Citizen Relationship Management

Regensburg, September 3 - 7, 2007

Submission Deadline: February 15, 2007

The annual EGOV conferences bring together leading researchers and professionals from all over the globe and from many disciplines. Over the years, the interest has increased tremendously. The 2006 conference attracted about 130 participants from 28 countries all over the world including developing countries, with 30 contributions in outstanding research, 30 contributions in ongoing research, 15 projects contributions and 5 workshops. Hence the EGOV Conferences have become a reunion for academics and professionals as well as an important ground for networking.

General information for the EGOV conference can be found at egov-society.org; Info on the location and for further conferences at the DEXA conference cluster.

In my entry on Google bombs on 11/19/2005 I raised the following question:

“How will governments react to such movements of altering the search results in an unfavorable way in the future as knowledge becomes more important? How will search engine providers react? The easiest way to approach this would be to influence or enforce rules on search engine vendors. Hence, we could ask whether search engine providers need to be kept as autonomous as central banks with respect to knowledge?”

Well, as of 1/25/2006 we got an answer to this when reports on Google’s self-censored search engine for China came out. However, as a other reports show, censorship also exists in other countries like Germany or France for certain terms. So in fact there is a need to watch developments in this regard carefully…What do you think or propose?

Related articles:
Harvard Law School, Berkman Center for Internet & Society
NY Times on Google and China search engine version
Wired on Google and their geolocations on searches
NY Times on Google and Privavcy
Newscientist on China and Google search
Washington Post on Geolocator