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Williams, Christine B. ; Dias, Martin ; Fedorowicz, Jane ; Jacobson, Dax ; Vilvovsky, Sonia ; Sawyer, Steve ; Tyworth, Michael
2009 Information Polity
doi: 10.3233/IP-2009-0170
In this article we offer visual depictions and analysis of contextual factors relative to the presence of public safety networks (PSNs) in the United States (US). A PSN combines shared technological infrastructures for supporting information sharing, computing interoperability and interagency interactions involving policing, criminal justice, and emergency response. The broad research objective is to explain the formation of PSNs based upon factors derived from rational choice and institutional theories. To do so we develop maps to represent our data analysis. This analysis suggests that our approach is promising for generating insights about PSNs and, by extension, about other types of inter-organizational collaborations focusing on using information and communication technologies to enable information-sharing.
Meijer, Albert ; Thaens, Marcel
2009 Information Polity
doi: 10.3233/IP-2009-0167
New technological opportunities and increasing demands make it imperative for government agencies to make the information they gather available to citizens. How should they go about this? This paper presents a conceptual framework for analyzing the strategic options open to agencies which have information that could be relevant to citizens. The conceptual framework is constructed on the basis of the literature and tested in a case study. The Directorate-General for Public Works and Water Management in the Netherlands gathers traffic information which is useful for citizens when they want to avoid traffic jams. Presently, the agency sells information to intermediaries. The agency wanted to release the information through its own website but this was prohibited by a court ruling. This paper reviews other strategies and proposes that an 'Intel inside' strategy may be a viable option in view of the consequences for effectiveness, manageability, cost-effectiveness, equity and legitimacy. The paper concludes that the conceptual framework proves useful for analyzing the strategic options open to agencies for making government information available to citizens.
Baker, Paul M.A. ; Hanson, Jarice ; Myhill, William N.
2009 Information Polity
doi: 10.3233/IP-2009-0171
Wireless technologies, especially those deployed by municipalities, have been offered as one way to enhance access to society at large, including people with disabilities and others on the wrong side of the digital divide. One of the promises of municipal WiFi, is free or low-cost service promised in the public interest of citizens. This paper presents research on the current state of municipal wireless network design and policies with regard to people with disabilities in the United States. A comparative analysis was undertaken of a sample of 48 municipalities to ascertain the degree of accessibility to, or sensitivity of, municipal wireless systems, and three case studies were examined for the unforeseen effects of deploying municipal WiFi in different locations. Secondly, the effectiveness of goals toward eradicating the "disability divide" are analyzed to see if policies toward people with disabilities fair well as systems are deployed, and we discuss legal implications of municipal WiFi models. Because many people with disabilities are already affected by disparities in education and income, further marginalization of their communication and information access creates a greater barrier to their access to critical information needs, and participation in a community.
Borning, Alan ; Friedman, Batya ; Davis, Janet L. ; Gill, Brian T. ; Kahn, Jr., Peter H. ; Kriplean, Travis ; Lin, Peyina
2009 Information Polity
doi: 10.3233/IP-2009-0172
Supporting public participation is often a key goal in the design of digital government systems. However, years of work may be required before a complex system, such as the UrbanSim urban simulation system, is deployed and ready for such participation. In this paper, we investigate laying the foundations for public participation in information design and sharing in advance of wide-scale public deployment, with the goal of having interaction designs ready when the system is put into such use. Moreover, in a highly politicized domain such as this one, value advocacy as well as factual information plays a central role. Using the theory and methods of Value Sensitive Design, we address three design goals toward public participation and value advocacy, and provide evidence that each of them was achieved: (1) enabling indirect stakeholders to become direct stakeholders (i.e. enabling more people to interact directly with UrbanSim in useful ways); (2) developing a participatory process by which these stakeholders can help guide the development of the system itself; and (3) enabling participating organizations to engage in value advocacy while at the same time enhancing overall system legitimation.
