Arguments Opposed to the Resolution

We believe our opponents have taken an unnecessarily narrow view of the potential impact of e-government. They appear to ignore (or take for granted) the vast improvements that have already taken place within the government’s internal information infrastructure and in the general availability and accessibility of information and services to the public.

It is true that there are some significant problems that will need to be addressed in order to achieve efficient and effective e-government, but the existence of such problems – many of which are not unique to government e-development – are hardly proof positive that they cannot be solved.

The very fact that the problems are being recognized and analyzed demonstrates that e-government efforts have moved beyond the initial “hype” stage and have reached the necessary realization that truly transformative e-government can only be achieved through a significant change in the way government conceives of itself and its relationship with the public. But this is exactly what the public will increasingly demand as online technology becomes more accessible and integral to daily life.

Quick Link to Arguments in Support of the Resolution

The Promise of e-Government

The opposition portrays e-government as an incremental change to business as usual. Admittedly, e-government has not radically changed our world - yet. Its potential for doing so is substantial, however, as it opens up new avenues for both the elected and the electorate to increase their role in the democratic process. As one report phrases the current state:

"So far the dominant trend amongst parliamentarians and in parliaments in adapting to the internet has been a relatively limited modernisation approach, largely trying to maintain existing practices and relations but in new formats.... Yet, in the longer term, the possible failure of this modernisation without democratisation approach provides opportunities for innovators. We would suggeste that the potential remains ... for ICTs to provide:

1. More continuous representation - As our survey confirmed, most people have very little attachment to the political system apart from casting a vote every few years. ICTs offer a means to engage people at least directly in debate and dialogue on a more regularisesd basis.
2. More informed policymakers - Most policy consultations are conducted with the usual suspects on a relatively narrow range of interests. Yet ... within [MPs'] own constituencies there are untapped polic experts who have ground level experience of government policy. The develoment of online networks of expertise may be one way of reaching such expertise.
3. A more informed public - The emergence of an online third force sector providing greater information on parliament and its representatives may assist the public's knowledge or at least stimulate some public debate about the role of parliaments and representatives." [1], p. 10.

There are many ways in which e-government can produce dramatic changes in the way our government operates. For purposes of this debate, we will focus on three specific arenas in which e-government initiatives promise change: improving the government's efficiency and effectiveness in forming policy and delivering services, increasing transparency to ensure accountability, and enabling a greater public role in the processes of governance.

Improving Efficiency and Effectiveness

Perhaps the most straightforward method of e-government is the use of information and communication technologies to improve the delivery of services to citizens or the efficiency of internal governmental processes. Existing examples of this abound; every state government uses automated methods to track payroll, monitor tax revenues, and the like.

In some cases, these improvements are merely incremental, and do not suggest a radical shift in the role of government. In other instances, the Internet and other technologies have the potential to radically reduce or even eliminate the role of the government in certain affairs, which can dramatically change incentives. Internet voter registration and e-voting, while not without its own concerns, has the strong likelihood of increasing voter "turnout." Online registrations for small businesses, allowing automatic approval without time-consuming trips to deal with paperwork, make independent operators far more self-sufficient.

Information technology can promote effectiveness in methods that extend well beyond increased efficiency stemming from faster communications. The NYPD have embraced ICT for sharing information between departments and boroughs and for effectively utilizing the data that is collected. [2]

Government processes can also address accountability deficits in ways that are less apparent. In particular, the recordkeeping implicit in electronic dialogues and documents can eliminate the possibility of "anonymous" alterations to proposed legislation, prevents late alterations to major legislation from passing through without notice, and generally imposes a degree of accountability on any alteration to proposed legislation. The lack of anonymity within legislative proceedings improves both internal efficiency and accountability by identifying the originators of specific changes to legislation.

Increasing Transparency

There are many ongoing projects that seek to increase transparency in government at many levels.

• They Work For You is "a non-partisan website run by a charity which aims to make it easy for people to keep tabs on their elected and unelected representatives in Parliament, and other assemblies." The website serves as a repository for information about the UK Parliament, including information about the stances, voting records, and other information about sitting MPs and Lords.

Promoting Citizen Involvement

At the simplest level, e-government has the possibility of increasing citizen engagement in politics simply by providing improved delivery of government services and increased transparency and accountability. By ensuring that government is in fact responsive to the needs of its citizens, e-government has the potential to alter the attitude of citizens towards government and thus encourage civic involvement.

