| |
Research,
Data, Viewpoints...
Summaries of
selected books, studies and articles
Global
E-Government 2005 (pdf file)
(Taubman
Center for Public Policy and American Institutions, Brown University) |
Significant
findings include:
- 19 percent of government websites offer services that
are fully executable online.
- 89 percent of websites this year provide access to publications
and 53 percent
have links
to databases.
- 18 percent (up from 14 percent in 2004)
show privacy policies, while 10 percent have
security policies (up
from 8 percent in 2004).
- 19 percent of government websites have some form of disability
access, meaning
access for
persons with disabilities, up from 14 percent
in 2004.
- Countries vary enormously in their overall e-government
performance based on our analysis. The most highly
ranked
nations include Taiwan,
Singapore, United States, Hong Kong, China,
Canada, Germany, Australia, and Ireland.
- There are major
differences in e-government performance based
on region
of the
world.
In general, countries
in North America score the highest, followed
by Asia, Western Europe, Pacific Ocean Islands, Middle
East,
Eastern Europe,
South America, Russia and Central Asia, Central
America,
and Africa
|
State
and Federal E-Government in the United States, 2005 (pdf
file)
(Taubman
Center for Public Policy and American Institutions,
Brown University) |
Significant
findings include:
- 44 percent of federal sites
and 40 percent of state sites meet the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C) disability guideline, up slightly from
last year.
- A growing number of websites offer online services.
Seventy-three percent of state and federal sites have services
that are
fully
executable online, compared to 56 percent last year.
- 3) One percent of government sites are accessible through
personal
digital assistants, pagers, or mobile phones, the
same as last
year.
- A growing number of sites offer privacy
and security policy statements. This year, 69 percent
have some form
of privacy policy on their site, up from 63 percent
in
2004. Fifty-four
percent now have a visible security policy, up
from 46 percent last year.
- federal government websites
have a
number of
quality control issues, such as broken links,
missing titles, missing keywords, and warnings and redirects
to new pages.
- 18 percent of sites offered some type of foreign
language translation, compared to 21 percent last
year.
- 67 percent
of government websites are written at the
12th grade
reading level, which is much higher than that
of the average American.
- The highest ranking states include Utah,
Maine, New Jersey, North Carolina, Michigan, Tennessee,
Delaware, and
Massachusetts.
The most poorly performing e-government
state is Wyoming.
- Top-rated federal websites include
the
White
House,
the Department
of State, Department of Treasury, Department
of
Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Administration,
Social
Security Administration, the Department of
Housing and Urban Development,
and the Federal Communications Commission.
At the low end of the ratings are the various circuit
courts of appeals.
|
Global Best Practices in e-democracy
Local
E-democracy National Project (United Kingdom) |
| The
Global E-democracy Best Practice Case Studies, commissioned
by the United Kingdom's Local
E-democracy National Project, complement lessons generated
by the UK local e-democracy pilots and other UK-based experiences.
The
purpose of the project-oriented case studies and the online
feature-related "Briefs" is to help UK Local
Authorities, and those interested in local e-democracy generally,
access and adapt ideas and strategies from around the world.
The goal is to effectively enhance democracy within government
and communities by sharing some of the top new lessons available
today. Further, the 15 Briefs(*) linked from http://dowire.org/bp,
provide tips and best case examples on such topics as e-mail
newsletters, democratized navigation, and mobile democracy.
|
'What Works': key lessons from
recent e-democracy literature
Local
E-democracy National Project (United
Kingdom) |
| A brief review of evidence
assessing impact and effectiveness of e-democracy applications
in the United Kingdom providing access to government information
and stimulating citizen participation through interactive communications,
such as though e-mail and Webcasting. |
|
>>Internet voting potential
assessed in report... |
| A report, 'Internet
Voting: Bringing Elections to the Desktop', suggests
that there is significant potential for increasing voter
registration
and participation through use of Internet voting. Released
April 11, 2002, with support from The
PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment for the Business of Government,
the study conducted by Robert Done, assistant research
professor of management and policy at the University of Arizona,
examined the 2000 Arizona Democratic presidential primary,
which was the first political election to use Internet voting.
