• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.353-376
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• 2023

The global pandemic and the development of virtual and augmented reality technologies have led a metaverse boom that enables a lot of interactions in virtual worlds, and is being utilized in various fields such as business, government, and education etc. Despite the growing interest in the metaverse, its scope and definition are still unclear and the concept is still evolving, making it challenging to establish its governance. Governmental entities are also investing intensively in public metaverses to make public value and promote social welfare, but they are underutilized due to lack of systematic governance. Therefore, in this study, we propose a public metaverse governance framework and identify the relative importance of the factors. Furthermore, since a public metaverse should be accessible to anyone who wants to use, we explore the factors of shadow work and examine the ways to minimize it. Based on the socio-technical system theory, we derived public metaverse governance factors from previous literature and topic modeling and then generate a framework with 23 factors through expert interviews. We then tested relative priority of the factors using the analytic hierarchical process (AHP) from the experts. As a result, the top five overall rankings are: 'roles and responsibilities', 'standardization/modularization', 'collaboration and communication', 'law and policies', and 'availability/accessibility'. The academic implications of this study are that it provides a comprehensive framework for public metaverse governance, and then the practical implications include suggesting prioritized considerations for metaverse operations in the public sector.