Miguel Angel Olivero

Smart governance is a recent concept that aims to improve public services and the management of cities and territories through an open government to civil society and the intensive and intelligent use of ICT. However, despite the availability of legal frameworks and technologies, citizen participation is still occasional, is not integrated into the comprehensive public policy cycle, and is not based on data or knowledge. Thus, there is a risk that public decisions and services are not aligned with citizens’ needs, are costly, or are of low quality. Based on literature insights, we hypothesized that the lack of knowledge-based and comprehensive solutions, as well as conceptual frameworks, system models and technological tools, could be hindering the smart governance implementation. To validate our hypothesis, we decided to study the real state of smart governance implementation in local governments of Seville province (Spain) through the expert opinion of public managers. Previously its key aspects and implementation barriers were identified in the literature. To this end, we conducted anonymous surveys of 19 public employees (experts in citizen participation and e-government) in successive rounds in search of consensus (Delphi method) on these issues in relation to how they were addressing them and how they would like to improve them. The results showed consensus in low citizen participation and collaborative decision-making, and the desire to improve it in frequency and depth, involving the business and professional sectors. Furthermore, it revealed a lack of specialized personnel, tools and technical resources to carry out participatory processes and collaboration among stakeholders, especially for complex and integrated processes based on data and shared knowledge. Furthermore a great variability of these processes was evidenced. Therefore, we could conclude that providing technological resources for smart governance, such as implementation frameworks, models and tools, would help institutions and ICT providers to develop integrated smart governance solutions in the complex and variable context of the e-government ecosystem. Our study is original since it focuses on the implementation problem, both how it is and how it should be, reviews the needs of specific types of participatory processes (e.g., participatory budgeting or citizen consultations), government areas, and considers localities of different sizes. So, it provides valuable insights to guide smart governance implementation in a general way in local governments.

La ingeniería informática en la Universidad de Sevilla es una ingeniería joven que se inició en la década de los 80. Uno de los pilares de la ingeniería informática es la capacidad de analizar un problema para diseñar algoritmos capaces de darles una solución eficaz y optimizando el uso de recursos. La asignatura Análisis y Diseño de Datos y Algoritmos ofrece estas competencias a los estudiantes y, por tanto, se considera una buena oportunidad para mejorar la base del aprendizaje de los estudiantes. Este capítulo describe el desarrollo de un Ciclo de Mejora en el Aula aplicado a esta asignatura y se descubren los desafíos que supone y las oportunidades que ofrece integrar los cambios diseñados a las sesiones de clase. Los resultados muestran que los cambios que se proponen son recibidos positivamente por parte del alumnado en tanto que muestran más interés por el contenido de la asignatura y un gran porcentaje de los mismos consiguen resolver desafíos complejos.

In the late twentieth century, the term “System of Systems” (SoS) became popular to describe a complex system made up of a combination of independent constituent systems. Since then, several studies have been conducted to support and assess SoS management, functionality, and performance. Due to the evolutionary nature of SoS and the non-composability of the security properties of its constituent systems, it is difficult to assess or evaluate SoS security. This paper provides an up-to-date survey on SoS security, aimed at stimulating and guiding further research efforts. This systematic mapping study (SMS) focuses on SoS security, privacy, and trust. Our SMS identified 1828 studies from 6 digital libraries, 87 of which were selected that presented approaches analyzing, evaluating, or improving security. We classified these studies using nine research questions that focused on the nature of the studies, the studied SoS, or the study validation. After examining the selected studies, we identified six gaps and as many future work directions. More precisely, we observed that few studies examine SoS problems and instead propose specific solutions, making it challenging to develop generalizable approaches. Furthermore, the lack of standardization has hindered the reuse of existing approaches, making it difficult for solutions to be generalized to other SoS. In addition, the lack of descriptions of industrial environments in the literature makes it difficult to design realistic validation environments. As a result, the validation of new SoS research remains a challenge in the field.