Earticle

Recently, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have increasingly been utilized by governments to involve citizens, leading to the rise of e-participation. E-participation has varied across units and levels of government and has attracted attention from both scholars and practitioners. While researchers have explored various factors that impact e-participation, few of them have tested the comprehensive influence of the external environment on e-participation at the national level. This article aims at filling a research gap by examining the direct and indirect impacts of environmental factors on e-participation. The results indicate that environmental factors might significantly influence e-participation nationally. This study argues that the diffusion of e-participation could be explained by its external environment variance.

As society has increased its reliance upon ICTs to communicate with government, public concern over privacy and security policies has also increased. This paper examines the extent to which municipal web sites in the United States address the privacy and security concerns of their web site users. Specifically, this paper analyzes the existence and extent of privacy and security policies of the official web sites of the largest cities in the United States. Our findings indicate that despite a great deal of rhetoric by local governments, privacy and security policies in US cities have not demonstrated a great deal of improvement over the past decade.

A major challenge faced by countries, and in particular developing countries is to improve the manner in which heterogeneous information systems work together across government, exposing valuable data required to improve government service delivery. Almost every government institution has activities related to each other, which makes interoperability between them a necessity. In view of this, this paper introduces the Analogy of Data within an e-Government Interoperable Ecosystem (AD-eGIE). The ADeGIE provides a theoretical data and systems architectural model for the establishment of interoperability between information systems, which is a key issue in unlocking data that is required for the creation of egovernment solutions. This work deals particularly with sectorial data, which is classified into primary and secondary data, and the means of sharing and exchanging it. To achieve workable e-government electronic services that spans across government sectors, the ideal situation would be to reduce data duplications by substituting secondary sectorial data with primary sectorial data through a standardized data exchange and sharing system architecture.

This study discusses enlarged roles of e-governance in delivering public services to citizens, focusing on the roles of privacy and citizen participation. A question arising from collegiate evaluations of worldwide websites is: why user discrepancy issues remain in privacy/security, and citizen participation/ engagement. Previous studies confirmed low verified scores from multiple privacy/security and citizen participation measures. The five most frequent and unique website usage deficiencies in distinction to those components. Because computers aid in the “work in progress” status of government, this paper concludes that an interaction of constructive policy choices, management strategies and cultural responses, among both undeveloped and developed countries alike, can help determine the direction of that progress, and a future of successful, quality e-governance worldwide.

This article develops a framework for studying smart urban governance – use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for better public service performance in an urban setting. This proposed framework contributes to the existing literature by focusing on institutional design and system dynamics. This framework integrates insight from the institutional analysis and development framework and the complex adaptive systems perspective and adapts for smart urban governance systems. A smart urban governance system consists of five elements: rules and norms, actors/ participants, interactions, ICT enactment, and outcomes. The main processes capture the relationships between these elements. The emphasis is on the how rules and norms, as well as actors shape, ICT enactment decisions and consequently outcomes.