Electronic Government

e-Government has become both: a vision and the world we live in. With information as the lifeblood of modern society, the enabling potential of information technology is recognised sufficiently in its full extent. So e-Government has become a guiding vision that provides a comprehensive view of citizen demands and their fulfilment in administrative processes. Moreover, Government has turned into e-Government: thus all – agencies, citizen and enterprises – draw heavily on increased use of information, on more sophisticated service provision, on a creative and thorough redesign of existing administrative processes, and on innovative forms in assisting governance.

This paper draws on a literature study on research on accessibility. The first part categorizes the literature found according to different approaches, focused on where one accentuates the solutions. The second part briefly discusses some implications of the findings with respect to e-government and e-democracy, and gaps in current research that should be filled. The paper concludes that in order to further the discussion of the accessibility topic in view of the electronic government agenda, there is a need for making the discussion of “accessibility” more sophisticated so as to distinguish availability (physical access) from approachability (mental access) for the reason of not by default taking progress in one field (typically availability), integrating research from several fields to bring more nuances to the different issues and including research on organizational perspectives to complement the current focus on technology and government regulation.

The demographic characters of the Internet user make the group worthy paying attention to. This is not only because they have great possibility to be the nucleus of the society and play an important role in social development and decision-making, but also because the growth of this social group is beneficial to the formation of a citizen society – a power which Chinese traditional social system is lack of.

In this paper we discuss the eGovernment strategies and the eGovernance policies of the Federal Government, of the Cantons and of the largest cities in Switzerland. While some of the cantons have already developed strategic documents that serve as a basis for the implementation of eGovernment, others are currently defining their policies and some do not have their own approach as they follow the recommendations of the Swiss federal government. This paper compares the existing strategies and policies in order to try to identify the overall directions of the Swiss ePolicies.

This paper is concerned with institutional change and the role of IT in public reforms. Specifically, we analyze a historical case concerning the development of a MIS in a local health-care organization in Norway. We use the concept “symbolic power” constructed by Bourdieu to investigate the problem of legitimization during the process of developing the MIS. We illustrate how the use of symbolic power within different logics and conflict of interest has influenced the MIS development. Despite this, we also observe a process which to a great extent has been harmonious. We argue that it is because these logics, interests and values have gained the status of symbolic capital; i.e., are recognized as legitimate competencies and knowledge, that the political dimensions are unrecognized. Our conclusion is that MIS development faces a serious challenge in making it legitimate to define issues of IT as political.

The paper presents research aimed at overcoming barriers to citizens’ ability to access electronic government services. Our concern is specifically ‘non-connectivity’ barriers to electronic service delivery including cultural background, language, literacy and level of technology experience. These issues are investigated and solutions researched in a developing world context. The project on which the paper is based aims to develop a service delivery framework and technology where service delivery is personalised to citizen’s unique circumstances taking into account the means by which they will have access to government services and individual characteristics such as language preference. In order to develop appropriate technological interventions, a number of field experiments are done to gain an improved understanding of the extent to which citizens’ exposure to technology and home language affect their ability to access electronic services. These experiments will influence technology development on the project that will be incorporated in a technology demonstrator.

In this paper the experiences from evaluating an e-democracy platform in two European cities are presented. The e-democracy platform under evaluation consisted of three main applications, mainly tele-voting for realising opinion poll petitions, tele-consultation and e-Forums. In this paper, the trials performed in Barcelona and Brent borough of London are outlined. The specification, development and trials evaluation of the e-democracy platform were carried out within the IST EURO-CITI project. The main purpose of the evaluation within the project was to prove the robustness of the technological platform. However, the evaluation also provided some interesting results with regards to the use of Internet in order to increase citizens’ participation. Although the purpose of the evaluation was not to study the current state and potential of e-democracy, the lessons learnt could nevertheless be useful to researchers and practitioners in the field.

As the power and influence of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in international debates on social and moral matters increases, questions concerning their legitimacy and accountability become all the more challenging. Some starting points are given for a defensible account of the legitimacy and accountability of internationally operating NGOs. Special attention is given to the use of new information and communication technologies by NGOs and to the ways in which legitimacy and accountability circumscribe the ways in which NGOs are structured and organized.

Conversations between citizens and their representatives may take a number of forms. In this paper, we consider one of these – letters between citizens and representatives – and explore the application of a well-known model of dialogue types to these. We provide a method to give these types a precise characterization in terms of the initial beliefs and desires of the participants, and then explore one type, persuasion dialogues. This work commences the formal modeling of citizen-representative interactions necessary for a fully electronic democracy.

This paper offers a fresh perspective to study the role and implications of information and communications technologies (ICT) in processes of local democracy. It moves away from earlier perspectives that have given privilege to information flows, information technology features or strategies employed by human actors in their accounts. The paper proposes a theoretical framework, derived from Giddens theory of Structuration. This framework suggests that the material technology cannot be understood in isolation from the way it is appropriated in social processes. It brings to the forefront technologically enabled social practices rather than the technology itself or the actions of human actors and thus avoids technological or social determinism. It highlights the importance of the interplay of the context, social structures and agency factors in the technologically enabled social practices. When applied to processes of local democracy, it brings forward a number of important insights for policy makers and ICT designers.

The Webocracy project aims to empower citizens with innovative communication, access and polling system, supporting increased participation in democratic processes. One of the main project goals is to develop an open source web-based system called Webocrat as a multi-channel communication platform supporting e-government and e-democracy applications. Some of the Webocrat modules were tested in first trial of our two pilot applications, one of them running in Wolverhampton, UK and the other one in Kosice, Slovakia. Currently, whole integrated Webocrat system is being tested within the second trials.