The potential for civic involvement through e-government extends far deeper, however. By facilitating various forms of communication between members of government and private citizens, e-government enables citizens to become directly involved in government efforts, by commenting on or suggesting changes to proposed legislation or by otherwise participating in the act of policymaking and service delivery itseslf.

For example, many of the sections of They Work For You permit user responses to government debates or statements. Furthermore, users are polled as to whether the official government response to a written question provides a satisfactory answer, suggesting a tool by which citizens can identify and chastise vague answers. [3] On a more formal level, the Family Courts Forum site was set up explicitly to solicit public input on the topic of "openness and privacy in the family courts."

The challenge here is twofold. First, e-goverment must encourage citizens to be more active in contributing to the democratic dialogue. Second, e-government must ensure that the government actually considers and acts upon input received directly from citizens. This is the ltimate goal of e-government in many respects, but it also presents the greatest challenges. Given the evidence that e-government is beginning to function in other domains, there is reason for optimism that it will expend in this direction over time.

Challenges to e-Government

Participation

As with any democratic endeavor, e-government will be successful only if all interested parties buy in to its tenets. The challenge of forming both an informed, active civil society and a responsive, accountable government is a perpetual issue, and e-government projects that fail to provide sufficient incentives for participation are unlikely to succeed.

Fortunately, e-government has a somewhat unique set of incentives to offer. For citizens, the chance to be truly informed and involved in the political system has the potential to counteract apathy and disconnectedness. For politicians, the communicative opportunities of the Internet and other ICTs provide an invaluable, and possibly essential, tool to maintain a connection with their constituents in any pursuit of (re)election. The key to effective e-government is to channel all of these impulses to ensure that all parties are willing to participate in the project at hand.

Access

The second, and more specific, challenge to e-government is that it reinforces existing political and social divides by providing benefits only to a select group. Those with the technical savvy and political interest to thoroughly engage in e-govvernment activities are allegedly able to further their own political agenda, while those who lack access to the necessary resources are further disenfranchised.

It is worth noting that these issues are hardly unique to e-government or even to government in general. The solution to a disparity in access to modern communication technologies is to remedy the disparity. Digital democracy requires a digital electorate; that the marked disparity in wealth present in the current world limits the benefits of e-government does not demonstrate that those benefits do not exist and cannot be apportioned in a reasonable fashion if and when distributive solutions are found.

Moreover, many of the benefits of e-government are not directly tied to continuous universal access. Increasing governmental transparency and enhanced delivery of servies should benefit all citizens, not merely those with Internet access. Even mechanisms for increased citizen participation in government can be utilized to benefit a broad range of citizens if the input received is considered by elected representatives on the basis of its impact on the nation as a whole; online polls or discussion boards pose no particular threat so long as the demographics of participants are known and taken into account.

Structure

As the supporters of the Resolution note, e-government is not a panacea that will magically fix government. E-government is, at best, a tool that enables dramatic and even transformative improvements in the processes of governance and democracy; simply moving from a paper-based world to a computer-based world in no way ensures these improvements. In fact, ICT-based initiatives can simply entrench bureacracies further, reducing or even eliminating existing means of access and accountability; they can be used as another outlet for government-controlled content rather than accurate, transparent information; they can even be used as a tool for surveillance and monitoring rather than dialogue between citizens and government.

These concerns do not suggest that e-government is pointless, or that its effects are limited because it can only be deployed and utilized in situations where governance and democracy already work well. Rathern, as Patrick Dunleavy and Helen Margetts suggest, the challenge for e-government advocates is to "steer a delicate path between utopian and dystopian pathways to maximize the benefits of the information age." [4] Effective e-government must be tied to specific goals of increasing efficiency, improving transparency, and enhancing communications; moreover, the projects must be enacted within the context of the existing governmental regime, or the government itself must be smoothly adjusted to be better positioned to take advantage of the possibilities of e-government.

It is worth noting that demcratic government does not exist in a vacuum and is not the sole body interested in e-government. The Hansard Society and the Sunlight Foundation provide two examples of non-governmental entities investing considerable effort into researching and advocating for e-government. As long as government in a given country is in practice democratic, external and internal pressures have the potential to force institutional change to make e-government feasible.

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e-Government Success Stories

Although there have been some disappointing experiments in e-government, even mistakes provide valuable information for the development of successful "e-Government 2.0" programs. Some countries have already taken advantage of the growing knowledge about e-government best practices to develop highly innovative systems -- which have already changed the way citizens of these countries interact with their government. Such programs provide a hint of the profound changes e-government will inevitably bring about in the future. Below, we provide an overview of just few of such programs.

