International Сonference "Public Sector Development and Data Driven Government"

On June 29-30, 2022, the International Laboratory of Digital Transformation in Public Administration is holding a conference "Public Sector Development and Data Driven Government" held an online-conference dedicated to public sector development and data-driven government. The conference was organized and moderated by the Laboratory Head Dr. Evgeny Styrin, and by Leading Research Fellow Dr. Anna Sanina.

The conference provided an international forum, which brought together researchers and practitioners to discuss current trends and cutting-edge technologies for the development of public sector and public policy. Two days conference became a widescale event with 19 insightful speakers from 6 countries. The speakers from the Netherlands, Israel, Brazil, China, Mexico, and Russia exchanged ideas, concerning issues of artificial intelligence, digital platforms in public administration, data-based public management, machine learning and digital government.

The conference was an opportunity to reflect on the progress of data-driven government and to present a vision for the future of public sector development. Over the last decade, practitioners and academics have highlighted the value of data use and encouraged governments to put the role of data at the center of thinking about the digital government transformation. A data-driven public sector development recognizes data as an asset, an important part of policy making, service delivery, organizational management and innovation. Data-driven approach has become a big trend in recent years, having a positive impact on public administration.

Thus, the conference was devoted to the discussion of different aspects of data-driven government. Overall, the conference agenda covered a diverse list of topics, both theoretically and practically oriented.

Prof. Rodrigo Sandoval Almazan (Autonomous University of the State of Mexico); Prof. Eran Vigoda-Gadot (University of Haifa, Israel); Dr. Anna Sanina and Dr. Evgeny Styrin (HSE) has performed remarkable talks on Conceptual foundations of digital governance and “metaverse” challenges for contemporary Public Administration. 

As Prof. Almazan stated, these challenges arised from the Metaverse concept is gaining widespread prominence. Characterized by online presence, interoperability, e-standardization and business focus, the metaverse provides new challenges and perspectives for governments around the world. The creation of public verse, an environment that seeks to generate a metaverse model for public administration, may provide opportunities to meet avatars of public officials, resolve problems, receive consultations and even access public services. However, the interaction in the metaverse creates enormous challenges for the public sector, including an increase in the surveillance of the state, the metaverse economy regulation, moderation and content creation, virtual bureaucracy and others. How will governments regulate the metaverse? According to Prof. Almazan’s arguments, this is still an open question. 

In a similar vein, Prof. Vigoda-Gadot delivered a very promising presentation of his recent and future studies devoted to the conceptual analysis of the terminologies related to digital transformation. The author maps the arena of Digitized Public Management (DPM), using the concept of Digital Government Footprint (DGF) and its evolution, and suggests the comprehensive model for DPM impact on individuals’ reactions to the digitalization of public environment. The special focus of the model is placed on the socio-psychological impact of the transformation of society on individuals. The speaker indicated that two new proposed definitions, DPM and DGF, play the central role in shaping the future structure of public values, citizenship and democratic forms. 

Dr. Sanina and Dr. Styrin (HSE) presented the Lab’s theoretically-based project on conceptual foundations of digital governance and digital transformation. While Digital Government Transformation (DGT) is a widely used term, it still lacks a clear conceptual definition in academic literature. Thus, the study is focused on defining the elements of DGT, its peculiarities and definitions through expert surveys and interviews. According to the results obtained from the experts, DGT is a blurry concept, which is oriented to the future and often has more complex national equivalents. The authors use a metaphor to highlight that DGT is a “black box”, a desired goal for the future, while more concrete terms such as “digitization” and “digitalization” provide more concrete meanings for practical implementation. The empirical research underlying this study was developed in collaboration with the head of Internal Research and Monitoring Center, Evgenia Kutergina (ITMO University). Anna Semenova (HSE) also referred to the initialization of the digital transformation field studies that has rapidly increased in recent years providing wide possibilities of bibliometric analysis and visualization techniques to conduct a literature review of the research in this field.  Semenova’s study focuses on the bibliometric approach for studying digital transformation. The method provided evidence of exponential growth in the number of publications in the field of digital transformation and showed that on average it doubles every three years. As for the most highly cited works found, they were mostly theoretical studies. 

Prof. Chen Tao and Dr. Liang Zhehao’s (Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China); Prof. Edgar Alejandro Ruvalcaba-Gomez (the University of Guadalajara, Mexico) and Victor Hugo Garcia-Benitez (ILab, Mexico); Anastasiia Popova and Yana Rybushkina (HSE) presentations were devoted to various aspects of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning tools in contemporary government.

