Digital government and wicked problems

This editorial introduces three examples of innovative research from the 16th International Digital Government Research Conference (dg.o 2015). To position the contributions of these examples meaningfully, we first performed a brief bibliographic analysis of research articles in the knowledge domain of digital government. This analysis provided a detailed examination of the evolution of digital government research themes and helped us introduce the examples in this special issue to the research field. Specifically, the research selected contributes to the theme of “digital government and wicked problems” by examining people's online political behavior, extracting citizens' needs from massive quantities of text data, or engaging constituents across geographical boundaries. At the same time, the bibliographic analysis and research examples together led us to ask whether the research field is ready to adopt wicked problems as a central focus, as it appears that the field is only in the very early stages of understanding the importance of the theme. To facilitate the transition from the current research orientation of the field to the next stage, we provide several suggestions for directions in future research.