My writings on eGovernment
Assessment is part of the
United Nations Public
Administration Network.
It is available as a
blog on eGovernment Assessment 
.
My writings on eGovernment
Assessment is part of the
United Nations Public
Administration Network.
It is available as a
blog on eGovernment Assessment .
A very interesting presentation has been made available discussing the impacts of the recent financial crisis on the eGovernment in Denmark. (Adam Grønlykke Mollerup, The economic and financial crisis: Impact on e-government in Denmark?)
The study claims, as can be expected, that more strict economy meant increased budged deficits, fall in investments, and decreased productivity.
Much more interesting is the impact it had on eGovernment in the country. According to the presentation the strict financial times, and the measures taken accordingly, had a positive impact on the eGovernment, namely:
I have unfortunately only been able the find the presentation of this study (Adam Grønlykke Mollerup, The economic and financial crisis: Impact on e-government in Denmark?). In this presentation, the findings are not discussed in any details. More elaborate argumentations for the findings would have been very useful.
Ever wondered what the practical difference between the UN E-government measures and the UN E-participation measures?
The recently publish data from UNPAN shows us that the differences are practically absent. In the following image, I have plotted the correlation between the E-Government measurements and E-participation measurements.
Correlation between UN E-Government Measure and UN E-Participation Measure
A straight diagonal line, which is clearly visible in the plot, means that there is a strong correlation. I.e. that the E-participation measure can be extracted from (or calculated from) the E-Government measure. If the data looks chaotic, which is not the case here, it means the measures from E-participation and E-Government are independent.
This plot clearly shows a strong correlation. It even has a Pearson Correlation, which is a statistical way of showing that to data sets are correlated, is a staggering 0.66, which is extremely much in the social sciences.
The question which naturally arises is why bother with both measurements?
United Nations Public Administration Network has made the data for the 2010 e-Governemnt Survey available.
The countries which reached the highest e-Government score this year was:
Capgemini has released its 8th eGovernment Benchmark Measurement called Smarted, Faster, Better eGovernment.
International eGoverment surveys are always interesting. This is especially true when surveys include an aim at measuring user experience, as the Capgemini survey does.
In this survey, user experience is divided into six sub categories:
From the above user experience categories, there are some interesting points to take note from. The manual evaluations were limited to checking if the national portals could be viewed with various font sizes. It turns out that this was possible for almost every portal and the metric was finally dropped.
Another interesting point is that Capgemini has chosen to measure web accessibility automatically using the technology from the European Internet Accessibility Observatory (EIAO). Capgemini states that technology conducts a series of automated tests following the Unified Web Evaluation Methodology. From each national portal, 6000 pages were downloaded and about 300 pages examined. (It should be noted that EIAO is no longer being developed. The project measuring Web accessibility automatically, building on the EIAO application, is eGovMon.)
According to Capgemini, the top five countries in Europe when it comes to Web accessibility is:
This ranking list is further supported by Capgemini stating that Austria regularly proceeds with self assessment of government Web sites. Furthermore, that the Netherlands have a strict Web accessibility policy; all Web sites launched after September 1st 2006 in the Netherlands must conform to strict accessibility guidelines within the end of 2010.
Transparency International has annually since 1996 released a global corruption index aim at representing the level of public-sector corruption. The results from the 2009 Global Corruption Index has recently been released.
New Zealand, Denmark, and Singepore received the highest score (least corrupt), while Somalia, Afghanistan, and Myanmar have most improvement potential.
Good scores reflect political stability, long-established conflict of interest regulations and solid, functioning public institutions. Furthermore, the results show that countries which are perceived to have the highest levels of public-sector corruption are also those plagued by long-standing conflicts, which have torn apart their governance infrastructure. (What is new in the 2009 Corruption Perceptions Index)
The corruption index is calculated based on results from survey questions posed to business leaders around the world (Transparency International Frequently Asked Questions)
A new and very interesting survey from OECD has recently been launched called Government at Glance. This survey focuses on public administration and is intended to be a bi-annual survey of the OECD members.
The survey is categorized into indicators. Each indicator is composed of results from multiple questions. These are individually weighted discretized into a single score per grouping of indicator. The indicators are grouped as following:
The survey also includes how core values within government has changed from 2000 to 2009, shown in the following figure:
Some of the other key findings includes that governments are increasingly using private and non-profit entities to provide goods and services. Furthermore, that only between 10% and 60% of the population use eGovernment services.