This article aims to present the Interlegis program developed by the Brazil National Congress, in association with Interamerican Development Bank (IDB), which is about modernization and Integration of the Legislative command, in its federal, state and municipal levels and about promotion of the transparency and interaction of this command with society. The ways used are the new information technologies (internet, videoconferences and data transmission), that allow communication and exchange of experiences between the legislative houses and legislators and between the legislative and the public, seeking to raise the participation of the people on the legislative process.

This paper is concerned with the online public engagement ‘Leitbild Metropolis Hamburg – Growing City’ which has been conducted in the context of the EU project DEMOS (Delphi Mediation Online System). The result of DEMOS is an innovative Internet platform facilitating democratic discussions and participative public opinion formation. The test of the DEMOS approach and the software system during the online discussion in the City of Hamburg was one of the most successful projects in electronic democracy or participation ever conducted on a municipal level. The paper introduces the DEMOS approach and system, describes the political background of the discussed ‘Leitbild Growing City’ and the results. The authors try to identify success factors for online public engagement projects.

Like many other western countries, the Dutch central government has several programs to stimulate E-government development in local governments. The constitutional relations between central and local governments in The Netherlands, however, are such, that the development of online service delivery is part of the autonomy of the local authorities. Central government has little formal authority to command development efforts on a local level. Through a PR-offensive, subsidy programs and intervening as a market party, the central government tries to convince the local authorities to invest in the development of online service delivery. This paper describes three different approaches used by the Dutch central government to stimulate E-government initiatives in local governments. The central question is to what extent each approach contributes to the e-government aims of central government.

ICTs are intended to be a powerful tool in support of government transition to the “Digital Age”. The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the importance of integrating a socio-technical perspective into the body of eGovernment practices. The current realisation in Italy of an “Action plan for eGovernment” is a source of interesting preliminary evidence for our purpose.

The principle of modularity is more and more applied in the engineering of information systems in e-government. Initiatives are confronted with a highly fragmented ICT-architecture that has been organized around departments and do not or hardly share functionality. A modular architecture can provide common functionality to all information systems and provide the flexibility to include functionality provided by legacy systems, which cannot be replaced easily and otherwise restrict further development. The goal of this paper is to explore the road towards a modular architecture. A case study is committed at the Ministry of Justice to illustrate and evaluate the first steps on this road. Based on this experience we identify the next steps towards market-based modular services architecture.

Business processes in the e-Government are relatively complex, in particular which concerns the number of the persons and authorities involved. In addition business processes have the tendency to change with the time. The more complex the processes, the more largely is the danger, that they drift from and fail the goals of original process modeling within a short time. The process management requires therefore a process control, with which the constant actualisation of the process organization and a continuous adjustment at changed goals and basic conditions can be carried out. An organization concept is presented, with which the transition of a BPR project to a continuous improvement process is supported. It is reported on first experiences with this concept.

Despite its perceived importance in Brussels, cross-border electronic public services are not a big thing yet in the Netherlands. There appears to be sufficient (yet rather partial) supply but insufficient demand. In the post dotcom era suppliers tend to look more critically at actual demand and balance their investments with perceived benefits. Decisions to invest in cross-border electronic services are based on the relative number of foreign customers. Due to the relative low number of foreign visitors public organizations put low priority to cross-border services, unless they have specific mandates.

If co-operating government agencies reside in different countries, they will differ in many respects: administrative ontologies and laws, political context, administrative culture, and computing infrastructure. Inter-organizational e-government services may provide technical interoperability, but do not necessarily solve the problem how to understand a foreign administration. In this paper, we shall discuss the difficulties of citizens in dealing with heterogeneous local e-government services.

The paper conceives e-governance as the overall design and implementation of e-government strategies, structures and processes. It argues for paying greater attention to the sustainability of e-government strategies and examines the use of scenario methods for integrating a future-oriented perspective. Two major applications of scenario approaches in the field of e-government are analysed: a scenario project at regional level in the United Kingdom, and the pan-European project PRISMA, a research cooperation within the IST programme. With a focus on the latter, the contribution outlines scenario processes as well as outcomes and derives implications for strategy design. The scenarios suggest certain caveats for future-oriented design which can enhance e-governance. A number of design components which are robust across different scenarios are pointed out, e.g. target group and needs orientation, privacy enhancing measures, access to government-held information, one-stop service centred back-office reorganisation.

This paper addresses eProcurement adoption strategies in public sector institutions from four perspectives (capability, interactivity, value distribution, and orientation of the decisions). The paper analyzes eProcurement in the largest municipality (Copenhagen) in Denmark. Our analysis suggests that efficiency and effectiveness (capability), and improved coordination of private sector and public sector interaction (interactivity) are the drivers for the adoption strategy pursued by the municipality.

The aim of the Government Gateway is to provide better, customer-focused and more efficient public services.

In this paper we compare and contrast the issues of providing conventional against electronic services within Public Authorities (PAs). We present a model suggesting the three dimensions to electronic service delivery are motivation, organisation, and technology (the MOT of service delivery). We observe that the motivations affecting service delivery differ greatly between PAs and commercial organisations, with PAs having certain obligations and responsibilities as to the services that they provide that do not constrain commercial companies. We argue that technologically many lessons learned by commercial organisations can be immensely valuable to PAs, and conclude that the key barrier to effective electronic service delivery within PAs is their culture and organisation.

One of the main strategic goals of the European Union is a borderless Europe. In reality there are yet a lot of steps to achieve this ambitious goal. An impediment to this mobility is the lack of integration in pan-European administrative processes. To solve the problems these business processes have to be made transparent to the citizen and public services need to be integrated. To do so, public administrations have to interact seamlessly vertically (Europe, nation, region, municipality) as well as horizontally (between countries) with each other. This implies not only the use of standards for data exchange but also the interoperability of business processes. InfoCitizen is a “proof-of-concept” e-government project in the context of the EU IST Framework Program 5 with a budget of more than three million Euros. Within InfoCitizen a European Information Architecture dealing with the interoperability problem has been developed. Based on these blueprints a prototype has been implemented and currently user-partners are evaluating the concepts and the system in interacting local showcases. In this paper the results of the project are shown by summarising the project so far. Findings are used to map out future tasks.