Prof. Chen and Dr. Liang presentation was devoted to the potential impact of government AI failures on citizens’ attitudes. The problem underlying their research is that nowadays algorithms replace humans in decision-making in many spheres but people remain resistant to using algorithmic recommendations. The research is devoted to the study of “algorithm aversion”, a biased negative assessment of an algorithm. The empirical part of the study examines citizens’ attitudes towards mistakes made by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and a human in the forecasting. The first results show that people tend to over trust algorithms but react more sensitive to mistakes made by AI than by humans. The speakers provided possible explanations for “algorithm aversion” and discussed future research design.

Prof. Alejandro Ruvalcaba-Gomez and Victor Hugo Garcia-Benitez performed the analysis of the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy in Mexico from the ehics and human rights perspective. Researchers showed that the adoption of technological systems such as AI generates a variety of social, ethical, legal conflicts. The government is one of the sectors that has been interested in technological development and establishes guiding documents and strategies. Ruvalcaba-Gomez and Garcia-Benitez’s study is focused on analyzing Mexican AI strategy from the ethical and human rights perspectives. It highlights that although the AI national strategy considers ethics and human rights as guiding principles, these guidelines are poorly connected to practical implementation and need further elaboration.  

Anastasiia Popova and Yana Rybushkina (HSE) focused their presentation on the concrete Machine Learning to increase positive effects of using nudging in public administration. The researchers presented a model that can be used to predict cases in which nudging would be an effective tool to solve a problem. Model is based on the use of machine learning. The process of using the model consists of four steps, as a result of which certain outputs can be obtained that can be used to make management decisions.

A separate branch of discussion was devoted to data-driven policy making solutions, digital platforms and Open Government Data.

Msc. Thiago José Tavares Ávila, strategist in Digital Transformation and researcher in Transparency and Open Government (São Paulo, Brazil), talked about Brazilian subnational government experiences in data-driven practices that suppose an intense use of large volumes of data to support public policy decision-making. As an example, the state of Alagoas in Brazil has an official open data platform that accumulates socioeconomic data from the State Government. The portal offers geospatial data, economic and social statistics that create opportunities of comparative rankings of quality of life in Brazil’s states. In the education example, the researcher provided evidence that digital transformation may become a tool to improve a state's performance in the quality of life ranking. The speaker presented some ways of how data-driven government can create new conditions for governments development of public services.

Dr. Fernando Kleiman (Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands) presented his recent study focused on the attitude to the distribution and willingness to share and apply data in government agencies. The author used gamification to test a hypothesis: Can a serious game change the attitudes of civil servants toward open data? More than 100 officials were involved in the process, and they played the game that was developed. The results showed that the game can have a significant impact on attitudes to support the using of open data. Thus, interventions of this nature can have a positive impact on government openness.

Viktoriya Kazanskaya(Biocad, Russia) and Mariia Vinokurova(HSE)presented the study of social innovation meeting the economic and social challenges of the coming decades and provides an approach to address complex social problems in new and innovative ways. Their study focused on digital platforms as innovative forms of interaction between social policy actors and presents the case studies that provide the evidence of digital platforms potential to drive a social change. The key advantage of such tools is the potential to transform social life both technologically and by building new social interactions and institutions.

Evgeny Styrin presented the ongoing research project on Digital Platforms’ influence on public value system, that is being conducted together with Evgeny Rylskikh and Natalia Dmitrieva (HSE). The key issues being explored touches upon the sharing economy thatbecomes a transformative agent for the public sector and takes the form of collaboration between government and other stakeholders. Digital platforms provide opportunities for value creation and more effective actors’ interactions. Driven by the private sector, digital platforms start to evolve and promote change in governments operations. The study provides an example of the public values creation on private online labor platforms. According to the large-scale online survey conducted, digital platforms create public values and build a trust system used for stakeholder interactions. Digital platforms are becoming an independent subject of management and states should adapt faster to the new perspectives and challenges of the collaborative consumption economy.

Dra. Beatriz Barreto Brasileiro Lanza, IDB Consultant and Scientific-Technical Leader of the Brazilian States and Federal District Transformation Group in Brazil, was talking aboutdigital transformation becoming an imperative to increase public administration efficiency and improve public services delivery for many governments. The Brazilian government is not an exception and accelerates digital transformation. However, in practice Brazil faces subnational challenges due to its territorial features and the need for aligned actions. The speaker highlighted the lack of federative coordination in digital transformation implementation and the need to ensure digital inclusion throughout the country to succeed in data-driven government operation.

As a very promising result of the Conference, rich experience and research ideas were shared and contacts were established for further cooperation in different academic directions.