The Digital Government Society organised the 19th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research – dg.o 2018, with a theme: “Governance in the data age“. The dg.o 2018 conference was hosted by Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands from 30 May till 1 June, 2018. I presented a success story about citizens creating Open Data in Italy, as part of our EU-project called Route-to-PA[1]. But here we are concerned with cybersecurity. Was there anything on that topic at the conference? We found only one paper: by Brian Nussbaum[2] from the University at Albany, about government contracting of IT services for cybersecurity. They authors told us that (in the US) services with clear and measurable outcomes, easy to monitor, requiring little local knowledge to implement are most likely to be contracted. These constraints do not match most cybersecurity solutions: the field does not have clear metrics or definitions of success. They require investing in specialised personnel, and high local knowledge is needed. Monitoring of contract performance is only possible ex-post because it involves real-time monitoring and detection of potential threat that often results in false positives and the higher level of uncertainty associated with technological development. Traditional economic logic (large profit for little effort) does not apply here, cyberlife is too complex.

Users of the CS-AWARE solutions will be prepared for what it takes to have a good cybersecurity solution in the house.

Jerry Andriessen
Wise & Munro Learning Research
The Hague, NL

[1] Ambrosino, M. A., Andriessen, J., Annunziata, V., De Santo, M., Luciano, C., Pardijs, M., … & Santangelo, G. (2018, May). Protection and preservation of campania cultural heritage engaging local communities via the use of open data. In Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Governance in the Data Age (p. 50). ACM.

[2] Nussbaum, B., & Park, S. (2018, May). A tough decision made easy?: local government decision-making about contracting for cybersecurity. In Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Governance in the Data Age (p. 28). ACM.