01-introduction.tex 2.62 KB
\section{Introduction}

E-government projects differ from others due to their complexity and extension
\cite{anthopoulos2016egovernment}. They are complex because they combine
construction, innovation, information \& communications technologies, politics,
and social impact. Their extension, on the other hand, is related to their
scope, target audience, organizational size, time, and the corresponding
resistance to change. Government-academia collaborative projects may be treated
as an alternative to create novelty for e-government projects and to meet the
needs of society. This collaborative work has challenges, such as organizing
the collaboration project, aligning goals, synchronizing the pace of between
government and academia \cite{anthopoulos2016egovernment}, and overcoming the
failure trend of e-government projects \cite{goldfinch2007pessimism}.

Poor project management is one of the causes of e-government projects failure
\cite{anthopoulos2016egovernment} which in turn grows into a critical issue
when government and academia combine efforts to develop an e-gov solution. 
Academia commonly works on cutting edge of technology while the government is
still relying on traditional techniques.  Changing the development process in
large-size institutions represents an organizational disturbance with impacts
on structure, culture, and management practices \cite{nerur2015challenges}. As
a result, government and academia have to harmonize their view to increasing
the chances of success in projects with tight deadlines and short budgets.

Due to the plurality of the Free Libre Open Source (FLOSS) ecosystems and the
diversity of organizations which currently employ agile methodologies,
procedures from both may be an option for harmonizing different management
approaches. Open communication, project modularity, the community of users, and
fast response to problems are just a few of the FLOSS ecosystem practices
\cite{capiluppi, warsta}.  Individuals and interactions, working software,
customer collaboration, responding to change \cite{beck} are the core of agile
development. With this in mind, FLOSS and agile practices may improve the process
management and the cooperation of distinct teams.

In this work, we investigate the empirical method built during 30 months of a
government-academia project that helped to harmonize the differences between
both organization management cultures. We trace the best practices based on
FLOSS ecosystems and agile methodology. Finally, we collect data from the
project repository and survey the project participant points of view to
extracting a set of methods which favor government-academia collaboration.