From E-Government to We-Government: an analysis towards participatory public services in the context of the H2020 WeGovNow project Ioannis Tsampoulatidis INFALIA PC & Information Technologies Institute & Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH) Greece itsam@iti.gr Ioannis Kompatsiaris Information Technologies Institute, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas Greece ikom@iti.gr Nicos Komninos Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, URENIO Research Greece komninos@urenio.org ABSTRACT The idea that digital innovation increasingly shifts power from the supply- to the demand-side (or to the “customers”) is becoming ever more popular. And this holds true not only for the private sector but also for the public sector. At the same time, emerging technologies - notably the so- called SMAC technologies (social, mobile, analytics, cloud technologies) - are making a transformational impact on public services, with the potential of becoming ever more powerful. KEYWORDS e-Government, Participatory public services, Local authorities, Participatory Governance, Citizen-centric services, Smart City, WeGovNow project 1 INTRODUCTION Achieving digital innovation in the public sector, is anything else but a self-fulfilling prophecy. Different organisational cultures, obsolescent or poorly designed technology, and the legal realm of public administrations limit, slow down or prevent e-Government development. And that at a point in time where “e-Government” should be undergoing its first major transformation, from simple transactional online services (citizen as customer) to citizen co-production, local issues reporting and collective opinion formation; “We-Government”, the citizen as partner. From the technical perspective, this paper aims to describe the applied best practices towards the seamless interconnection of various participatory public services and software solutions under a consolidated common framework and the guidelines to follow for connecting third party services. Additionally, some concerns of adopting such a citizen engagement platform by the local authorities are described based on the outcomes of meetings with various stakeholders that took place on three pilot cities of the WeGovNow EU project consortium. 2 THE IMPORTANCE OF “WE” IN GOVERNANCE Participatory governance, aka We-Governance, is one of the building blocks of a Smart City, being also a major element towards the transformation process of a city into Smart City. We-Governance is related both to the concept of a "bottom-up" design of a Smart City, and to the better diffusion of the results across the city’s population (Tsarchopoulos et al, 2018). The adaptation of participatory public services can radically change the way citizens interact with government and thus, the public authorities have already begun to leverage these technical solutions to inform and encourage civic engagement and participation in the process of decision-making. Ansell and Gash (2008) define participatory governance as “a governing arrangement where one or more public agencies directly engage non-state stakeholders in a collective decision- making process that is formal, consensus oriented, and deliberative and that aims to make or implement public policy or manage public programs or assets”. Facilitating smart city initiatives through participatory public services is of great importance according to Chourabi et al. (2012) and Lombard et al. (2011). Nam & Pardo (2011) and Scholl & Scholl (2014) also highlight that the success or failure of smart city initiatives is partly determined by the ability of stakeholders to cooperate. Meijer & Rodriguez Bolivar (2013) point out that cities need to organise strong collaborations between government and its citizens, organisations and companies to drive forward smart initiatives and that policy making itself is not enough. In addition, the importance of transparency and openness of We-Gov is accented by Meijer & Rodriguez Bolivar (2015) as well. We-Governance means that the existing governance morphology and structures of the city need to be transformed, either radically or incrementally, to facilitate collaborative decision-making (Nam & Pardo, 2011, Meijer & Rodriguez Bolivar, 2016). At highest transformation level, this would lead to a community-based