Suchergebnisse

Part 5: Evaluation ; International audience ; The public sector plays an important role in the economic growth and development of developing countries. The application of modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) may help improve the public sector by contributing to new services and processes that address citizens as well as government-to-government services, involve citizens more directly in decisions being made, and contribute to streamlining work processes and standardizations needed to develop a well-functioning public sector. Research focusing on E-government in developing countries is still dominated by case studies and conceptual pieces of work. Thus, more empirical-oriented work is needed to expand our knowledge on current status, challenges and future plans.The reported study has been initiated to address such needs. The objective is to investigate, from a broad perspective, on-going E-government initiatives in the public sector in Tanzania. The contribution of this work is twofold. First, the descriptive findings are important to gain insight into the current status of E-government projects in Tanzania. Second, the study reported here could guide the way forward for practice as well as research. We firmly believe that both practice and research should be based on the current situation and identified challenges and aim to describe such issues to guide future work.

Part 1: Appreciation of Social Media ; International audience ; This article examines parliament representatives' Twitter- contributions (tweets). First, the genre of communication approach is introduced to identify common characteristics and communication patterns. Second, the findings are analysed using various eDemocracy models and deliberative standards to identify to what extent these tweets could be characterized as part of a deliberative discussion. The tweets are mainly dominated by five communication purposes; providing links to information sources for other Twitter users, to inform about the representative's ongoing activities, to express views on topical issues, introducing non-political (private) content and participating in online discussions with other parliament representatives. Other less frequent communication patterns include tweets attracting attention to the representative's own blogs, requests for input from readers and finally discussions with citizens. The analysed tweets generally did not meet deliberative standards and are dominated by politicians disseminating information and discussing with other parliament representatives. We conclude by arguing that the parliament representatives' Twitter use is linked to the Liberal Democracy model, where the main purpose is to disseminate information to electors, and provide information on ongoing activities to the audience.

A smart city is a dynamic living system that contains hard (unchanging) and soft (changing) parts that each involve the implementation of respective technologies. Prior research has focused on infrastructure, technology, and social components when discussing smart city structure. In this paper, we explore key elements within the soft aspects of smart city initiatives enabling the organization of a dynamic structure. To do so, we focus on human behavior, which we illustrate by analyzing online activities in two cases: one is related to a smart city while the other focuses on an online community. Based on the analysis, we identify key elements that reveal how people participate and become engaged in order to provide lessons to be taken into account within smart city initiatives. Within online activities, the key elements we note are related to knowledge generation, information sharing of common interests, and the creation of collective action.

Part 1: eParticipation and Social Media ; International audience ; A growing body of literature highlights the adoption of social media for eParticipation, focusing on the identification of processes and structures through which ICT supports the relationship between citizens, governments and public bodies. There is a need to better understand the role of technology in such initiatives. This paper addresses this issue by introducing the concept of affordance. We used a case study approach to investigate an Indonesian eParticipation projects from Bandung, identifying affordance perceptions, enabling and inhibiting factors, actualized affordances and affordances effects. From the use of social media we identify nine actualized affordances and their effects, and we discuss the relationship between them. The case introduces findings from a developing country, a context that has largely been ignored within eParticipation research. Our findings provide lessons learned for practitioners on how to organize their eParticipation projects, as well as for researchers identifying future research avenues to strengthen our understanding of the role of ICT by introducing the concept of affordances.

Part 1: Information & Communication Technology-EurAsia Conference 2014, ICT-EurAsia 2014 ; International audience ; This study aims at understanding how local government from a developing country, in this case Indonesia, implement and manage eParticipation services. In doing so, we combine institutional theory and stakeholder theory to build a sharper analytical lens. From an interpretive case study in the city of Yogyakarta, we reveal the institutionalization process of the services since their inception and identify major stakeholders and their salience. Based on our findings, we propose implications for practice and suggest implications for further research. Future work, based on a multiple case strategy including several eParticipation cases from other parts of Indonesia, will further explore the findings reported here.

Part 2: Social Media and E-Participation ; International audience ; This article focuses on how, why and with whom local politicians engage on Facebook. Based on a literature review of the public sphere, eParticipation and research related to social media, we propose a theoretical framework that identifies thematic areas integral to understanding the nature of political participation. The explanatory potential of our 'ENGAGE' model (Exchange, Narcissist, Gather, Accented, General and Expense) is exemplified by conducting a qualitative case study focusing on politicians in a local municipality in southern Norway. The findings indicate various uses of Facebook among the respondents, and a dissonance between what the politicians state as being important (engaging in dialogue with citizens) and what they really do (posting statements). We conclude our paper by discussing the use and usefulness of our proposed model, and by summarising how, why and with whom local politicians use social media.