This paper focuses the need for more research on user involvement and the investigation of stakeholders in e-Government initiatives. An investigation of existing work revealed a lack of research on those topics. As e-Government evolves and users mature, the value of their input can increase. The paper discusses the need and potential benefits of this approach. Finally, we suggest that existing stakeholder theory is investigated for adaptation into e-Government settings in order to map the complex body of interrelated stakeholders.

This paper presents some of the findings of an international research project entitled BISER (www.biser-eu.com) – “Benchmarking the Information Society in European Regions”, namely in the field of e-government. Citizen-to-administration as well as business-to-administration demand is analyzed in 28 regions (from 14 EU Member States), e.g. Brittany, Friesland, Greater Manchester or Tuscany. The survey reveals significant differences between businesses’ and citizens’ usage of e-government services, as well as between different European regions. Furthermore, it discusses potential barriers.

Process oriented analysis and optimisation of administrative procedures are key prerequisites for the successful organisational and technical restructuring of municipal administration in the move to Electronic Government. The exploitation of the full potential of information and communications technology can only be achieved through structured processes. The complexity of process models requires both a systematic preparation, and a methodical approach to the implementation of process oriented E-Government projects. Therefore this article provides a procedure model for process oriented organisation design, underlined by a case study which describes an optimisation project of the building permission procedure in the German municipality of Emsdetten.

Improving access to information and governmental assistance to citizens is nowadays considered as an important mechanism to enhance citizenship. As the number of web-enabled citizens increases, government is expected to deliver more effective on-line services, especially designed to meet the needs of the constituents. Since many citizens want to have the convenience of interacting with all levels of the government using information technology tools, the electronic government has consolidated its position as the best alternative to improve the interaction between government and citizen. It is described herein a Brazilian experience in developing an e-gov project for consumers rights protection. The project “Consumer-SC: Santa Catarina Consumer’s Portal” applies Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence techniques to provide means of higher quality and efficiency on the field of consumer protection in Brazil.

This paper describes some requirements for using software agents to automate many tasks in eGovernment applications. First, the architecture must be able to support workflow engines, transparent reliability, and security. Second, data must be presented in a format that can be understood by any system component that uses the data. Third, it must be possible to define processes in terms of distributed workflows. These processes may be originated from laws, internal guidelines, or technical specifications. The definitions must in any case be unambiguous, finite, deterministic, and refer only to public data structures. Agents can then be used to run the defined long-term workflows. We also present a sample Web service-based eGovernment service, based on new Finnish law governing government processes.

Since a few years digital government is becoming an active research area with lots of promises to revolutionise government and its interaction with citizens and businesses. A crucial point for the success of e-government is the integration and sharing of services and information provided by different authorities. We argue that Web services are a promising technology to solve this problem.

This paper presents the efforts undertaken by the Scuola Sant’ Anna in developing an open framework for document and workflow management within Public Administrations (PA). Goals of the project are engaging emerging and innovative technologies, interoperability standards and open architectures in the context of PA information systems, and providing a set of software components adhering to national laws. These tools constitute a basic lattice for providing advanced ICT services to the citizens and enterprises, and among PA themselves, making a step towards realization of e-Government principles. Further goals of the project are driving an experimentation of innovative open-source solutions within real case studies.

This paper reports some methodological guidelines for categorizing administrative services on certain typological characteristics (informational vs. transactional content, acquaintance vs. operational usefulness, local vs. hyper-local value), defining one-stop service offerings and ranking their interest from an end-user as well as service integration perspective.

Two Dutch municipal referendum websites were evaluated with regard to their potential for supporting voting decisions. The websites embodied different approaches to information provision. Both approaches showed disadvantages. In particular, the websites fell short on ‘argumentative empowerment’, in the one case by not providing any argumentative frames within which information could be evaluated, in the other by providing information solely within the argumentative frame of the municipality.

Electronic Government today focuses mainly on offering citizens-enterprises the capability to perform electronically their transactions with the Public Administration (PA). However, the huge potential of ICT has only to a small extent been exploited in the most critical higher level functions of PA, such as the development, monitoring and evaluation of public policies and programmes, etc. This paper is dealing with the exploitation of the technologies of Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) in PA. A general architecture of a flexible Government to Government (G2G) collaborative environment is described, for supporting the higher level functions of PA, which has been designed as part of the ICTE-PAN Project.

The European Commission’s working plan for the e-Commission is very ambitious and provides for a comprehensive redesign of information and communication technologies according to the leitbild (leading motive) of the reformed Commission. The already existing IT infrastructure of the e-Commission and gained practise with previous applications provide a good start for the next steps to an efficient e-government. Many existing IT systems must be adapted and integrated into the e-Commission that will take some time. After finishing this phase, the next step will be transaction services as well as the use of electronic signatures.

There is a need for discussing the role of IT use in government and governance beyond the information processing aspects, but theories are badly lacking. The literature on various aspects of government tends to underestimate the role of IT while IT studies tend to overestimate it. IT and information systems are not much studied in political science. While some thirty years of studies of information systems have produced many theories concerning IT use in organisations, e-government studies require going beyond the border of the organization as government/nance cannot be reduced to individual organizations, not even if interorganisational cooperation is included. This paper proposes a model that considers governance as a system rather than in terms of its individual organizational units and processes, and views information systems from that perspective.

This paper reports on a methodology for analysing the relationship between the reorganisation of government back offices, which contributes to the full realisation of eGovernment, and efficient electronic public services. It derives from research currently being carried out for the European Commission in which about 400 cases from around Europe are being subject to preliminary survey, from which a selection of between 20 and 30 of the most advanced ‘good practice’ cases will be studied in depth. Preliminary results are expected in September 2003 and full results in October 2003.