More
votes were cast on the Internet in the 2000 Arizona Democratic
primary than by any other means, with the total vote about
three
times the total number of votes cast in that state's 1996 Democratic
primary. Applying results from the Arizona experience
to the voting age population of the United States, Done
observes
that "if just half of the 24 percent of the unregistered
voting age population did register on the Internet, there
would
be an additional 25 million registered voters." He
also concludes that the complex technical, legal, and social
issues surrounding Internet voting, including concerns that
Internet voting discriminates against those without easy online
access, were addressed successfully in Arizona's Democratic
primary. |
| ,
Professor of Law at the Stanford
University Law School |
| In this
book, Lawrence
Lessig, currently professor of law at Stanford and previously
Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School from 1997 to
2000, argues that the technological breakthrough provided by
the Internet to expand access to information is threatened by
commercial interests seeking to constrain competition on content
and technology. Lessig sees the potential of global innovation
jeopardized by commercial forces that use their technical control
of the Internet's software codes and their political influence
to amend copyright and patent laws to impede competition. The
price of this limitation of competition, he argues, is less
freedom of choice and fewer opportunities for creativity and
innovation. He points out that since 1960, Congress has extended
copyright terms eleven times, and that protection in some cases
under current law may well exceed a hundred years (the life
of the artist plus seventy years). His recommendations include
limiting initial copyright terms to five years but renewable
fifteen times; restricting copyrights on software to single
renewal; and allowing anyone to license music from a record
company for a reasonable fee. |
|
>>Economists question
digital
divide' as cause of US wage inequality... |
|
The "digital
divide" -- the notion that poor Americans will fall behind
wealthier ones in computer skills because they cannot afford
computers and proper training--is questioned by a new study,
Skill Biased
Technological Change and Rising Wage Inequality: Some Problems
and Puzzles, published in February 2002 by the National
Bureau of Economic Research. Prepared by economists David
Card at the University of California at Berkeley and John
DiNardo of the University of Michigan, the report contends
that that the rise in U.S. wage inequality in the last quarter
of the 20th century can't be attributed to computerization,
and that other economic factors led to temporary high unemployment
among the less skilled and allowed employers to hold down
wage hikes to a greater extent than did differences in technological
skills. They also cite Census Bureau surveys reporting narrowing
technology gaps among different income and ethnic groups.
By September 2001, for example, the proportion of people in
families with incomes from $15,000 to $24,999 using computers
at home or at work rose to 47 percent from a 1997 level of
only 37 percent, while usage among families with incomes exceeding
$75,000 rose more modestly, reaching 88 percent last year
compared to to 81 percent in 1997.
|
Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence
at the University of Chicago
Law School and Department of Political Science |
In
this book,
Professor Sunstein casts a somewhat skeptical eye at the
benefits of the Internet as applied to democratic institutions
and governance. In Sunstein's view, the emergence of electronic
technologies giving citizens greater power to filter what they
see, hear and read could have the unintended consequence of
undermining democracy by segmenting citizens into groups listening
to only "more and louder echoes of their own voices".
He argues that democracy assumes that most people should have
a range of shared experiences, but that the Internet and other
electronic technologies pose risks of greater fragmentation
and extremism. "Without the Internet, most people with
dangerously extreme positions will eventually come to see that
their views are exotic and weird--and they will end up thinking
more sensibly", Professor Sunstein says. "But on the
Internet, like-minded people can find a kind of group home.
They create little enclaves for themselves." He also concludes
that the expanded access and greater speed of the technology
may not necessarily lead to better public decision-making: "....America
has always aspired to have a deliberative democracy--rather
than a system in which government reacts immediately to snapshots
of citizen judgments. We prize reflection and deliberation,
not just accountability to the voters. In some places, the Internet
is threatening to decrease deliberation."
Related links: interview
with Professor Sunstein discussing his book; book
summary and selected review excerpts; Professor Sunstein's
biography
... |
|
>>The
Digital Divide: Bridging the Divide Naturally
by Robert
W. Crandall, Senior Fellow in The
Brookings Institution Economic Studies program.
Brookings
Review Winter 2001 Vol. 19 No. 1 |
| In this
article,
Robert W. Crandall cautions against proposals for government
subsidies to alleviate the disparities among income groups in
gaining access to the Internet and other new information technologies.
