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Safe Online e-Services Building Legitimacy for E-government. A Case Study of Public E-services in Education in Sweden.
Get PDFThere is an increased use of public e-services integrating citizens into public administration through electronic interfaces. On-line interaction among public organizations and citizens is one core relation in e-government that hereby becomes embedded into daily practices. A safe entry into e-governmental systems is essential for security and trust in the e-governmental systems and schools as well as public services in general. This paper addresses how electronic identification has been used for access to public e-services in schools in a Swedish municipality. This paper draws on a case study of use of ICT platforms in education administration in order to study the implementation of secure login process and factors that may have implications upon trust in-and legitimacy of public e-services at local e-government level. Besides describing the implementation process and analyzing security and organizational arrangements connected to the use of the platform, the paper address the argument that secure identification tools are essential for increased use of e-services and lead to greater legitimacy of the public (e)services. The analysis focuses on information security, organization set-up and potential development of the platforms, contributing with empirical findings and conceptual applications. A key finding was that the organization of identification and access to public e-services seemed highly dependent of the organizational structure of the public schools. The more general implication of the findings was that safe and well organized identification systems that were considered as trustworthy and useful among citizens were essential for increased use of the services and legitimate public e-services in general
Political campaigning 2.0: The influence of online news and social networking sites on attitudes and behavior
Get PDFThis study aimed to examine differences in influence between online news (e.g., New York Times) and social networking sites (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) on attitudes in political campaigns. In a web-based experiment, campaign, polls and election between two fictitious candidates were simulated. Participants’ explicit and implicit attitudes as well as voting behavior were assessed using self-report items and the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The results reveal that information emanating from online news had a significant influence on explicit and implicit attitudes while that of social networking sites did not. Overall, negative items had a stronger impact than positive ones, more so in online news compared to social networking sites. Negative information from either type of media was more likely to change participants’ explicit attitudes in a negative direction and as a consequence also change their vote. Practical implications of the findings and limitations of the study are discussed
Internet Voting for Expatriates: The Swiss Case
Get PDFIn 2008 the first Swiss canton introduced internet voting for expatriates, thus initiating the second phase in Switzerland’s piecemeal i-voting roll-out. More cantons soon followed, and as of this writing expatriates from 12 out of the 26 cantons can vote online. This paper focuses on the second phase involving expatriates. We address three questions at the core of the internet voting research agenda. First, the popularity question: to what extent do expatriates make use of the new online channel? Second, the ‘who’ question: what is the profile of the typical expatriate i-voter? Finally, the turnout question: did the extension of internet voting to the expatriates have an effect on electoral mobilization? Our findings indicate that the online channel is very popular among expatriates, both if compared to other trials in Switzerland itself and internationally. On the other hand, known patterns regarding the profile of i-voters and the effect on mobilization seem to be also replicated in the expatriate trials. Expatriate i-voters tend to be young, male, and there is some evidence of an upper-class bias. Thus, usage of the online channel seems driven by the digital divide also among expatriates. Moreover, we find some evidence that i-voting did not affect electoral mobilization, similarly to trials involving residents
Breaking Public Administrations’ Data Silos. The Case of Open-DAI, and a Comparison between Open Data Platforms.
Get PDFAn open reuse of public data and tools can turn the government into a powerful ‘platform’ also involving external innovators. However, the typical information system of a public agency is not open by design. Several public administrations have started adopting technical solutions to overcome this issue, typically in the form of middleware layers operating as ‘buses’ between data centres and the outside world. Open-DAI is an open source platform designed to expose data as services, directly pulling from legacy databases of the data holder. The platform is the result of an ongoing project funded under the EU ICT PSP call 2011. We present the rationale and features of Open-DAI, also through a comparison with three other open data platforms: the Socrata Open Data portal, CKAN, and ENGAGE
From Toddler to Teen: Growth of an Open Data Ecosystem
Get PDFIn this paper, the authors conceptualize Open Data ecosystems by analysing the major stakeholders in the UK. The conceptualization is based on a review of popular Open Data definitions and business ecosystem theories, which are applied to qualitative empirical data. The work is informed by a combination of discourse analysis and a content analysis of in-depth interviews, undertaken during the summer of 2013. Drawing on the UK as a best practice example, the authors examine a set of structural business ecosystem properties: circular flow of resources, sustainability, demand that encourages supply, and dependence developing between suppliers, intermediaries, and users. The authors identify that gaps and shortcomings remain. Most prominently, demand is not yet fully encouraging supply and actors have yet to experience fully mutual interdependence
Editorial 6(2)
No full textEditorial of vol. 6, issue 2. This issue comprises extended articles of CEDEM 14, Conference for eDemocracy and Open Government 2014
Editorial
Get PDFEditorial of JeDEM Vol 6, No 3 (2014), comprising ongoing submissions in the area of eDemocracy and Open Government
Online Participation in Higher Education Decision-making
Get PDFThis article considers online participation in higher education decision-making using the MyUniversity EU project as a case study. MyUniversity was a pilot designed to provide European universities with a web-based system to empower and involve students and other members of the academic community in the Bologna Process. Thirteen universities in Spain, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Lithuania participated in trials. The study uses data collection methods from across the quantitative and qualitative spectrum: web analytics, online surveys, key performance indicators, interviews, focus groups, participant observation, document studies, and usability evaluations. The results are represented by 10 themes: project design, participation, functionality and usability, impact on decision-making, privacy and trust, institutional resistance, motivational factors, the political, economic, and sociocultural context, language barriers, and moderation and framing. The article ends with a discussion based on the results, including recommendations for future research
Through Liquid Democracy to Sustainable Non-Bureaucratic Government
Get PDFWe summarize the concept of Self-Service Government (ss-Gov) as presented earlier and explore how the principles of Liquid Democracy (LD) can be applied in ss-Gov for collaborative decision making. We provide a thorough insight into the history of LD and summarize its recent developments. By combining ss-Gov and LD, we develop the concept of Sustainable, Non-Bureaucratic Government (SNBG) as a novel, blank-slate approach to government of eligibilities within- and towards governmental systems. We argue that such entanglement of LD with ss-Gov results in a closed-circuit system that can provide end-to-end self-management of jural relations. Thus, we argue, SNBG is a vision concept capable to enable morphable self-managed government which requires virtually no mediatory human agents for government. We discuss the feasibility of such approach based on a Gedankenexperiment featuring a modern parliamentary decision-making process
Police.uk and Data.police.uk: Developing Open Crime and Justice Data for the UK.
Get PDFIn this paper we describe the evolution and development of the police.uk and data.police.uk sites, which publish open data about crime and justice in the UK, and make it accessible and comprehensible to the public. Police.uk has received over 64 million visits (754 million hits) since launching in January 2011. Open crime and justice data represents a key sector in the UK open data landscape, and citizens are keen to engage with the criminal justice system to become more informed about local levels of crime and other policing information. This paper sets out the policing context in the UK, discusses the journey in providing such open data, the processes involved and challenges encountered, and explores possible future developments