The main focus of the Public Sector Process Rebuilding (PPR) method is to orient information systems (IS) towards the end-user of the public services. This paper presents six actions implementing the PPR-concept: (1) bring order in the digital tool box; (2) argue which processes can not be 100% digitalized; (3) explain what the IS-benefits are for citizens, decision-making and prioritizing; (4) distribute new IS leaving 10% for intra departmental solution and 20% on other inter/intra governmental communication; (5) access the formal IT capability; and (6) identify the radical IS implementation.

Recently, process modelling and process reorganisation have been recognised as being of utmost importance for making e-government implementations success. Due to the high complexity of governmental processes and organisational structures, appropriate modelling methodologies and tools are, however, not really available yet. In our contribution, we describe the needs for a comprehensive Business Process Management methodology and toolkit targeted for the public sector. We present a solution to support public administrations in the reorganisation and re-engineering of administrative processes towards online service provision.

The information systems-related sourcing literature has recently largely emphasized a portfolio approach in which homegrown, hybrid, and outsourced systems are combined. In electronic government, similar approaches are found in practice. Since electronic government is predicted to have a major impact on government business processes, an increased understanding regarding the optimal sourcing mix of e-Gov systems is needed in order to direct the scarce resources into strategically relevant areas. In the absence of a developed sourcing theory, an exploratory approach has been employed for this research undertaking. Elements of a sourcing theory are proposed for testing.

This paper is concerned with e-government implementation at the local level. It proposes that effective realization of the radical change promised by e-government depends upon a sense of crisis, a problematisation, which motivates the organisation to respond with urgency and vigour. The paper reports a study of one leading local authority based upon interviews of its senior managers. It finds no sense of crisis, and instead obfuscation and psychological distancing, as the potential of e-government is marginalized, and the status quo is reinforced.

The term electronic voting is often used as a method to stop sinking voter turnout or to enhance the accessibility of the election. Before conducting an election using electronic voting, technical standards and legal issues have to be solved. In Austria the “social partnership” model is built upon numerous public corporations, such as the chamber of Commerce or the Student Union. These corporations suffer in contrast to elections to the national parliament from a low voter turnout. As e-voting is seen as one measure to raise voter participation, the Austrian national parliament passed the Student Union bill on 1st of February 2001 that allows e-voting in the context of the bi-annual student elections. In this paper the authors present e-voting in the Student Union in a three-fold way. First the legal situation is addressed, then the acceptance of e-voting by voters and finally the technical solution of a two phased method that is used for a test election during the 2003 Student Union elections. It is based on a Kerberos-style algorithm designed to guarantee the separation of the identification process and the registration process as well as to prevent a malicious server administration from generating fake votes.

This paper focuses on an Internet-enabled remote voting system for a young people’s parliament in the Highland region of Scotland. The parliament was established to increase young people’s participation in local government. Two elections have been held to constitute the parliament. For both elections, the International Teledemocracy Centre (ITC) provided e-voting systems. The second system is part of a larger participatory design project, to develop an e-democracy website that serves the parliament and increases participation in a variety of ways. This paper investigates our motives for including e-voting, especially in relation to modernisation. We then evaluate the project and appraise the results according to these motives. While acknowledging the differences between this election and a statutory one, we then look at the relationship between modernisation and e-voting, in the light of our results.

Electronic voting (e-voting) systems can greatly enhance the efficiency, and potentially, the transparency of national elections. However, the security of such systems is an area of on-going research. The literature for secure e-voting is predominantly concerned with 1-out-of-m voting strategies, where m is the number of candidates running for the elections. This paper presents a case study of cryptologic protocols for secure e-voting systems that use preferential voting strategies.

OSCI is the name of a two-layered protocol for the secure exchange of messages in the E-Government context. It has been developed within the German MEDIA@Komm project [4], and now it became an important part of the German E-Government infrastructure. It will, for example, be a major part of the secure technical infrastructure for Bund Online 2005, which is the E-Government program of the German federal government. The security layer of OSCI, called OSCI-Transport, is a mandatory standard in the federal governments IT – architecture program SAGA [1]. It is part of the European IDA program, too.

The successful delivery of electronic services is a primary objective of modern e-government and their successful introduction depends on the users trusting these services and the privacy of their personal data. Digital signatures are one of the security elements that make these services possible, but they feature some weaknesses – weaknesses that can be surmounted by the use of a digital time stamp. These do not only add a certified time to the data but also make many of other methods that increase security and trust possible. Since digital certificates are widely used in today’s information society, digital signatures should be easy to implement. However, implementation must be studied carefully because abuse can have critical repercussions. Without 100 percent trust from its users, e-government and its services will be unsustainable. Slovenian e-government is in this situation, stranded with good infrastructure and legal bases, but services that are not trusted.

Delivery of documents is an elementary process in public administrations. For e- Government, electronic delivery is a central process, complementary to the electronic input process of form data. In the following article, the Austrian model is introduced, the characteristics of which are openness, security and simplicity. Electronic delivery takes place in the form of a deposit and is accompanied by a notification. By using electronic signatures we can solve the problems of signing the deliverables, receiver authentication and confirmation of delivery.

