progress is still necessary outside of the executive and legislative sectors. Achieving Open Justice through Citizen Participation and Transparency is a pivotal reference source for the latest scholarly research on the implementation of ope...

Public sector innovation is an important issue in the agenda of policymakers and academics but there is a need for a change of perspective, one that promotes a more open model of innovating, which takes advantage of the possibilities offered by collaboration between citizens, entrepreneurs and civil society as well as of new emerging technologies....

In the last one or two years, the growing demand for an open state has sped up the adoption of ICT aimed at improving access to justice, making the judiciary more transparent, increasing cooperation between legal authorities, and strengthening the justice system itself. Of particular importance are interoperability initiatives since they guarantee...

Este libro pone de manifiesto que la intersección entre las TIC’s y las administraciones públicas (lo que hemos llamado e-Gobierno) no es algo nuevo, sino que ha venido despertando interés entre expertos, académicos y profesionales del sector público desde hace décadas. Las dos etapas más recientes se subrayan como coyunturas críticas para introduc...

The effective sharing of knowledge both within and between police organizations is arguably becoming increasingly vital for success and has driven research in a disparate range of fields. This paper therefore presents the results of an integrative systematic literature review of research into knowledge sharing within and between police organization...

Innovation, and technological innovation in particular, can help city govern-ments to meet the challenges of urban governance, to improve urban environ-ments, to become more competitive and to address sustainability concerns. To prevent and manage these challenges, cities need to operate in an innovative way. In this context, the smart city approac...