Both private and public sector organizations tend to participate in networks in order to gain access to knowledge, skills and resources of other organizations and to create synergies to achieve highly demanding and complex goals they cannot attain individually. The governance of these networks has been recognized as being an important variable influencing organizational network performance. This Special Issue aims to contribute to the investigation and understanding of the relationships between ICT and governance of organizational networks. This introductory paper provides the conceptual and theoretical background. The relationship between network governance and technology is bi-directional; evolutions in ICT enable the development of new types of network collaborations and governance, whereas governance of collaboration networks is critical for the development of complex ICT infrastructures. We argue that network governance should be conceptualized as an evolving socio-technical process shaped by actors and aimed at tackling complex and dynamic contemporary challenges.@en

One essential element of open data ecosystems concerns their development through feedback loops, discussions and dynamic supplier and user interactions. However, these elements appear barely to be part of existing open data practices. We conducted a survey which showed that most professional open data users did not know at least one open data infrastructure that enabled five specific types of discussion and feedback mechanisms. The survey showed that much can still be done to improve feedback and discussion on open data infrastructures. In this paper we discuss an open data infrastructure which has started to contribute to filling this gap. The discussed ENGAGE open data infrastructure combines functionalities to close the feedback loop and to return information to public authorities for better open data use and publication as well as establishing communication channels between stakeholders. This may effectively lead to the stimulation and facilitation of value generation from open data.@en