Keynote: The Future Challenge for Young Researchers

Digital government research has some distinctive features. It benefits from contributions from public administration, computer science, data science, social sciences, law, and other disciplines. Digital tools that enable digital government solutions change rapidly, and such solutions are being scrutinized through an increasing number of lenses, including sustainability, ethics, and human rights. Given the nature of the domain, digital government research requires a balance of depth and breadth. Thus, young digital government researchers face unique challenges, e.g. contributing to an interdisciplinary domain lacking a comprehensive or discipline-specific training; bridging gaps between academic research and government implementations; ensuring access to often inaccessible and siloed government data; dealing with rapid technological change and emerging technologies; ensuring public funding for emerging topics amid restrictions to such funding; and finding venues fitting their publications. In this talk, we will address challenges faced by young digital government researchers and outline possible actions to tackle them, aimed at ensuring a meaningful impact of their work on theory and practice, and contributing to strengthening the digital government research community.