The aim of e-Government projects is bringing the appropriate services within an authority as close to the citizens as possible. Due to interdisciplinary cooperation the formerly ambitious project “e-Government” has become a fairly well introduced platform. This paper focuses on the security aspects and the different views within e-Government projects towards their relations. The first part presents an overview of the security fields and refines them into their different aspects, while trying to cover the whole range of security within a holistic view. Because of the complexity of security, as it contains diverse aspects that all have to be considered, the second part focuses on the single security area “data protection”, which with its weaknesses and its strengths serves as an example. Data protection regards such diverse issues such as encryption, access rights as well as the corresponding security awareness of the employees handling the data. This also involves the corresponding backup and recovery strategies, as well as the data storage itself.

e-Government service will be beneficial to citizen for its efficiency and security. From the citizen’s point of view, although the e-Government service brings citizens online service, citizens need to visit at least one of the governmental offices for receiving specific service such as job interview, ID card issuing, or attending social events. These kinds of service often accompany with payments for the service charge. It means that the citizen has to do three things: request for reservation, payment for the service, and visit at least one of the governmental offices. In this paper, the Online Internet Reservation of e-Government Service(ORGS), one of the smart card based models for online Internet reservation accompanying with payment, is proposed for its efficiency and security of these kinds of service. Java card security functions are part of the building components of the Java Card Applications Toolkit(J-CAT). The J-CAT is designed to provide developers with security, easiness and efficiency in developing Java card applications. In this paper, the proposed ORGS implemented by the J-CAT provides users, developers, and managers with security, easiness, and efficiency.

With their joint concept for a digital town hall the cities Nuremberg, Furth, Erlangen, Schwabach and Bayreuth were among the prizewinners in the national competition MEDIA@Komm. The five municipalities are in the process of creating an innovative and networked administration. In addition to more service, better availability and a higher transparency of administrative transactions for citizens and business companies, the municipalities implement many improvements within their administration. Curiavant Internet GmbH was founded as a project company. It develops e-government solutions for the region and implements them together with partners. The technical basis consists of the e-government infrastructure CuriaWORLDTM.

The spread and development of e-Government services caused significant interest in maintaining security, trust and privacy. This paper presents a state-of-the-art review of the widely accepted Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs). A strict classification of several parameters is performed in order to conduct a comparative analysis among Anonymizer, Crowds, Onion Routing, TRUSTe, P3P, LPWA, Hordes and Freedom. The selection of the comparison criteria is relevant to Security Threats, Technological Issues and User Demands.

As the e-government domain is about to become a field of application for Semantic Web technologies, the actors involved still lack reasoning to decide on critical issues such as organisational cost/benefit, “user” involvement, technical integration, and implementation strategy. Firstly, the paper seeks to identify “semantic problems” in e-government as prerequisite for discussing the requirements for the application of Semantic Web technologies. Secondly, experiences from an ongoing project are discussed to identify critical issues from the systems development perspective. Thirdly, taking into account the problems identified and the case findings, a research agenda is laid out aiming to guide and support the application of Semantic Web technologies in e-government.

The goal of the Structural Fund Project Knowledge Portal is to support organizations and individuals involved in the SF project proposal development processes to achieve the highest possible number of high quality eligible project proposals meeting the stringent EC criteria. Interactions among experts playing different roles within a project definition case, are an important element of all Knowledge Services that include manual (i.e. expert) interventions. Therefore we present a typical expert interaction workflow exploiting the negotiating capabilities of the ICONS intelligent agent environment that will typically appear in a knowledge portal.

We examine the possibility of using the software developed during the UNIVERSAL project to help improve the service provided by the CNFPT. We present briefly the main design ideas and characteristics of the software as well as the way we plan to integrate to the system the latest version of a Decision Support System (DSS) for training in the financial planning of towns.

This paper draws on current research and from it isolates a framework of trust definitions. From these definitions models of the trust relationships specific to the implementation of knowledge management within a governmental organisation are developed. As a foundation for the paper we address the nature of knowledge, adhering to current accepted definitions of tacit and explicit knowledge, while introducing a third knowledge type – obscured explicit knowledge. We argue that this third type is a subtype of explicit knowledge, and has been misidentified as tacit knowledge. We also argue that this third type is fundamental to the models. We argue that social acceptance of knowledge management is fundamentally based on trust and subsequently develop the models that describe the complex trust relationships involved in this acceptance.

Public administration (PA) has significantly shifted its interests to reach the innovative Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), as a result of e-Government projects. The new challenge for public administrations is based on the exploitation of their knowledge resources in order to improve their processes and to offer better services to the users. The aim of this contribution is to investigate the spreading of cooperating strategies in public administrations in order to better understand why and how these organizational behaviors could assure advantages for PA and citizens.

This paper takes an information systems development perspective on e-democracy. A case study in the area of e-democracy, a number of different types of information systems applications, is presented. These are discussed from three perspectives on knowledge, (cognitive, social, and critical), using an analytical framework that is based on some general direction in the area of knowledge management. The lesson of the case study is that full support from all these perspectives are needed to make IS an effective support to democratic processes. The analysis shows that it is not a technical problem, most types of support are readily available and in use. There is an insight in the area that success rests on a match between IS, understanding democratic processes, and peoples’ expectations. The trouble, it seems, is to convert this into a system development perspective. Here findings from knowledge management could provide support.

E-Government brings a shift of paradigms. New speedy, smart and simple processes are imperative. Existing processes should stay unnoticed, when these new processes are modeled. The development of the new Austrian state budgeting and bookkeeping system has followed these new paradigms and has brought impressive rationalisation effects.

This paper present possible further development of intelligent life-event based portals. Introduction of ‘deep’ knowledge (semantics) in the shape of ontologies, distributed components in the shape of web services and intelligent agents are three main topics of probable future architecture of e-gov. This paper relates to the developed prototype of life-event based portal and its possible future architectural refinement.

Nowadays, there are an emergence of spatial or geographic data stored in several and heterogeneous databases, mostly in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The diversity of GIS and the increasing accumulation of non-spatial (simple attributes) and spatial (geometric shapes) data make it difficult to apply conventional OLAP and data mining tools. Thus, the need to build a spatial data warehouse over heterogeneous GIS is becoming necessary in many fields. Our architecture is a central type architecture based on GML (for spatial data representation) and more generally on XML (for all data). In this paper we will focus on the study of data integration into a data warehouse, and data representation. We will show how the specificities of our architecture contribute to manage spatial and non-spatial data.

