GovStack Master's Thesis Topics Open Call

Open

The GovStack Research Community is a collaborative space designed to address governments' evolving technological challenges in meeting their citizens' needs. It brings together researchers, practitioners, and policymakers who share an interest in advancing digital government ecosystems.

Value Proposition for Students: 

• Access to public and technical stakeholders as well as GovStack experts for data collection (interviews, surveys, workshops, technical artifacts, among others.)

• Opportunity to participate in the design, implementation, and/or impact of public services

• Publication of thesis research can be made more visible via the GovStack knowledge hub.

• Students will be provided with a dedicated GovStack co-supervisor/expert within the specific topic/research domain

Target students:

• 1st and 2nd year Master’s students in e-Governance, Public Administration, Socio-technical Systems, IT, and other related domains.

• 1st and 2nd year Master’s students who are interested in investigating the GovStack Building Block approach and Digital Public Infrastructure through specific use cases.

Master’s Thesis Topics (Use-Cases):

• Djibouti (Construction Permit e-service) 

• Somalia (High School Records Digitization and Content Management System)

• Kenya (Implementation of Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission’s integrative case management system)

• Rwanda (Extended Producer Responsibility e-service to manage eWaste Regulatory compliance)

• Bangladesh (Student certificate that can expedite the VISA application process) 

• Technical Perspective:

Evaluate the technical effectiveness of GovStack's building blocks (e.g., ID, Information Mediator) in facilitating data exchange and interoperability between government agencies involved (MCIT, Ministry of Health, etc.).

• Social-Technical Perspective:

Examining the interplay between technology and social factors in developing and adopting the use cases. Does the design thinking approach adopted by GovStack effectively bridge the gap between citizen needs and technical feasibility?

• Human-Centric Perspective:

Investigating user experience and citizen engagement with the implemented public services. This may be related to user satisfaction, digital ethics, and other human-computer interaction principles. Are the related public service use cases human-centric?

• Policy & Governance Perspective:

Analyzing the policy and governance frameworks surrounding data ownership, privacy, and access controls within the applications. Are there clear guidelines for citizen consent and data privacy and security? This may also include organizational and data governance-related angles and GovStack’s whole-of-government approach. 

• Comparative Perspective:

Compare GovStack implementations across different countries. What are the common challenges and success factors?

• Experimental/Quasi-Experimental:

How to rigorously establish downstream impacts on relevant populations? – for instance, do quicker construction permits in Djibouti lead to firm-level impacts, does improved visa processing in Bangladesh lead to detectable changes in who applies for visas and what their outcomes are?

=================================================================