In a liberal democracy, the evolution of political agendas and formation of policy involves deliberation: serious consideration of political issues. Modern day political participation is dependent on widespread deliberation supported by information and communication technologies, which also offer the potential to revitalize and transform citizen engagement in democracy. Although the majority of web 2.0 systems enable these discourses to some extent, government institutions commission and manage specialized deliberation systems (information systems designed to support participative discourse) intended to promote citizen engagement. The most common examples of these are political discussion forums. Though usually considered trivial adaptations of well-known technologies, these types of deliberative systems are often unsuccessful, and present a distinct set of design and management challenges. In this article we analyze the issues involved in establishing political deliberation systems under four headings: stakeholder engagement, web platform design, service management, political process re-shaping and evaluation and improvement. We review the existing literature and present a longitudinal case study: the Norwegian Demokratitorget (Democracy Square). We define key issues in each of the four areas which need to be understood in order to design and manage a successful net-based deliberation forum.

On-line political communities, such as the Norwegian site Demokratitorget (Democracy Square), are often designed according to a set of un-reflected assumptions about the political interests of their potential members. In political science, democracy is not taken as given in this way, but can be represented by different models which characterize different relationships between politicians and the citizens they represent. This paper uses quantitative and qualitative content analysis to analyze the communication mediated by the Democracy Square discussion forum in the first ten months of its life. In the quantitative analysis, citizens' and politicians' contributions are analyzed against four different democracy models: Consumer, Demo-Elitist, Neo-Republican and Cyber-Democratic. Whereas politicians' contributions mainly reflected the Demo-Elitist model, citizens' contributions tended to reflect the Neo-Republican model. In the qualitative analysis the discourse is analysed as repeating genres – patterns in the communication form which also reflect the conflict of interest between citizens and politicians. Though the analysis gives insight into the nature of the discourse the site supports, little is known about translating this kind of insight into better site design. We match the site's communication genres with known features of E-democracy sites to generate tentative design improvement possibilities. ; On-line political communities, such as the Norwegian site Demokratitorget (Democracy Square), are often designed according to a set of un-reflected assumptions about the political interests of their potential members. In political science, democracy is not taken as given in this way, but can be represented by different models which characterize different relationships between politicians and the citizens they represent. This paper uses quantitative and qualitative content analysis to analyze the communication mediated by the Democracy Square discussion forum in the first ten months of its life. In the quantitative analysis, citizens' and politicians' contributions are analyzed against four different democracy models: Consumer, Demo-Elitist, Neo-Republican and Cyber-Democratic. Whereas politicians' contributions mainly reflected the Demo-Elitist model, citizens' contributions tended to reflect the Neo-Republican model. In the qualitative analysis the discourse is analysed as repeating genres – patterns in the communication form which also reflect the conflict of interest between citizens and politicians. Though the analysis gives insight into the nature of the discourse the site supports, little is known about translating this kind of insight into better site design. We match the site's communication genres with known features of E-democracy sites to generate tentative design improvement possibilities.

Part 4: Critical Reflections ; International audience ; While Online Communities (OCs) are increasingly used to involve people in organizations and societies, few studies focus on how OC influence political decision making within eParticipation initiatives. This issue is explored through an interpretive case-study of the Italian Five Star Movement (M5S), a mass-size eParticipation political initiative recently founded by private citizens. The use of OCs is a common strategy to involve groups of people to easily connect on-line, cooperating on common and shared interests. We here focus on understanding the internal and external forces influencing on the OCs, to better understand how to manage such OCs within the eParticipation domain. We do so by introducing the concept of tensions, to describe the states that these contrasting forces produce on the OCs, addressing the research question: what tensions occur in OCs for eParticipation? Our work contributes to a deeper understanding of the OCs phenomenon within the eParticipation domain, while also provides avenues for further research.

Part 3: Service Design and Improvement ; International audience ; Government architecture (GA) is a relatively young discipline in which concepts are slowly emerging. Often terms and concepts are used in various ways and there is no uniform agreement on these concepts. Further, the relationship between GA, benefits and public value creation is unclear. In this paper we unravel and define GA concepts that are often used by governments. Although GA is used in different ways there are common concepts. GA practice in two different countries, the Netherlands and Norway, indicates that although the Netherlands clearly has more experience with GA than Norway, both countries employ similar concepts. Nevertheless our study confirmed the assumption of conceptual confusion. In both countries GA efforts are concentrated towards guiding design projects and dealing with complexity. We found that the impact of GA is ill understood. We defined central concepts of GA, and propose a conceptual model illustrating the relationships between GA concepts, its use, benefits and public value drivers.

Despite substantial investments in ICT in the public sector over the past decades, it has been hard to achieve consistent benefits. One reason for the difficulties is the gap between the expectations of key stakeholders (such as governments, businesses and citizens) and project outcomes. Though normative, descriptive and instrumental aspects of stakeholder theory have been influential in explaining stakeholder interests and relationships in the management field, e-Government researchers have rather neglected the normative core of the theory. We show how value theory can improve normative foundations in this area to provide a focused analysis of four e-Government projects. We use a multiple case study approach to study the values of salient stakeholders, demonstrating how the combination of value theory and stakeholder theory provides greater explanatory power than either of the theories in isolation. Our work shows how stakeholders´ interests are bound to generic value positions and allow us to formulate implications for research and practice.