SINUP consists of a geographical information system whose purpose is to store, in a coherent manner, data resulting from key activities of Oporto local authority, allowing to better structure the knowledge about the urban reality. In the possession of such knowledge, and with the revision of Oporto’s Municipal Master Plan taking place soon, the municipality is making an effort to develop an electronic citizen service that will allow a large number of citizens to consult it, and more important, participate in its public discussion prior to approval thus creating a major instrument of e-democracy in Oporto’s municipality.

Geographical information is of strategic importance, when comes to land use management decision-making and GIS are essential resources for the production of land use management instruments, commonly known as plans (e.g. master plans).To build them, local authorities require multi-disciplinary teams with different competences and responsibilities. Many of these teams are external to the municipality and in the position of sub-contractors. With so many actors involved, the result is often a complex mesh of incoherent spatial data. Overcoming this problem often leads to huge overheads for the public administration.This paper addresses a possible technical solution for this issue, based on international standards (e.g. OpenGIS) and profiting from the current state of technological development.

This paper presents goals and contents of ISP for a nationwide project in Korea called “Development of 4S-based Integration Technologies.” Results of this ISP can be utilized for establishing nationwide 4S architecture, strategy, business model, and plan for related current and future projects. 4S project is a government-supported program for the purpose of development of core technologies and integration methods for four systems that are commonly related to spatial information. Application items of 4S such as projects of local governments are also defined and developed in this task. However, there were few systematic approaches about derivation of application items, propulsion strategies and policies, relationships between technical components, and future plans, till now. In this research, by establishing a comprehensive ISP for the 4S project, we form a foundation of nationwide 4S industry and promote integration and utilization of 4S technologies. This ISP is also used for a master plan or guideline prior to system design and implementation for nationwide projects or business items related to spatial information.

This paper considers the effectiveness of the UK’s geographic information network in developing a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). It argues that despite domain expertise and considerable consensus the network has failed to establish a vision for an SDI at the heart of the UK’s e-government strategy, a failure that may be impacting on that strategy. The paper concludes that European organisations may become significant actors in the network.

In the year 2003 the administration portal for Switzerland, the Virtual Desk www.ch.ch, went live. This portal is based on a powerful meta-database of all available resources and services of the federation, the cantons and the districts and allocates a unique name, the URN (Uniform Resource Name), to every resource. The URN:Technology, adapted to the requirements of www.ch.ch, became an open standard and a building block of the Swiss e-government platform. This article highlights the URN:Technology and shows how portals in powerful and established federal structures benefit from this innovation. URN:Technology represents nowadays a key factor in the success of building and operating large portals with split responsibility for the content and interlinking. The present meta-database of URN:Technology, already similar to UDDI, can be developed with the help of web services into a registry with UDDI conformity.

The award procedure has a great deal of influence on the software process. Therefore the choice of a qualified type of award procedure is of particular importance for the success of a software development project in the public sector, as well as electronic government projects. The condition for the use of the open procedure or the restricted procedure is a complete and detailed requirements specification, to enable the comparison of the tenders. From a software development point of view, the application of one of these types means using the waterfall model. The disadvantages of the waterfall model are well known. The approach presented in this paper uses the negotiated procedure to support the advantages of an iterative, risk mitigating software process.

This communication describes the activities carried out by the Shared Infrastructures Working Group of the E-Forum Association and its early results. This group is devoted to study the interoperability issues of e-Government shared infrastructures. Firstly, the initial task of analysis of existing initiatives is described and some concluding remarks are given. Secondly, an Interoperability Framework is proposed as a methodological approach to analyze interoperability issues of e-Government. The paper ends up with some ideas for further work.

E-Commerce and E-Government applications are traditionally seperatly developed and come from different backgrounds. As the applications become more and more sophisticated and citizen-centric, the need for communication and integration between those two paradigms arises. Web services, as the emerging standard for the implementation of distributed applications, support this on both a technological and a process level.

The transformation of our society into a network society is proceeding at a startling pace. One often hears the term legal framework in this context, but few details of that framework are forthcoming. What this framework is or should be like has generally not been adequately discussed. If we are content to watch it take shape guided by directives formulated on varying bases and their equally varied implementations, there is serious risk that the legal order will become fragmented. A clear frame of reference can easily became chaos, which, will pose a threat to our basic rights. The point of departure in this article is the assessment of e-government as a complex of information processes. These are evaluated in the light of the requirements of the modern constitutional state. The aim is to determine the relationship between the requirements for good government and the new digital operating environment. Such an analysis is a rarity, although different countries have set out to develop electronic services in government on the strength of advances in information technology.

Online one-stop government is a current development of public administrations for offering services and information through a single point of access in cyberspace. Current developments implement initial information and download of forms as well as delivery service and associated payments. Since the legal frame is the basis for governmental activity, legal regulations have to be thoroughly studied for online service delivery. In this paper, we investigate the Austrian laws for the case of online one-stop government service provision in general, especially in the area of electronic service of official documents (when allowed, how, what remedies are available in case of errors, etc.). We detail the legal aspects with the official proceeding of a building permission.

In this paper, a process approach to the investigation of e-voting is adopted defining the process stages and the agents involved in each stage. The technologies used in the delivery of electronic voting, the locations related to the different stages of the process and the main legal issues involved have been identified in the existing literature. These five elements, namely agents, legal issues, process stages, technologies used and locations involved, form the framework of this taxonomy. The aim of the taxonomy is to provide an insight into the legal issues emerging according to the different combined relationships between these five elements, and provide a tool for the identification of legal accountabilities amongst the different agents involved.