South Korea

South Korea's e-government program ranked first in the 2006 Global E-Government Report based on a survey of conducted by The Center for Public Policy at Brown. [5]. The study found that the South Korean program had an "impressive level of organization and offer a wealth of information and services," and that it "offers an abundance of features while remaining user-friendly for its visitors." [6]

Online Services

The main government portal, for example, offers easy access to over 500 government services fully executable online. Other departmental pages offer a wide range of e-services, from paying taxes to searching for lost relatives in North Korea.

For Citizens

• Civil services including various permits/authorizations and certificates
• Information services to search for legislative/administrative notices and relevant laws
• Payment services including tax refunds and social welfare payments
• Opportunity to participate in government administration by requesting public hearings and casting electronic votes.

For Businesses

• Civil services including various permits/authorizations, formal objections, diverse reports and complaints.
• Electronic transaction services including procurements, bids and so on
• Payment services for various taxes and public charges
• Opportunity to participate in government administration by requesting public hearings and casting electronic votes.

Government-to-Government

• Information sharing among agencies in terms of documents and knowledge management.
• Exchange of opinions among agencies by distribution electronic documents
• Support for electronic approval and video conferencing for efficient decision-making
• Database sharing among agencies to enhance the efficiency of work procedures

Custom Experience

Highly customizable, with a majority allowing the user to manage his or her own activities. In addition, most sites offer PDA or wireless access, and nearly all allow visitors to sign up for e-mail updates.

Interactive Features

Interactive features available for users – virtually every site contains a prominent guestbook or forum as well as the option to petition the particular department.

Estonia

Estonia has embraced the concept of e-Government at many levels, recognizing the vast potential that the Internet and other forms of technology offer in improving the functionality of government and increasing political accountability and citizen participation at multiple levels.

• The State Web Center is a repository for links to the official web sites of various governmental institutions as well as "almost all the official documents" produced by the government.

• The Kodanikuportaal (Citizen’s Portal) allows Estonian citizens to enter and confirm data in the various national databases, fill out application forms, and sign and send documents, allowing government to operate more efficiently and more accurately.

• The Teabeportaal (Information Portal) provides information about government services, ranging from planned power outages to contact information for a wide range of governmental entities.

• The Estonian Cabinet has committed to paperless sessions using a web-based document system, increasing efficiency and making the process of legislative alteration far more transparent. Furthermore, Cabinet votes are conducted electronically, allowing members not physically present to vote on any issue. [7]

• Täna Otsustan Mina ("I Decide Today") is a model for community participation in the legislative process. Draft bills and amendments are placed on the forum and citizens are permitted to post comments, questions, and suggestions. Ideas that gain substantial support will be reviewed by competent bodies. According to the government website, "[a]pproximately 5% of all ideas are used as amendments to bills." [8]

• The E-Governance Academy is "a non-governmental, non-profit organisation, founded for the creation and transfer of knowledge concerning e-governance, e-democracy and the development of civil society."

The Potential of e-Government

Improving Efficiency and Effectiveness

Many of the early shortcomings of government efforts resulted from a lack of coordination and strategic planning. Governments seeking to make improvements have been developing integrated e-government programs, similar to the South Korean model, to provide information and services useful to the public.

"Transformational Government" Initiative in the UK

Recognizing that a strategic technology plan was necessary for the United Kingdom to implement technology "decisively and effectively" across government to meet its national objectives, Prime Minister Tony Blair commissioned the development of a unified e-government strategy for the UK: Transformational Government -- Enabled by Technology "to seize the opportunity provided by technology to transform the business of government." The project was initiated in 2005.

Index of Tranformational Government Program Information

Strategy

A formal Strategic Plan was released in July 2005.

In particular, the strategy was directed to provide overall technology leadership in three key areas:

1. The transformation of public services for the benefit of citizens, businesses, taxpayers and front-line staff.
2. The efficiency of the corporate services and infrastructure of government organisations, thus freeing resources for the front-line.
3. The steps necessary to achieve the effective delivery of technology for government.

The strategic plan required three key transformations:

1. Services enabled by IT must be designed around the citizen or business, not the provider, and provided through modern, co-ordinated delivery channels. This will improve the customer experience, achieve better policy outcomes, reduce paperwork burdens and improve efficiency by reducing duplication and routine processing, leveraging delivery capacity and streamlining processes.
2. Government must move to a shared services culture - in the front-office, in the back-office, in information and in infrastructure - and release efficiencies by standardisation, simplification and sharing.
3. There must be broadening and deepening of government's professionalism in terms of the planning, delivery, management, skills and governance of IT enabled change. This will result in more successful outcomes; fewer costly delivery failures; and increased confidence by citizens and politicians in the delivery of change by the public services.

