Suchergebnisse

Part 2: Reviews ; International audience ; The European Citizens' Initiative is designed to make European democracy more directby allowing citizens to propose (including electronically) legal acts to the Commission. The present paper offers a conceptual model for the analysis of this eParticipation case, and other similar e-petitioning practices, which is not biased by political ambition or technological determinism. The operational framework proposed aims to understand the nature of communication between citizens, governments, and the civil society among other stakeholders in the contemporary media landscape by using the concept of genre systems for this purpose.

Electronic Government (eGovernment) has attracted considerable investment over many years but there is little agreement on how to measure success. This is problematic as eGovernment has ambitions beyond project success – in particular in developing countries it is expected to yield development. There is also both an academic and a practitioner debate on eGovernment assessment in which social and political values are included, meaning an external perspective is beginning to take root. This paper reports a literature study of ICT4D (Information and communications technologies for development) journals, where the focus on development should be the greatest. Our study investigates to what degree case study research on eGovernment and ICT4D focuses on ICT's role for development in developing countries or regions. This means that we examine to what degree evaluations of ICT4D-projects focus development assessment. We find that while a majority of the papers include social factors only a few take an external, i.e. development, perspective. It seems that instead of focusing research on the critical factors in developing countries today, on which we need new knowledge, the majority of the research is repeating studies done in the industrialized world in the past twenty years to which we cannot expect to find neither the solution to the problems in the developing world nor radically new findings to enrich the body of research already existing. This said, the few papers that did have a development focus introduced challenging issues, research on which holds promises of relevance to target countries as well as improving the knowledge base of IS research.

Privacy of information is a critical issue for e-government development as lack of it negatively influences users' trust and adoption of e-government. To earn user trust government organizations need to provide reliable privacy assurance by implementing adequate information privacy protection (IPP) practices. African Least Developing Countries (LDCs) today develop e-government but focus is on quick technical development and the status of IPP issues is not clear. Little research has yet studied the status of IPP practices in e-government in African LDCs. To fill this gap, we assess the status of existing IPP practices in e-government in Rwanda, using international privacy principles as an assessment baseline. We adopt a case-study approach including three cases. Data were collected by interviews and a survey. The findings call into question the efficacy of existing IPP practices and their effect in ensuring e-government service users' privacy protection in Rwanda. The study extends existing literature by providing insights related to privacy protection from an African LDC context. For practitioners in Rwanda and other LDCs, this study contributes to the protection of information privacy in e-government by providing recommendations to mitigate identified gaps.

Part 6: Open Government ; International audience ; E-government is a strong focus in many developing countries. While services can technically benefit from solutions developed elsewhere, organizational development and user trust and acceptance are always local. In Least Developed Countries (LDCs) such issues become more dramatic as services are transformed quickly from traditional manual procedures to digitized ones copying models from developed countries. One of the most critical trust issues is privacy protection; e-government services must be developed in balance with citizens' privacy views.To understand how to design trusted services in an LDC this study investigates information privacy concerns, perceptions of privacy practices, trust beliefs and behavior intentions towards using e-government services in Rwanda. The study was conducted by means of a survey (n = 540).A majority of the respondents had a considerable level of trust, and a positive view of the effectiveness of service providers' privacy practices. Most respondents expressed positive intentions towards using e-government services. Still, a majority of the respondents expressed considerable privacy concerns. Men were more concerned than women and reported a higher reluctance to use e-government service. As this study is one of the few studies of privacy, trust and adoption of e-government in LDC, it contributes to broadening the context in which such issues have been researched.