Corruption is important, in particular for transforming countries. Anti-corruption approaches are briefly examined. The conclusion is reached that more attention should be given to the aspect of the necessary support by information systems. A case study was selected. A simple model of corruption is proposed. It is used for formulating general informational requirements to support anti-corruption actions. These requirements suggest that effective anti-corruption actions imply the infrastructure of e-Government.

Legal reform aimed at creating of favorable legal environment is important part of e-government development. E-government legal solutions need to be legally binding and sound in order to succeed. Legal framework initiatives for e-Governance so far have followed two concurrent approaches. First one infers development of separate regulations covering individual questions pertaining to e-Government, under umbrella of special programs-plans. Second one, is a holistic framework, which could identify and address legal principles of e-Government in a single regulation. This approach may especially be applicable to cross-border issues and challenges common within any e-government environment. The article provides comparative review of these views on e-Governance regulation and their suggested benefits and flaws.

The paper presents an e-government project set up in Italy to build the portal “Normeinrete” (i.e. “laws on the net” ). It offers a co-operative information service to citizens providing unified access to Italian and European Union legislation published on different institutional web sites. The system is based on a co-operative technological architecture, resulting in a federation of legislative data bases developed on different platforms. Co-operation is achieved by means of suitable application gateways that provide “loose” integration by adopting two standards to identify the resources and to represent document structure and metadata by XML mark-up according to ad-hoc DTDs. The adoption of these standards allows automatic dynamic hyperlinking among laws and semi-automatic building of legislation in force. The approach adopted allows a good level of integration among different systems while maintaining the autonomy of institutions.

In this paper the authors discuss the legal and technical implications of enabling democracy over the Internet (short e-Democracy) would have. Which requirements does the law, respectively the constitutional law, define for internet-based political communication, especially for computer-aided voting procedures? Which technical procedures and algorithms do fulfil these requirements?

eGovernment is an opportunity to improve the public service delivery, increased productivity and reduced costs using Internet-based technology. On the other hand the eGovernance should go beyond: to enhance the citizen’s access to government information and provide new ways to increase citizen participation in the democratic process. For this reason a Legislative Management System is a fundamental IT System for providing the basic inputs to a good governance. Without a clear understanding of the normative system in force in a country is not possible to build correct polices, to stimulate democratic debate, to build concrete economic strategies. Norma-System is an integrated web-based system that is able to manage all the cycle of the law production: back-office and front-office sides.

The scope of this paper is to analyze the extent to which Information Technology can be used as an enabler in the transformation of productive processes associated with the activities of government organs, with an emphasis on the use of Internet technology, in government-to-citizen processes in the Brazilian context. For this purpose, the process of issuing and renewing driver’s licenses coordinated by the Department of Transport of the State of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil is presented so as to show how redesigning the former production process with the assistance of Information Technology brought about improvements for the citizen.

Designing user-friendly public e-services is one of the prime concerns of most e-government initiatives and programmes. In this context a life-event based approach seems to be one of the most promising. There are several research projects and several live-event description and design methodologies under development, most of them still in an early stage. In the paper we are trying to focus and compare three selected methodological approaches to designing live-events. Main aim of our research was to compare the selected approaches and outline their main characteristics as well as differences between them.

Portals do help communities to expand its level of government services providing a frame to implement e-government and the opportunity to revitalize local government. Hereby, partnering is particularly relevant in today’s rapidly changing world and its focus on the needs of citizens and communities. In this article current factors and trends are presented focussing on the situation in Germany.

The main aim of “e-Administration” programmes in Spain is to regulate and to implement administrative procedures that enable e-documents to be telematically processed, recorded and filed in a unified system that may be used by various entities. S. 45 of the 30/1992, of 26 November, Administrative Common Procedures Act is the general basis for the regulation of the specific demonstrations of computer and telematic techniques in Administrative procedures, such as the management of e-documents, the use of e-signature, the handling of administrative databases or general records on computer means, the issuance of e-mail notices and the management of administrative information by telematic means, either displaying it on administrative websites or by subscribing to e-lists. For those purposes are noteworthy Tax regulations, which establish the general conditions and regulate the procedure for telematically presenting declarations of different tax models over the Internet.

Existing studies of e-government concentrate on the supply-side, focusing on the availability and level of sophistication of online services and usage. This study addresses the demand-side of e-government – not only usage, but also perceptions and barriers to utilisation that have not been treated previously. Indicators to measure acceptance and adoption of e-government were used to build a survey that was then piloted among members of the ‘general population’ in the 15 EU Member States, Switzerland and the US. A second survey was used to study 10 Accession States. The results of the surveys indicated a preference for online services that do not require users to provide a great deal of personal information. Reasons for preferring online services to their traditional counterparts include added convenience and increased efficiency. Attitudes toward e-government tended to vary by country, although reasons for this are not clear at this time.

What is local community e-government? What is needed to be successful in setting up virtual town halls? Many different answers are given to this question. For some it is a successful and useful Internet presentation by a municipality, for others it is a new initiative for modernisation in the public administration enhanced by the technological development. But all too often, local community e-government is reduced to on-line services such as the provision of forms on the Internet, possibilities for participation in municipal websites or the availability of electronic interaction and transactions.

Today’s Western democracies where most e-Government initiatives are being launched tend to be far from culturally homogeneous political entities. Most of them harbour large minorities who may not only speak different languages, but have different religions, use different scripts and differ in their cultural values, traditions and attitudes. We assume that these factors have an influence on their understanding of information distributed by public authorities and on their cognitive approach to knowledge representation.

This paper examines the experiences of driving take-up of eGovernment applications in Europe. It develops ten key actions that, if followed, result in a dramatic increase in eGovernment usage. The work breaks new ground in a number of areas including the recognition that the factors affecting take-up fall into two distinct groups. The first of these is a vital set of preconditions. The second of these is a set of factors all of which have been shown individually to raise take-up dramatically but only when the first set are in place. The biggest single factor is sharing of benefits with users.