Warner, Janice ; Chun, Soon Ae
2009 Information Polity
doi: 10.3233/IP-2009-0169
The Web 2.0 technologies allow dynamic content creation using syndications or mashups, extracted from diverse data sources, including government enterprise data. As a primary source of citizen data, the US government has the obligation not only to make public data available for citizen access as stated in the Freedom of Information Act, but also to protect the privacy of individual citizen's records as stated in the Privacy Act. In a mashup, a third party mashup Web application provider requests the individual's data from the government agencies through Web services. Since the data is public data and not necessarily provided through electronic interactions, individual citizens may not be able to express fine-grained privacy policies on how data may be used. In addition, the government agency's privacy policy is very coarse grained, and the relative sensitivity of individual information is not considered. We discuss the opportunities and issues associated with the programmable web and mashups, provide a Privacy Protection Model for Mashup Applications, using a mashup related multi-dimensional privacy protection space and present policy recommendations to complement the technological solutions. The model and recommendations include deployment of a personal privacy policy network, a distributed system over which citizens can publish their individual privacy policies. These policies are accessible by all web service providers to be consulted in real time by data providers including government agencies for the purposes of automated privacy protection reasoning concerning data release.
Chourabi, Hafedh ; Mellouli, Sehl ; Bouslama, Faouzi
2009 Information Polity
doi: 10.3233/IP-2009-0168
Many governments worldwide are restructuring their business practices to improve their performances. To help describe and understand the process of restructuring, modeling techniques are used at different levels of modeling abstraction. This paper presents a new approach to the modeling of e-government business processes. It is based on two existing modeling techniques: Business Process Mapping (BPMapping) and UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM). The BPMapping technique provides an overall graphical representation of an organization depicting all different types of business processes, their inputs, outputs, and the environment in which the organization operates. The UMM methodology with its different business views gives details on collaborations and interactions of business processes. Combining BPMapping with UMM leads to a very expressive modeling approach which can provide artifact details at the higher levels of modeling abstraction and which also shows deployment strategies of the business processes. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, it is applied to the modeling of the Record Integrated Management business process at Quebec Government.
Canestraro, Donna S. ; Pardo, Theresa A. ; Raup-Kounovsky, Anna N. ; Taratus, Dennis
2009 Information Polity
doi: 10.3233/IP-2009-0166
Governments around the world are increasingly turning to information sharing as a lead strategy for developing response capacity for problems in a wide range of program and policy areas. One form of information sharing is regional coordination, which links together organizations or groups within close proximity to one another to pursue similar interests, goals, or mandates. Regional coordination requires leveraging currently held resources in innovative and potentially more efficient ways, as well as the establishment of new business processes, communication flows, and a system of governance that satisfies the needs of all stakeholders. In addition, trust, collaboration, and timely cross-boundary information sharing all play a pivotal role in this new model. This paper presents the experiences of the New York State Department of Public Service as it explores the concept of regional telecommunications incident response in New York; although this case study presents only one example of regional coordination, it raises issues which may apply in other regional information-sharing initiatives.
Artigas, Francisco ; Elefante, Dom ; Marti, Alex
2009 Information Polity
doi: 10.3233/IP-2009-0165
The New Jersey Meadowlands Commission (NJMC) is a regional planning agency in northern New Jersey with jurisdiction over 14 municipalities. This case study describes a five year effort by this agency to serve geographic knowledge to 14 towns in the region by sharing resources and infrastructure through a centralized Geographical Information System (GIS). Serving this information required funding, convincing towns to participate, specialized staff, software licenses and equipment and follow-up with training and updates. The information being served consists of interactive maps available through a Web browser conveying the spatial arrangement of municipal infrastructure, administrative boundaries and fundamental demographics of each town in maps and tables that show proximity, elevations and distances that would otherwise be impractical to describe using words alone. Systems such as these support local governments by delivering information and services to the community in the form of variance notifications, zoning and land use inventories and updates and emergency management information including Right to Know (RTK) records that inform first responders about hazardous materials stored in industrial facilities. The study details how towns were brought in to share resources and participate in a multi-user GIS, how data was organized around the needs of users, the different implementation phases, roll out of the applications, training, maintenance and finally, how the system was adopted and is currently used.
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