Does Your Government Offer Both E-Government Services and Participation?

Public sector implementation of online technology remains far from reaching its full potential. E-government has been a major strategy in large American cities for some time. Municipal websites contain city ordinances and regulations, notices of upcoming public meetings, job openings, and downloadable permit forms. Some government websites have gone as far as facilitating online filings for permits and electronic requests for further information. These are all forms of e-government, focusing on government provision of web-based services to its citizens.

Some governments have begun to offer e-governance, which allows citizens to interact among themselves and with officials through multiple, dynamic channels such as:

· Comments or feedback forms

· Online discussion of policies through bulletin boards, forums or chat sessions

· Scheduled e-meetings

· Online surveys

· Online voting and decision making.

In a recent academic paper, “A study of e-government and e-governance: an empirical examination of municipal websites” published on March 3, 2011 in the Public Administration Quarterly the authors report on the progress the 20 largest American cities have made in offering online services and online interaction to their citizens. The study found that these large cities are providing more components of e-government than e-governance. They are doing a good job of making information available and allowing citizens to transact business via the web. Yet, they have been much slower and less effective at developing interactive web-based applications that give citizen opportunities to provide feedback on policies or debate proposed governmental actions. The review of literature in the article that points out that e-governance technology promotes “egalitarian purposes of increasing equity and democratic discourse.” It breaks down cultural and economic barriers between government officials and citizens, giving them the feeling of being true participants in government, not merely customers. The authors point to a federal website Regulations.gov as an example of quality e-governance.

The report found that in the combination of both e-government and e-governance New York significantly outperformed the other cities scoring 53.99 out of a possible 100. Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Dallas followed. Detroit and Baltimore scored lowest. While the report deals with America's largest cities, cities of all sizes would do well to further their e-government offerings and initiate meaningful e-governance technologies via the web and mobile devices. We'd love to hear your thoughts on how these public sector communication goals can be incorporated into the PublicStuff platform. Please email us at ps@publicstuff.org