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The European H2020 Families_Share project aims at offering a grass-root approach and a co-designed platform supporting families for sharing time and tasks related to childcare, parenting, after-school and leisure activities and other household tasks. To achieve this objective, the Families_Share project has been built on current practices which are already leveraging on mutual help and support among families, such as Time Banks, Social Streets and self-organizing networks of parents active at the neighbourhood level and seek to harness the potential of ICT networks and mobile technologies to increase the effectiveness of participatory innovation. The aim of this paper is to present and discuss the Families_Share methodology and platform, as well as the results obtained by several partecipating communities in different European countries.

This paper discusses how the Families Share approach (CAPS project, Horizon 2020) is bringing the sharing economy to childcare. Families Share developed a co-caring approach and a co-designed digital welfare platform to support parents with sharing time and tasks related to childcare, after-school and leisure activities. Families Share conducted two iterative pilot experiments and related socio-economic evaluations in six European cities. More than 3,000 citizens were engaged in the co-design process through their local community organizations and more than 1,700 parents and children actively experimented with the approach by organizing collaborative childcare activities. The authors discuss the challenges and solutions of co-designing a socio-technical approach aimed at facilitating socially innovative childcare models, and how the Families Share approach, based on technology-supported co-production of childcare, may provide a new sustainable welfare model for municipalities and companies with respect to life––work balance.

The authors discuss the challenges and solutions of co-designing a technological tool aimed at facilitating socially innovative childcare models, and how the Families Share approach may provide a new sustainable welfare model for municipalities and companies with respect to work–life balance.

As a main difference with state-of-the-art proposals, Families_Share is aimed to provide support to networks of parents in the organization of self-managed activities, this way being orthogonal with respect either to social-network functionalities or to supply and demand services. Furthermore, Families_Share has been based on a participative approach for both the ICT platform and the overall structure.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a layered, comprehensive model of quality of service (QoS) for local eGovernment, and discuss its feasibility on a regional eGovernment case study. The eGovernment online services are becoming a key infrastructure for advanced countries. They allow significant efficiency gains in different sectors of society, offering benefits for individual citizens and for the community as a whole. The deployment of online services alone is not sufficient in order to qualify an eGovernment strategy. The intrinsic and perceived quality of services offered, as well as the actual impact of new functionalities, should be properly measured and taken into account.

This paper presents an applied research study for a quality‐focused evolution of a service‐oriented architecture for local eGovernment portals. This investigation was based on three main layers: the perceived quality and effective impact of services (G2C layer), the effectiveness of the deployed processes (WFM layer) and finally, the system‐level efficiency (G2G layer).

The measurement of quality with respect to eGovernment services is a complex task which requires appropriate tools to tackle the different aspects of the problem. Specifically, active and passive tools (respectively surveys and usage analysis) should be used to evaluate the quality perceived by the users as well as the utility of the service itself. The efficiency of the back office workflow must be estimated measuring statistical and dynamical indicators. Finally, technical measures should be used to monitor the responsiveness and scalability of software implementations and deployment systems.

A better knowledge regarding (e‐)Government service delivery processes, their QoS and their impact on the society can empower both citizens and local administrators, and can help them to better improve the effectiveness of local government.

The multi‐layered quality measurement architecture proposed in this paper offers local governments the capability to systematically monitor and analyse the quality of their online services. The business process management technologies allow citizens to get a better knowledge of the service delivery processes; the QoS measurements allow to improve control on them; and the eGovernment Intelligence model allows to better quantify their actual social impact.