Academic attention to smart cities and their governance is growing rapidly, but the fragmentation in approaches makes for a confusing debate. This article brings some structure to the debate by analyzing a corpus of 51 publications and mapping their variation. The analysis shows that publications differ in their emphasis on (1) smart technology, smart people or smart collaboration as the defining features of smart cities, (2) a transformative or incremental perspective on changes in urban governance, (3) better outcomes or a more open process as the legitimacy claim for smart city governance. We argue for a comprehensive perspective: smart city governance is about crafting new forms of human collaboration through the use of ICTs to obtain better outcomes and more open governance processes. Research into smart city governance could benefit from previous studies into success and failure factors for e-government and build upon sophisticated theories of socio-technical change. This article highlights that smart city governance is not a technological issue: we should study smart city governance as a complex process of institutional change and acknowledge the political nature of appealing visions of socio-technical governance. Points for practitionersThe study provides practitioners with an in-depth understanding of current debates about smart city governance. The article highlights that governing a smart city is about crafting new forms of human collaboration through the use of information and communication technologies. City managers should realize that technology by itself will not make a city smarter: building a smart city requires a political understanding of technology, a process approach to manage the emerging smart city and a focus on both economic gains and other public values.

The term open government is often used to describe initiatives of putting government information on the Internet. This conceptualization is too restricted since open government is not only about openness in informational terms (vision) but also about openness in interactive terms (voice). On the basis of an analysis of 103 articles, this article provides insight into the concepts of openness, transparency and participation, their interactions, and the manner in which they have been discussed in the literature. This analysis shows the differences and similarities between economic, political science and legal perspectives on open government and argues that a multidisciplinary approach needs to be taken. The authors conclude that open government is much too important to leave it to the 'techies': scientists and practitioners with backgrounds in law, economics, political science and public administration should also get involved to build sound connections between vision and voice that facilitate active citizenship. (4) design open government acknowledging a variety in desirables and (5) design for continuous learning about effects and sideeffects. The authors emphasize that a diversified approach to the design of open government will be more fruitful in the long run than merely understanding it in terms of making information publicly available. Points for practitioners

Although the effect of government transparency on trust is heavily debated, our theoretical and empirical understanding of this relation is still limited. The basic assumption tested in this paper is whether transparency leads to higher levels of perceived trustworthiness (H1). This paper uses theories from social psychology to advance our understanding of the effects and mechanism of the relation between transparency and the perceived trustworthiness of a government organization. Based on these theories we propose two alternative hypotheses, which state that (1) the general predisposition to trust government and (2) prior knowledge about the specific issue moderate the relation between transparency and trust. These assumptions are tested by online experimental research, which demonstrates that these factors indeed affect the relation between transparency and perceived trustworthiness: changes in perceived competence occur mainly in the group of citizens with high trust and little knowledge whereas changes in perceived benevolence occur predominantly in the group of citizens with low knowledge and low trust. These findings highlight that prior knowledge and general predisposition to trust should be incorporated in our theoretical models of the relation between transparency and perceived trustworthiness.

Th is article contributes to the growing body of literature on government transparency by developing a model for studying the construction of transparency in interactions between governments and stakeholders. Building on theories about complex decision making, a heuristic model is developed that consists of a strategic, a cognitive, and an institutional perspective. To test the model's value, it is applied to two empirical cases: Dutch schools and the Council of the European Union. Applying the model to the school case provides insights into the connection between the introduction of transparency and the transformation in arrangements for safeguarding school quality. Th e case of the Council of the European Union highlights the role of transparency in the transformation of the council from a supranational to an intergovernmental body. Th e article concludes that the heuristic model, together with in-depth, longitudinal case studies, helps us understand government transparency in relation to broader transformations in the public sector.

Proponents and opponents fiercely debate whether computer-mediated transparency has a positive effect on trust in the public sector. This article enhances our understanding of transparency by presenting three perspectives: a premodern, modern and post-modern perspective, and analyzing the basic assumptions of these perspectives about transparency. The analysis shows that the proponents of computer-mediated transparency have a modern perspective on societal change: computer-mediated transparency gives people better information and thus contributes to the rationalization of society. Opponents argue from a premodern perspective that unidirectional, structured and decontextualized forms of transparency will result in a loss of societal trust. Postmodernists focus on the esthetics of transparency and argue for varied and diverse forms of computer-mediated transparency. The value of these three perspectives is illustrated by using them to analyze debates about the need for making school performance in the Netherlands transparent. On the basis of this analysis, the author argues for diversity in systems of transparency to maximize effects on societal trust. Points for practitioners This article evaluates transparency through the Internet from different perspectives. Premodernists see computer-mediated transparency as a threat to traditional mechanisms of trust such as face-to-face contacts, modernists praise computer-mediated transparency for its contribution to trust by providing objective information to the general public and postmodernists value the esthetic value of computer-mediated transparency. The ambivalent relation between trust and openness is at the heart of debates about the new transparency. This article