This paper examines the development of electronic government (e-government) in Thailand. The development of information technology (IT) projects in Thai public agencies was initiated in the early 1990s, albeit without developing a national IT master plan or establishing a national IT agency. However, when many problems arose in the use of IT in public agencies, the Thai government formulated in 1996 the first national IT master plan to cope with e-governance problems. This case study illustrates the Thai e-government’s development experiences and examines e-government strategic approaches. The lessons may be relevant to and may be a learning experience for countries at similar stages of development.

The paper describes the main ideas and results of a project improving the government to business relationships in Italy by a cooperative architecture based on a Publish & Subscribe communication paradigm.

The TANGO e-government arena is an on-going project in Southern Sweden, funded by the Innovative Actions of the European Regional Development Fund. The aim of the project is to establish cooperation between the public sector, private enterprise and university-based research in designing public e-services. Our starting point is e-government understood as co-construction of technology, society and citizenship in everyday life. This approach is based on the Scandinavian Tradition of Participatory Design, but also motivated by on-going technological development. In cooperating around development of new, integrated services, catering to various categories of users as well as to a growing diversity of mobile technologies, we are aiming to establish feedback channels between practice and theory, between use and design, and between different academic disciplines where we see a need to synchronize the models and methods we work with. Our current research questions focus on exploring and managing multi-perspectivity as a resource for design.

With the extensive application of the World Wide Web, an important application is community management, many governments have built district-oriented websites to serve the citizens who live, work in the community, named as e-community. The e-community should be up-to-date, personalized and flexible to provide information. Furthermore, they should be embedded with knowledge that can be utilized for content analysis and marketing intelligence and above all with minimal administrative overhead.In this paper, we first systematically review major problems existing in the e-community, then we we show an practical project designed for the municipality of Ningbo, China, exploiting the currently emerging data exchange and metadata representation standards of the web to address such kinds of problems. And finally and we could see that inhabitants may benefit more from the e-community while constructing a semantic e-community under our methodology.

During the last few years there have been many confrontations between the government and the private sector over Internet governance in Korea. Two cases are examined: NEIS and domain name governance. The case of NEIS shows that the public interest concerns should be given serious consideration at the early stage of building e-strategies. For the case of domain names it is suggested that the respective role of the government and the private sector in Internet regulation should be complimentary rather than exclusive.

Major developments of the years of 2001-2002 prove that the ICT sector consisting of various sub-sectors (e.g., telecommunications, electronics, software, hardware, services, etc.) is expanding and infiltrating business, administration, education in Belarus. While awareness of these dynamics is growing, Belarusian government is already pursuing an array of ICT-related laws and regulations. Overview of the governmental ICT initiatives shows that the key focus is the development of telecommunication infrastructure, widespread introduction of information technology to government in order to collect and process data and information security which are regarded as a step of transition to information society. “Electronic Belarus” is oriented generally to organizational and technological upgrading of the public administrations. Issues of wide public electronic access to information and participation in democratic process, transparency of public administration are not mentioned in the programme. But the fact that e-government is proclaimed as a perspective creates opportunities for further work in this direction.

Gone are days when every thing related to “e” must be western or related to developed countries. There were times not long ago, when India was considered a country of snake charmers. With technological revolution, India has been the front runner in the area of Information Technology. India’s matured and robust educational system provided the much-needed backbone to IT manpower needs in country and abroad. Implementation of Information Technology is not only in the industrial sector as thought, but also in the area of governance. Information Technology has became a new tool for “Democracy”. Although e-governance is there on priority for every state government, some have taken a lead and developed effective models from which others can take a lead.

This paper deals with an Electronic Government project that has as objective the creation of the Santa Catarina Information Technology Nucleus – NECATI, due to the importance that CITs have in the State of Santa Catarina, in Brazil. It has as objective the R&D in CITs fomentation, offering legal and commercial specialized assistance. NECATI is structured in two sub-nuclei: the Copyright Support Nucleus – NAPI, that has as objective to give technical assistance to the generating technology entities, and the Knowledge Management Nucleus – NUGESCO, that has as target the commercialization of new Knowledge Management technologies. It still has as objective the creation of a web portal. NECATI will be organized by the Juridical Institute of Intelligence and Systems – IJURIS, having as co-executor FUNCITEC, counting on the support of the State Educational Foundations Association – ACAFE.

The quality and productivity of e-Government is measured by its successful usage for country development. The e-Government requirement is one of the most important features, which must be elicited from related stakeholders. The e-Government crisis normally comes from the shortage or unqualified IT Man, Machine, Money, Methodology, and Management (5M framework). The e-Government requirement elicitation requires a good management of 5M. This paper introduces the requirement process that is a super set of requirement elicitation and modeling. The e-Government architecture, which is classified into three layers, is discussed.

Just like other parts of the world, governments of Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) countries are also in cut – throat competition with each other to attract inward investment, make their products and services competitive on a global scale and create an in-country atmosphere that will attract the brightest minds. The current research assesses major government websites of GCC countries. The criteria for ranking included, online information, foreign language access, communication, services provided, and use of advertisements on government websites. The study reveals that all GCC countries have made some strides towards placing information and services online, however there is considerable variation across GCC countries in how much material is on these government websites. Further, among the GCC countries, UAE Government websites were ranked as highest in all the criteria researched. Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was rated as the lowest.

E-government in South Africa has a particularly important historical and social context due to the legacy of apartheid. As a result, a ten year e-government implementation horizon has been created from tested world wide practices. Thus far the plan is not being realised and a gap is appearing between what the policy says should be happening and what is actually happening. This gap is most likely a result of a lack of government capacity to meet the policy objectives. In this paper the author puts forward a framework – drawing on actor network theory (ANT) and the due process model – which aims to improve the current e-government implementation process and close the gap between policy and practices in South Africa.