It is unfortunately not possible to get a complete overview of how well a web site is working for the users by only using automatic analysis tools. However, there exists many tools which give valuable indications.
It should be clearly noted that in order to make a web site successfully working for all users, including users with disabilities, automatic accessibility measurements is not sufficient. In fact, only 20% of the tests defined in the Unified Web Evaluation Methodology can be measured automatically. However, many tools of automatic accessibility evaluation exists. Following are some of these;
(x)HTML and CSS are the most used technologies on web pages. There are many reasons to have valid (x)HTML and CSS. To mention a few; valid code is important to make sure the web pages are rendered similarly in different browsers, to help faster loading in web browsers and to reduce maintenance. The World Wide Web consortium (W3C) has also gathered opinions from the web community validation of web pages.
I would be surprised if many disagree with me when I say that hard to take a professional web site seriously if there has not even valid HTML. Thankfully, making sure web pages are implemented with valid (x)HTML and CSS is both easy and fool proof.
Another issue which can easily be checked automatically is detecting links which are no longer working (broken links). When you create a web site you typically link to the relevant resources – both internal and external. As the web site grows, chances are that the number of links to external resources also grows. Naturally, it would be a tedious process to manually verify that your links are still working, which is why we have automatic tools for doing exactly this:
Web Site performance can also be carried out automatically.
Recently, a very interesting survey on open source in the French government has been presented. Following is a short summary of this survey, which I thought could be a nice follow up on my recent blog post on open source in eGovernment.
This French survey shows that 96% of the French public sector use open source.
According to the report, 77% use open source for the maturity of the software, which is the most common reason. This is of course not a property of open source itself but a consequence of well carried out open source development in these projects.
Furthermore, very much related to government transparency, 67% say they use open source software to be independent from their vendor. 48% say they use open source for interoperability, while 43% say they use it because of public policies.
I have recently had the fortunate opportunity to listen to several talks from the open source evangelist Bruce Perens. This inspired me to do a short survey on the use of open source in eGovernment.
There is no question that open data and open source are key elements to ensure transparency in government. Any scientific survey on these topics will tell you this, such as: Government Transparency via Open Data and Open Source, Open Source Government Transparency Projects, etc. Furthermore, not surprisingly, the European Commission reported that open source software as well as the use of open standards are necessary for successful interoperability.
Despite of this, a recent paper by Robert Deller and Veronique Guillox,
Determining relevance of “best practice” based on interoperability in European eGovernment initiatives, identified that open source and open systems are unfortunately significantly under utilized when efficiency is measured in government services. In fact, Deller and Guillox’ data indicates that open source is the most under-represented characteristic when benchmarking interoperable systems. The study shows that only 6% of the best practice initiatives from the ePractice portal had explicit requirements for an open systems. Similarly, as much as 84% of the initiatives had absolutely no indication that open source were part of the initiative.
In contrast, an excellent project which won the ePractice good practice label 2007 is PloneGov. The project is still innovating and is again a finalist for the good practice label in 2009 (and has won several other impressive awards). The project has realized that government agencies world wide often have similar requirements and face similar challenges. Thus, PloneGov attempts to unite efforts and focus on creating portals for local governments and cities. There is no question that they do this very well; the PloneGov reference list is impressive and speaks for itself.
Joomla is another open source portal which has been used for local governments web sites. We are for example starting to see this used by several Norwegian municipality web sites. I work with Norwegian municipalities myself and have often been surprised that we have not seen more open source projects such as Joomla used for the web sites. Norway has 430 municipalities, most of which have very similar requirements, this is specially true for their web sites. This should be the ideal situation for use of open source software. It will be interesting to see how Joomla will compete with the well established proprietary vendors in the Norwegian marked.
Another eGovernment tool based on open source and open standards recognized by ePractice is openFWPA. Even though it is currently only deployed used in Asturia, Spain, it is a large application which has the potential to make collaboration between public entities more transparent and much easier – both in Spain and globally. This project has a huge potential and it will be exiting to see if other government agencies will start to utilize this in the future.
Let us hope that we see many more excellent open source government projects in the future as well as more transparent eGovernment.
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) promotes an implementation of United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. A forum, hosted by the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology of Thailand, addressed policy and regulatory measures to promote accessibility in ICT. According to the press release, this is the first effort to promote implementation of ICT provisions in UN on the rights for persons with disabilities.
For more details, see the press release from ITU.
