The ambition of our journal is to be a key component of the international community of e-Government scholars. The journal aims to present state-of-the-art research, but also broader reflections and insightful commentaries relevant to our field of study. We believe that the current issue clearly fulfills these ambitions. Within this edition you will find: themed content deriving from one of the major conferences in our subject area; a reflection on the contribution of one of the founding scholars of our subject; and, a review piece reflecting on the implementation of new European legislation which will significantly impact the ongoing provision of e-Government.

The main part of this issue is a set of papers from the 18th International Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o 2017) on evidence-based government. The dg.o conference brings together top scholars in the field of e-Government studies and for this reason Information Polity is delighted to present a selection of the best papers presented at last year’s conference. This set of articles has been brought together by special issue editors Soon Ae Chun, Nabil R. Adam and Beth Noveck, and we would like to thank them for their hard work and pleasant collaboration.

In addition, we present an obituary for Professor Christine Bellamy who passed away in May 2017. Professor Bellamy made a significant contribution to our understanding of e-Government and has left a lasting legacy in the form of a body of knowledge about the complex relationships between institutions and technologies.

Finally, the reviews section contains a critical reflection on the European General Data Protection Regulation, commonly known as the ‘GDPR’, which comes into force in May 2018. This European Regulation will have considerable impact on the way personal data is processed by technologies, both within and beyond Europe, and as such has particular relevance to scholars of e-Government.

This issue highlights the strength of the community of e-Government scholars and the vitality of our field of research. We would like to encourage scholars to contact us with ideas for the journal that could further strengthen its role as a platform for connections between e-Government scholars, and between academia and practice.

Please visit https://content.iospress.com/journals/information-polity/23/2 for the full contents of this special issue.

Editors-in-Chief

Professor Albert Meijer

Professor William Webster