E-government united

April 29, 2010

Finally, although I’d been premature in January  in my post predicting its arrival, the United Nations E-Government Survey 2010 – Leveraging e-government at a time of financial and economic crisis report has appeared.

At 140 pages, and taking up over 7 Mb it’s a biggish download, so for brevity on this occasion, I’ll focus upon the sixth chapter on the topic of “Measuring e-government”.

Interestingly, amongst the draft indicators on page 94 is one labelled EG18 entitled “Degree of satisfaction of e-government service users, disaggregated by gender”, this is obviously in response to the statement on the same page that “Little information is yet available on the demand side of e-government.”

Similarly on page 96 is the phrase “Future work on measuring e-government capacity might usefully expand beyond ICT infrastructure and human resource issues to cover, where feasible, adherence to recommended practice in design of institutional machinery laws, regulations, policies and standards.” Which may help iron out the gender and access issues already raised elsewhere.

Further, confirming my own research, on page 97 it states that “usage of e-government services by citizens is absent from most measurement frameworks.”

The report also considers that demand might be captured by “measuring the percent of requests processed using ICT as a function of the overall number of requests”, along with “the degree of satisfaction of e-government service users.” Whilst I personally would use these measures across all channels to gain panoptical view of service as a whole.

It’s becoming clear that the lack of metrics has finally hit home, particularly ones focused upon outcomes. But, why-oh-why, must we always try to make them as complicated as possible?

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Keeping mum

April 27, 2010

I frequently cringe when I see Mumsnet established as a standard for e-government style engagement. This was confirmed by a piece in the New Statesman of the 26 April 2010 by Alice Miles entitled “Don’t kid yourself about Mumsnet“.

Alice clearly picks out the iffiyness around those who believe social media are making headway in politics when she says “The strange relationship people have with “online” is a challenge for adherents of “e-democracy” and undermines the fashionable theme of the “Mumsnet election”. Will Mumsnet make such a difference on 6 May?”

She’s also done her research when she looks at the usage proportions of the various media and states “Compare these with the proportions expecting to get information from blogs (3 per cent) or social networking sites (2 per cent).” This and research from Professor Graham Smith results in “a distinctly limited role for mature online political debate.”

This is also supported by the comment on my “The twittering parties” by Andy Williamson of the Hansard Society who stated “the latest Audit of Political engagement asks some of these questions and shows that 4% of the general electorate follow a politician on Facebook and 2% on Twitter.”

We’ll soon see the results, but how much of this is directly down to the Internet I believe will be little and remain unclear.

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E-government and the volcano

April 25, 2010

Where was/is e-government during the current/recent travel crisis? Having been stranded in Tarragona, south of Barcelona, amongst a group of foreign nationals wanting to get home or elsewhere after a conference, I thought I should asked the question, what, if anything could or should e-government have done?

From my view, the first target on the hotel or university Internet connections were the airlines, then the home language newspapers, then the alternative transport modes, such as buses and trains. I don’t recall anyone looking at a government page or being directed to one. In Spain the confusion was compounded by lack of information on the French rail strike.

Whilst the  newspapers made claims about warships being sent and consular assistance at every airport, we saw none of this. First, one was advised to stay away from the airports and secondly, how was the true message supposed to dissipate through the bands of people divided between the practicalities of needing additional accommodation and finding alternative transport?

If Martha Lane Fox, founder of lastminute.com, is such a leading light for the UK government, couldn’t someone have scraped together the intrinsic information from IATA, ABTA and the rest and presented something? The newflashes were full of people developing applications for car-sharing across Europe, but part of the issue for travellers to and from the UK became getting across the Channel.

Much of the information available online or through the BBC World Service appeared inconsistent and focused upon travellers sleeping at airports, whilst what the travellers themselves need to know were alternative routes and whether they should take them. After failing to get a satisfactory solution from EasyJet we resorted to booking the earliest combination of trains and buses we could get onto, all done from an Asus EEE over very slow hotel wi-fi at midnight.

If incidents of this type are to become more frequent, as a result of natural occurences, terrorist action or civil disturbances, shouldn’t we prepare? The Internet was created for military purposes, the WWW for unifying scientific research, can we now use Gov 2.0 for joining up information sources? Perhaps it might be the making of e-government? Was it any better for other nationals? This, of course, is a UK opinion, although I did initially relate to my conference colleagues from across the globe!

I’m not forgetting those without access and one of the noticeable factors in the episode was how well verbal messages got around at bus and train stations and even the airports we weren’t supposed to gather at. I also noticed the prolific use made of the only available very dodgy-looking Internet cafes.

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E-government and sex

April 21, 2010

Amongst the many papers presented at the Ethicomp 2010 conference was one by Georgia Foteinou, consultant on e-government within the EU and new member states, and researcher at Oxford. Her paper is entitled “E-exclusion and the gender digital divide“.

Georgia has examined the available data from Cap Gemini’s exercises on behalf of the EU, which I have previously criticized, and which I have also challenged directly with them directly.

However, despite my already stated concerns about the nature of quite limited, whilst supposedly statistically significant surveys, there is the clear conclusion that outside of the former communist countries there is some significant gender bias in the use of e-government towards men! Georgia explained that in Greece’s case, this is notably down to the fact that women are not permitted responsibility for their own tax affairs. however, what the cause of the difference was in the rest of the “old” west she hasn’t discovered yet. My own opinion is that it is down to the particular services examined in the survey, and how these are delivered in different states across Europe and nothing to do with “electronic”.

There was also some debate at the presentation around supposed increased gender equality in the former communist block, which there was not complete agreement with!

I look forward to seeing more of Georgia’s research, as she progresses with it.

(Written whilst wandering in Barcelona)

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Lost in Spain

April 19, 2010

Following the Ethicomp 2010 conference which was a splendid a splendid success, the author like many other delegates is stuck in Spain. There is lots to repeat from the two inch thick conference proceedings, but I can’t do it all on my netbook wandering from hotel to transport operators. So watch this space…I’ll be back shortly

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