Samos 2020 Summit Declaration

On ICT - Enabled Governance

We, the participants of the Samos 2020 Summit on digital government 3.0 (ICT-enabled Governance) being active citizens, members of the academic and industrial communities, members of Public sector bodies and SMEs, as well as researchers of Open Data, Governance and Policy Modeling, Public Administration Transformation, Legal Informatics, Disruptive Digital Public Services and Ethics, Interoperability, Information & Communication Technologies, Future Internet and Social Sciences.

Recognizing:

that knowledge and innovation are important means for tackling the global economic crisis while also being predominantly a key factor for sustainable economic growth and competitive advantage of enterprises;

that today’s global challenges are complex in nature, characterized by non-linear development, cascade spreading and unpredictability, therefore requiring the collaborative effort of scientists, private and public institutions, and citizens;

the strategic importance of information and communication technologies in dealing with digital governance, establishing and ensuring open, well – informed and competitive economies;

the global context of the development of information society, which necessitates the transcendence of national horizons into transnational collaboration schemes and programmes across disciplines;

the role of the public sector in shaping citizens’ quality of life as well as the need to align public sector innovation investment with societal priorities and needs.

Acknowledging:

the European Digital Agenda 2020, which strives to foster information society development and to provide the building blocks for sustainable growth, for all citizens and businesses;

the European Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for research and innovation, which provides an evolving constitutional agenda for supporting scientific research and precompetitive industrial development on information and communication technologies, social sciences, energy and environment, education and sustainable development;

the Open Governance Partnership, that brings public sector information sharing and innovation forward, as the best mean of successfully tackling major societal challenges, which are becoming more urgent by the day;

the Research Roadmap on Next Generation Digital Government developed by the Gov3.0 project as well as the Roadmap on Next Generation Policy Making, developed by the Big Policy Canvas project;

the Research Roadmap on Global Systems Science, as supported by the European Commission;

We call upon:

the United Nations, the European Parliament, the European Union Presidency and Council of Ministers, the European Commission, National Governments, international organisations and NGO’s, elected representatives and decision makers within the industry, SMEs and every active citizen

To:

Support the Scientific Foundations for Digital Transformation and Governance through the development of the Digital Governance Science Base covering the epistemological approaches, the neighboring domains, the problem and the solution space.

Support research and innovation in the domain of Digital Government so that major technical and non-technical barriers for the wider availability and utilization of Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and other disruptive technologies are overcome to enable significant benefits both in the research and industry and in the domain of governance for evidence-based decision making, transparency and public trust.

Support the development and use of Advanced Service Infrastructures for Legal Informatics, incorporating distributed and diverse public sector information resources as well as data curation, semantic annotation and visualization tools, capable of supporting multilingual legal information.

Support the promotion of a new participative governance model recognising ethical issues for the use of disruptive technologies and ensuring an inclusive society that is based on transparency, enhanced cohesion, public engagement and trust.

Embrace and apply the results of ICT research and innovation to improve interoperability and utilization of open/ big data in the public sector, academia, industry and society.

In light of the above considerations, we have gathered at the Samos 2020 Summit on “ICT-enabled Governance” and now we call on all institutions and individuals addressed above, to take decisive steps at global, European, regional and local level regarding the scientific foundations of digital governance domain, as well as the development and adoption of the new and advanced ICT solutions for Legal Informatics and the use of AI supporting data-driven decision making, thereby providing the means for a proper response to the challenges of the future.

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