Information Polity

2012 Information Polity

doi: 10.3233/IP-2012-0274

Harrison, Teresa M. ; Guerrero, Santiago ; Burke, G. Brian ; Cook, Meghan ; Cresswell, Anthony ; Helbig, Natalie ; Hrdinova, Jana ; Pardo, Theresa

2012 Information Polity

doi: 10.3233/IP-2012-0269

We argue that the Obama Administration's Open Government Initiative blurs distinctions between e-democracy and e-government by incorporating historically democratic practices, now enabled by emerging technology, within administrative agencies. We consider the nature of transparency, participation, and collaboration, suggesting that these processes should be viewed as means toward desirable ends, rather than administrative ends in themselves, as they appear to be currently treated. We propose alternatively that planning OG initiatives be addressed within a "public value" framework. The creation of public value is the goal of public organizations; through public value, public organizations meet public goals with respect to substantive benefits as well as the intrinsic value of better government. We extend this view to OG by using the framework as a way to describe the value produced when interaction between government and citizens becomes more transparent, participative, and collaborative, i.e., more democratic.

Munson, Sean A. ; Avrahami, Daniel ; Consolvo, Sunny ; Fogarty, James ; Friedman, Batya ; Smith, Ian

2012 Information Polity

doi: 10.3233/IP-2012-0267

Many have enthusiastically greeted the ability to search and view public records online as a great advance for transparency and accountability. Such ability, however, also creates value tensions with privacy and other important human values. In this paper, we report findings from a survey of 134 residents of the US Pacific Northwest on their awareness of and attitudes towards online access to political campaign records and real estate transaction histories, bringing to light some of the social implications of technological changes that increase ease of access to public records. We show that, while respondents often understood the reason behind making these records public, considerable concern about the current accessibility of these records exists, along with a precautionary indication that such open access may reduce public participation for some individuals.

Spaiser, Viktoria

2012 Information Polity

doi: 10.3233/IP-2012-0268

In this paper, young people's political participation on the Internet in Germany will be analyzed by statistical means and on the basis of survey data, comparing two groups: Germans (the majority group) and a minority group, consisting of young people from Turkey and various Arab countries, who share a religious affiliation. The young people from a Turkish or Arab background turned out to be particularly politically active online and offline, despite being rather socioeconomically disadvantaged. Statistical models presented in this paper show that this is probably related to their grievances caused by discrimination experiences because of their religion. Generally, the results suggest that disadvantaged minority groups may appropriate the Internet in order to raise their voice, although with some constraints.

Chun, Soon Ae ; Cho, June-Suh

2012 Information Polity

doi: 10.3233/IP-2012-0273

In this study, we investigate the implementation, benefits and results of an online participation tool, called Cyber Policy Forum, and other for e-participation tools, by the Seoul Metropolitan City Government (SMG) in Korea, used for citizen participation in the policy making process. The Forum has not only shifted the paradigm of city governance by easing SMG's burden of policy planning, but also has raised public awareness and understanding of municipal issues. However, we do not think the Policy forum tool has enough features for "shared governance" to achieve a true citizen-government partnership in policy decision making. We recommend a provenance data based policy transparency model} that captures and makes the policy decision making data transparent to citizens to be used in the deliberation process. The provenance data-based policy transparency model implies transparency in policy data, process, role and context information generated in the policy decision making lifecycle by the government. In addition, we advocate augmenting citizen participation tools with personal decision support system functionalities, such as content management and social analytic tools. Such tools can help enhancing the efficient management of the deliberation data to overcome information overload. They will also make it easy for citizens to understand the interactions among participants, and to grasp the conditions and contexts related to policy decision making.

Scherer, Sabrina ; Wimmer, Maria A.

2012 Information Polity

doi: 10.3233/IP-2012-0270

The success of innovative e-participation solutions depends heavily on the organizational planning and the incorporation of such initiatives into the different stages of the policy life-cycle. E-participation often demands to introduce new participation facilities into the traditional processes of policy formulation and decision making. Accommodating the various requirements from distinct perspectives calls for a holistic engineering approach for e-participation systems analysis and design. Enterprise Architectures (EA) have evolved in information systems research as an approach to give guidance in developing complex socio-technical systems. This paper analyzes the application of EA frameworks in the context of e-participation. E-participation domain and implementation models are investigated to identify crucial tasks and aspects in e-participation project development and implementation. Related to the tasks identified, two EA frameworks are analyzed: the Zachman Framework and TOGAF. We explain how EA frameworks can support the development and implementation of e-participation projects. Finally, the needs for a reference framework for e-participation are argued and a reference framework is presented.

Bridges, Frank ; Appel, Lora ; Grossklags, Jens

2012 Information Polity

doi: 10.3233/IP-2012-0271

Recent initiatives by the United States government are seeking to enhance the transparency and openness of its decision finding processes. At the same time, increased use of interactive web and social media technologies as well as the integration with online social networking platforms suggests that citizens have unprecedented access to government representatives. In this paper, we report results from an exploratory usability study involving average young adults in an engagement task. More precisely, we observed college students while they searched for appropriate online contact points with the federal government to communicate concerns related to various problem domains. We report a mixture of quantitative and qualitative results including an analysis of post-study interviews with the participants. Less than 30% of our subjects were able to accomplish the objective of the given task scenarios. We find that a combination of individual and institutional factors limit participants. In addition, we do not observe a significant utilization of cues related to online social networking tools. We attribute this finding to a still limited acceptance of such communication tools for political participation by average young adults.

Colineau, Nathalie ; Paris, Cécile ; Linden, Keith Vander

2012 Information Polity

doi: 10.3233/IP-2012-0272

Information and communication technologies afford public administrations the opportunity to communicate more directly with individual members of their constituencies by offering tailored information services on-line. This paper focuses on delivering tailored informational brochures describing the programs offered by a public administration agency to the public it serves. The goal is to better communicate with the public by moving from brochures written for generic audiences, which must include careful discussions of the conditions distinguishing the various constituencies within the generic audience, to brochures written for individuals, which can be personalised to focus on the information relevant to one reader. This paper presents a scoping study that identified key requirements for such tailoring and a prototype application developed in response to the study. The paper pays particular attention to the forms of document tailoring appropriate in the eGovernment domain and to the information that must be represented to support this tailoring.

2012 Information Polity

doi: 10.3233/IP-2012-0277

2012 Information Polity

doi: 10.3233/IP-2012-0278