Implementation Plan

In March 2006, the Cabinet office released the Transformational Government Implementation Plan.

At the same time project released a Timetable for Change to the public, detailing when planned changes would be implemented.

Progress So Far

• Centralized government web presence at DirectGov

Public Response

The government invited public response and criticism to the strategy and implemenation plan. A summary, and copies of the individual responses recieved are available here.

Europe's Information Society

http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/index_en.htm

U.S. Government Efforts

Coordinating Planning Efforts

• Presidents's E-Government Initiative coordinated through OMB

• GSA's eStrategy.gov website provides guidance to help promote, implement and manage E-Government initiatives and programs at federal, state and local levels of government. The overall objective is to improve citizen, intergovernmental, and business access to E-Government information and services.

• Council of Federal CIOs

Coordinating Web Presence

USA.gov [9]

Improving Delivery of Services

• The State of Michigan, among others, utilizes the web to simplify the process of starting a new business. A government website allows a business to obtain a tax registration online, access other necessary forms, and obtain information about programs and initiatives designed to encourage entrepreneurship. [10] A criticism of Massachusetts for failing to implement such a program can be found here.

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Promoting Government Transparancy

Because citizens cannot depend on the government alone to provide sufficient transparancy -- particularly those directly impacted by electoral politics -- private efforts to promote easy access to infomation will play a critical role in the development of e-Government. This "watchdog" role has traditionally served primarily by the institutional press, which will continue to play a crucial role for most citizens, but as information becomes more widely available to all, its role will be to integrate available information, rather than to serve as a gatekeeper of information that is not widely available. Alternately, the role of integrating and distributing information might be accomplished by the public at large, or even by the government itself. [11]

Sunlight Foundation

The Sunlight Foundation was founded in January 2006 with the goal of using the revolutionary power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparency and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy. Sunlight Foundations efforts are entirely focused on the use of "technology and the power of the Internet" to help citizens, journalists and bloggers "be their own best watchdogs, both by improving access to existing information and digitizing new information, and by creating new tools and websites to enable all of us to pool our intelligence in new, and yet to be imagined, ways."

The Sunlight Foundation sponsors a wide range of projects that are designed to encourage civic involvement in monitoring government activity. Some examples of these projects include:

• Congresspedia: Congresspedia bills itself as "the 'citizen's encyclopedia on Congress' that anyone can edit." As the name suggests, it hopes to duplicate the success of Wikipedia in the realm of politics, encouraging public contributions to articles about members of Congress, draft legislation, and other political activity.

• The Congressional Web Site Investigation Project enlisted "citizen journalists" to evaluate the methods by which members of Congress are using their personal web sites to connect with their constitutents and further the Foundation goals of transparency and accountability. The project has compiled submissions concerning these web sites and anticipates releasing its findings in the next 10 days.

• The Punch Clock Campaign is designed to encourage current and potential members of Congress to post their daily schedules on the Internet to allow constituents to observe how their elected representatives spend their time and energy, and to better understand what elected representatives actually do when Congress is not in session.

• OpenCongress.org is a resource that combines official government information with news and blog coverage to provide in-depth information about the quotidien happenings in Congress. It aims to increase transparency by organizing information about pending bills, providing links to commentary, and enable citizens to become better informed and thus more involved in governance. The future plans for OpenCongress.org are more ambitious: it hopes to provide a forum for collaborative public commentary, analysis, and activity concerning pending litigation, encouraging citizens to become involved not only in electoral politics but in policymaking itself.

Transparancy Grants

Transparancy Grants provide financial support to enhance independant efforts such as:

• MAPLight.org, which was founded to illuminate the connection between campaign contributions and voting records in the California legislature. The project correlates publicly available information on bills and legislative voting records with political contributions. The online database is searchable by individual legislator, interest group, subject and by bill number. In December 2006, MapLight received a Transparency Grant that will help the organization create a beta version of their database to correlate information on federal legislators. The new database is expected to be available in April 2007.

• Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) to fund the launch of its "Open Community Open Document Review System." CREW had already developed a demonstration version of an online reviewing process that is a really cool tool. It lets anyone review, tag and comment on any of the thousands of pages of documents that CREW has in their possession. (CREW has thousands of pages of governement records as a result of their thorough and repeated FOIA requests.) Our grant will help them build a massive publicly searchable database of every document they receive -- a database put together by citizen journalists. Beta version will be available in late March 2007.

