• About the Conference
• Announcements of future conferences of IFIP's WG 8.5

About the Conference

The University of Macedonia is a relatively new university. It includes 8 departments organised in 4 schools offering 8 undergraduate and 11 graduate curricula.

Thessaloniki has a population of around 800,000 inhabitants and a history of about 2,300 years. It is the second largest city of Greece, and it is multicultural and lively.

The annual international IFIP EGOV conference is the top-2 ranked core conference in the domain of ICT in the public sector and the public sphere. Each year, scholars from all over the globe present the most recent advancements and findings of research and innovations in e-Government, e-Governance and related fields of study.

The annual international ePart conference is the top-ranked conference in the domain of electronic participation and the 5th-ranked overall conference dedicated to information technologies in the context of public administration and the public sphere.

The dual conference is organized by the IFIP Working Group 8.5 on information systems in the public sector. Since the beginnings of EGOV in 2001 and the inauguration of ePart in 2009, the two conferences have provided important guidance for research and development in this fast-moving domain of study. The dual IFIP EGOV—ePart conference brings together leading researchers and professionals from across the globe and from a number of disciplines. The previous IFIP EGOV and IFIP ePart conferences have attracted around 150 participants on average per year from all continents including developing countries

The organisers of the dual conference have agreed to slightly change the format of IFIP EGOV and IFIP ePart to enable extensively emerging topics to be more prominently visible by own tracks. Accordingly, the 2015 dual conference is organised along five major tracks. Under the following links, the call for papers per track are accessible:

• The General E-Government Track
• The General eParticipation Track
• The Open Government & Open and Big Data Track
• The Policy Modelling and Policy Informatics Track
• The Smart Governance, Smart Government, & Smart Cities Track

Although the five tracks overlap in certain areas, they cover and emphasise distinct areas of research and appeal to specific and important sub-communities within the overall EGOV—ePart scholarly community. Therefore the tracks have their separate and detailed call for papers.

Across its tracks, the dual IFIP EGOV/ePart 2015 conference hosts distinct formats of contributions:

• Completed research papers (max. 12 pages, published in the IFIP ePart proceedings of Springer LNCS)
• Ongoing research and innovative projects (max. 8 pages, published in alternate proceedings by a IOS Press)

Beyond the tracks, the dual IFIP EGOV/ePart 2015 conference also hosts

• Posters (max. 2 pages), to be exposed along the welcome reception on Tuesday evening
• Workshops and panels on pertinent issues, short abstracts (2 pages), and
• PhD colloquium submissions (max. 8 pages),

all to be included in the alternate proceedings published by IOS Press. These formats encourage both scientific rigor and discussions of state of the art as well as innovative research approaches, work in progress, and studies of practical e-government or e-governance projects along with papers on system implementations.

Prior to the conference (that is, on Sunday and Monday, August 30 and 31), the eleventh PhD student colloquium will be held providing doctoral students with an international forum guided by senior scholars for presenting their work, networking opportunities and cross-disciplinary inspiration. It is dedicated to learning and understanding from each other. PhD research with topical threads of both conferences and the special tracks or further related topics relevant to ICT use in the public sector are welcome.

As in previous years, the conferences and tracks are co-located. Accordingly, general information for all conference tracks is accessible under the following links:

• Submission guidelines and review criteria
• Link to EasyChair submission system
• PhD colloquium info
• Deadlines
• Organisers and PC members

Announcements of future conferences of IFIP's WG 8.5

We are pleased to announce future tentative locations as follows: Barcelona (Spain), St. Petersburg (Russia), Rome (Italy), Budapest (Hungary). The order of the locations is not yet settled.

The 2015 dual conference organisers:

• Efthimios Tambouris, University of Macedonia, Greece
• Hans Jochen Scholl, University of Washington, USA
• Marijn Janssen, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
• Maria A. Wimmer, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany
• Konstantinos Tarabanis, University of Macedonia, Greece

Public/Private sector, academia