He contends that market forces already are lowering consumer
costs, and that public subsidies risk investing in technologies
that may become rapidly obsolete or fail to demonstrate market
acceptance. Crandall also
warns against attempts to prod lower-income households to use
unwanted communications services; the failure of some households'
to join the Internet, he writes, may simply reflect rational
judgments that currently it offers relatively little benefit
compared to other needs and recognition that there are few friends
and associates who use it for communication. |
>>democracy.com?
edited by
Elaine Ciulla Kamarck, Director of the Visions of Governance
for the Twenty-First Century project at the
John F. Kennedy School of Government at
Harvard University and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Dean of the John
F. Kennedy School of Government and Don K. Price Professor
of Public Policy at Harvard
University (Hollis Publishing Company 1999) |
| This book publishes a collection
of papers and commentaries originally produced for a faculty
retreat in July 1998 hosted by the Kennedy School's Visions
of Governance Project. From varying perspectives, it examines
the impacts of information technologies on aspects of democratic
governance--such as representation, community, politics, bureaucracy,
and sovereignty. Essays include speculation about the effects
of the Internet on deliberative democracy and the potential
of forming true communities--relationships among groups of people
characterized by affective ties and mutual obligation-on the
Internet. Another contribution uses empirical research to explore
whether the Internet is changing political campaigning, for
candidates or voters. |
by
Pippa Norris, Ph.D.,
Associate Director (Research) at the Joan
Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy
and Lecturer in Public Policy,
Harvard University
(pdf file, requires Acrobat Reader) |
This book outlines issues relating to the expansion of the Internet
and its current and potential impact upon the economy, society
and politics. Drawing upon worldwide surveys of public opinion,
systematic content analysis of web sites, and case studies of
online civic engagement,
Dr. Norris finds a growing digital divide based on income
and also among industrialized and developing nations. She reviews
arguments that the Internet will be a powerful new force capable
of transforming existing patterns of social inequality, strengthening
linkages between citizens and representatives, facilitating
new forms of public engagement and communication, and widening
opportunities for the development of a global civic society
against countervailing predictions that it will only serve to
reinforce the existing gap between the technologically rich
and poor within and among nations. She also considers the merits
of the contrasting predictions that parties, interest groups,
and governments will use the Net to encourage interactive participation
against the potential that it will be used to reinforce 'top-down'
communications to restrict public information and participation...
related links: Dr. Norris's home
page and biography |
State
and Federal E-Government in the United States, 2001 September
2001
by
Darrell M. West, Ph.D., John Hazen White Distinguished Professor
of Public Policy and Political Science and Director of the Alfred
A. Taubman
Center for Public Policy and American Institutions
at Brown University |
|
This
report prepared under the direction of
Professor West
follows up an earlier
Taubman
Center
survey conducted in 2000, In
general, the new report finds "...that e-government has
made good progress over the past year." Comparing 2000
and 2001, Professor West concludes "...that more information,
services, and interactive features are available online this
year, and that governments have made excellent progress on
developing 'one-stop' portals that integrate web service delivery."
features available online at state and federal government
websites, compares the progress between 2000 and 2001, and
examines the differences that exist across the 50 states and
between the state and federal governments. Using a detailed
analysis of 1,680 state and federal government websites, the
survey measured the information and services available on-line,
the kinds of variation that exist across the country as well
as between state and national government sites, and how e-government
sites respond to citizen requests for information. Problems
continue, according to the researchers, in the areas of privacy,
security, and special needs populations such as the handicapped.
The most popular online services were filing taxes online,
ordering publications online, filing complaints, registering
vehicle registrations, and ordering hunting licenses.
|
|
>>Extending
the Public Sphere through Cyberspace: The Case of Minnesota
e-Democracy by Lincoln Dahlberg, Ph.D.
First Monday (volume
6, number 3 March 2001)
|
| This article published on the
online journal First Monday
discusses how the Internet may be used to facilitate citizen
participation in public policy through interactive discussion
on public issues. It evaluates
Minnesota e-democracy, a
non-profit, non-partisan citizen-based project first
launched in 1994 seeking
to improve participation in democracy in Minnesota through the
use of information networks and online discussion forums.
While some significant limitations remain, the author concludes
that Minnesota e-democracy
provides a basis from which online deliberative initiatives
can, given adequate resources and further research, extend the
public sphere through the Internet. |
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