Earlier this year in February, our great colleague and friend Rene Wagenaar suddenly and unexpectedly passed away during a short trip to Switzerland. Rene was an active and inspiring scholar who always had forward-looking and innovative ideas. Since the EGOV beginnings Rene has served on review and programme committees, and he was a regular attendee and contributor to the conferences. He was also a founding board member of the European EGOV Society, which was established at EGOV 2006 in Krakow (Poland). We are desperately missing him.

In memory of Rene's outstanding contributions to our community - both in terms of scientific contribution and service to the community - we endow three paper awards and dedicate those to categories, for which Rene was most known and appreciated in the community:

1. Category 1 - The most novel and innovative contribution: Awards the paper with the most out-of-the-box and forward-looking idea and concept, which has a potential to become a new ground-breaking innovation in eGovernment research and/or implementation;
2. Category 2 - The most compelling research reflection: Awards the paper with the most compelling reflection on eGovernment research evolution, or with an outstanding idea of shaping and advancing eGovernment as a research domain;
3. Category 3 - The most promising contribution: This category awards the paper, which delivers a concept or solution with the highest potential to materialise, be implemented and, consequently, has a large potential to have a high impact in eGovernment implementations and applications

Nomination procedure

In July, the reviewers were asked to revisit the papers accepted for EGOV 07 in order to assess them and propose them for nomination in one of the categories of the awards. Based on these nominations, the nomination comitee compiles a list of three nominations per category.

At the conference, a nomination comitee assessed the presentations of the nominated papers per category and finally come up with a winner per category:

• Category 1: Innovation Processes in the Public Sector by Bjoern Niehaves, ERCIS, University of Muenster, Germany
• Category 2: Antecedents of corruption and the role of e-government systems in developing countries by Rahul Dé, IIM, Bangalore, India
• Category 3: no winner awarded

Awards Ceremony

The Rene Wagenaar Outstanding Paper Awards ceremony took place at EGOV 07, on September 6th, 17.30 pm.

Nomination comitee

The nomination comitee members of the Rene Wagenaar Outstanding Paper Awards 2007 are:

Åke Grönlund, Sweden
Jochen Scholl, USA
Marijn Janssen, The Netherlands