• National Institute on Money in State Politics to continue the development and implementation of their initial Web Service Application Program Interface (API), to conduct extensive outreach to ensure its adoption later in this year, and to develop several custom APIs for journalists and/or academics.

• Center for Citizen Media to develop an Election Year Demonstration Project for citizen journalism in one Congressional district. CCM will oversee the creation of a website that will seek to cover everything that can possibly be reported on a Congressional election, with an emphasis on drawing on the talents and ideas of local citizen reporters. The site will include in-depth biographical and political information on candidates, audio and video archives, campaign finance profiles, first-person reports, links to articles, etc. This project is designed to serve as a model for possible nationwide implementation in hundreds of districts in 2008.

• New York University's NewAssignment.Net Project, a non-profit site that is working to foster journalistic innovation by showing that open collaboration over the Internet among traditional reporters, editors and large groups of reader-reporters can produce high-quality work that serves the public interest, holds up under scrutiny, and builds trust. This project is an experiment in networked journalism, exploring how to blend the experience of veteran journalists with the engagement of passionate amateurs to produce work that neither could manage alone.

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Increasing Citizen Involvement

Sunlight Network

The Sunlight Network is a sister organization to the Sunlight Foundation, which was founded in January, 2006 to strengthen the relationship between lawmakers and the people they represent through transparency, technology, and local communities.

The Sunlight Network directly supports small projects, runs national campaigns, and provides a social networking hub where people who want to create change can meet. It is committed to supporting citizen initiatives, local community organizations, and the growing network of people who believe their elected officials should be more open and responsive to their constitutents. We are experimental, irreverent, and especally (but not exclusively) interested in the ways that technology and the networked public sphere can nurture the already developing democratic movement in our country.

The Sunlight Network exists to:

• Mobilize real political muscle behind calls for reform, to help Congress change its habits.
• Provide a means for people to have direct access to power. We will constantly be experimenting with tools and campaigns to make it easier for people to meaningfully and positively affect their representative’s behavior.
• Offer a model for other nonprofits that have gotten used to top-down control within their organizations. We hope to learn, through trial and error, how best to enable the extraordinary latent power of citizens within a public organization.

Examples of programs sponsored by the Sunlight Network include:

• Congress in 30 Seconds encourages members of the public to create (using provided tools and video clips) a 30 second political commentary, inspired by MoveOn.org's "Bush in 30 Seconds" video.

Canada

The Canadian Pension Plan Online Consultation with Canadians "represented the first interactive website by a parliamentary committee in Canada and was regarded by all concerned as a success" in engaging citizens in the development of the Canadian Pension Plan Disability Program. "Those people involved in developing and implementing this initiative believe it was successful because it engaged citizens as partners in the decision making process." [[12]

Europe

European Union eParticipation Case Studies [13]

The BBC's iCan project is aimed at individuals who are dissatisfied with mainstream politics but nonetheless care about political issues. It combines information provided by the BBC, information shared by users, and tools to encourage and enable civic involvement and coordinate activities with others.

YouGov is a rare commercial site focused on increasing communication between government and the public and fostering debate on political issues. For a given issue, the site permits users to submit long responses to open-ended questions; these responses are parsed by computers and mapped to a range of submitted responses, leading to a series of propositions. In a second phase, respondents can consider arguments for and against the various propositions prior to making a final poll response. In this manner, the site encourages deliberative engagement with the issue at hand rather than the quick responses that often plague e-polls.

Conclusions

E-government is not immune to threats common to democracy in general: the possibility of domination by a small group of elites with the means of dominating the flow of communication and information, and the risk of citizen apathy towards government. However, increasing the flow of information within the government and between the government and its citizens is unlikely to make either of these threats more severe. On the contrary, increasing governmental accountability and avenues for citizen involvement may revitalize democratic governments, overcoming elitism and apathy and generating a government that is truly responsible and responsive to the electorate.

E-government is not likely to happen overnight. Incremental improvements in effectiveness, transparency, and communications are happening already, however. Moreover, new initiatives are able to build on earlier initiatives; OpenCongress.org, for example, references data provided on government web sites and Congressional biographies generated by Congresspedia. Just as the Internet did not emerge overnight as a major force in society, we should not expect e-government to arrive overnight - but it is coming.

The greatest challenge to e-government is ensuring that all citizens are able to participate fully in the new methods of civic activity and enjoy the full benefits of governmental embrace of ICT technology. Extending access to the Internet and other technologies is one means of accomplishing this; even before universal access is achieved, however, substantial gains can be realized so long as all parties ensure that the rights of those not participating in the process are protected.