Last week the US Supreme Court ruled the legislation requiring libraries to use filtering software in order to receive federal funds was constitutional. The arguements were the compelling interest in shielding children from "harmful" material to the protection of free speech (or rather the ability to freely receive speech).
I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this whole issue - I agree that the government (via library funding) should not be required to provide access to material the community deems unacceptable, but I know how faulty both the technology and the application of it have been. Obviously, less control over the conduits of access, the better, and the SC ruling is a blow against that. There is a bright spot to the ruling, in that librarians now have more leeway in unfiltering sites for adult usage.
After a series of articles over the past couple weeks warning that eGov initiatives aren't quite the cost savers they've been sold to be, here is some news about ways eGov has saved time/money in the US. They cite consolidation of agency business activities as the prime reason for the savings, which includes $1.2 billion in payroll savings over the next ten years.
Here is a slash dotish thread documenting anecdotal experiences with UK eGov initatives. It is one thing to see surveys and reports, but to read personal experiences provides another interesting glimpse into why take-up of services hasn't been higher.
Following up on a theme from an earlier story, this article cautions agencies from selling eGov iniatiatives as cost savers. One reason is that it is often tough to determine where savings are being generated, technological advances or policy changes. Another reason is that since these iniatitives have not achieved full adoption, most agencies are still providing paper as well as digital version of most services. And, most importantly, the value of eGov doesn't can't necessarily be judged by something as quantifiable as dollars and cents - the true value of eGov is in it's ability to better serve consituents, the success of which is much more difficult to gauge effectively, and much more difficult to put a monetary value on.
The Electoral Reform Society, an independent organization concerned with, well, electoral reform, published their report of the UK's recent voting trials and the news is not so good. Their report on the various alternative voting pilots found that none significantly increased voter turnout. The pilots tested in the recent elections included postal, SMS, internet, and digital TV.
All in all, there were 56 pilots tested on 6.5 potential voters. The report found that, on average, turnouts increased about 15%, but total turnout in districts running the pilots still didn't reach desirable levels. Most of the increase came through the postal pilots, and the numbers are much worse for the technology pilots. Only 3 of 10 districts running tech pilots saw increases, and the those distrcits only saw single digit increases. On average, in those districts with eVoting pilots, less than 10% of those voting choose to use the technology option.
I'll wait to see some kind of official report from the Office of the e-Envoy, but I must say this doesn't bode well for the UK's ambitious eVoting goals.
A couple days ago I wrote about how eGov initatives have yet to save the time and money they've promised. Well, I just ran across this article that says the problem aren't the initiatives themselves, but rather that not enough people know about them to make them viable alternatives to traditional interaction methods. This is another one of those polls/reports that for sets out to prove an obvious idea - that the more people who know about something, the more people will use it. I usually think these polls are silly, until it was pointed out to me that until someone takes the time to do this kind of report, the only thing you have to make your case to managers is your opinion. With budgets getting slashed so harshly, a report like this can assure your project can get the marketing budget it'll need to make the project worthwhile.
Here is a direct link to the official GSA report.
An hour long discussion of Natural language processing and FirstGov from the National Public Radio station at American University. Guests on the show include the CTO from the General Services Administration and the Vice President of the Council for Excellence in Government.
Haven't gotten to listen to the whole thing yet (on dial-up from home, yes it is very 1998), but what I have heard of it is very interesting and definitely worth a listen. (via the resource shelf)
In the UK eGovernment costs outstrip savings. Most of the deficeit is made up of the start-up costs of these initiatives, but savings wont catch up to costs until at least 2012, it is estimated. One of the big selling points for eGovernment is the potential cost benefits of reduced staffing, beuracracy, etc and if these benefits aren't visible for another decade, and I'm worried that legislators might cool on their support because eGovernment, and the Internet in particular, isn't just a fad, but a tool that will be a crucial element in the operation of every organization in the future. I'm sure it was quite expensive to have telephones and electricity installed in government facilities a hundred years ago, but it was unqestionably worth it and necessary. I hope people realize that when it come eGov.
An interesting article on the state of eGovernment in South Korea. Their $251 million project, which began last November, has since lost 2/3 of its traffic since debuting. The program relies heavily on public kiosks and severeal of those kiosks have already been shut down because of disuse.
I don't read Korean well enough (at all, really), to judge the Korean eGov site, but I hope that usability is the problem, rather than that this speaks about the potential of the use of kiosks to bridge the digital divide.
Whatever the cause of the failures, the current problems don't bode well for what was supposed to have been the world's first eGovernment.
In the 2004 elections, the US federal government will be testing its Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE).
I've got some initial problems with SERVE, 1) it is only available on computers running on the Windows operating system, 2) the testing will be very limited to about 6 million potential voters (only citizens living abroad and members of the armed services), and 3) it requires a third step in the voting provess by requiring participants to register with SERVE to get a digital signature (the other two being registering to vote and actually voting).
Still, it will be the first use of the Internet for binding results in a US national election and should be a good test of the system.
Though declaring email “the end of history” is more than a bit of hyperbole, this article about the difficulty of keeping a national archive in the digital age is very scary. Personally, this problem keeps me awake at night. Because of email, and the Internet in general, people are writing and reading more, yet very little of that information is being archived in any meaningful way.
Digital access to the UK's government art collection. Link via Experimental Space, who asks why the US doesn't have a similar digital archive. Good question. They may very well have one, somewhere, but the American Memory a digital archive from the Library of Congress, contains an extensive collection of pictures, sounds, text, and movies.
If you are going to be in DC next week, you should visit E-Gov 2003. The conference itself is very expensive, but the expo, exhibitions, and a couple sesssions are free (for government employees, cheap otherwise).
The District of Columbia has gotten a very nice revamp. According to this article from GCN, they didn't add much new content or functionality, merely reorganizing of the information already on the site. One of the major flaws in most websites is that sturcture of the site mirrors the organizational heirarchy, rather than the matching the needs and expectations of the users. This is especially true of some government websites, which, predictably skew much more toward the beurocratic than the usable. The navigation of DC's new site is task-centered, and much easier to get around. It also promintently features access to Ask's natural language search engine.
An excellent resource on information about restrictions on access to Government Information. This resource is maintained by the Government Documents interest group of the American Library Association, who also maintain this list documents regarding Freedom of Information issues. I wish I'd run across these about two months earlier while I was working on a paper about the Federal Depository Library Program, GPO Access and the neccessity to continue funding for both programs.
Here is another good resource on access to government information post 9/11. Though, OMB Watch are probably a tad too radical for my tastes.
At the end of 2002 the UK had made 63% of public services available online. While lower than the 73% projected 3 years ago, this seems like an overwhelming success to me. I'd like to see figures for the US, Canada, Singapore and other nations deemed to be at the high end of the eGov spectrum, but even 63% strikes me as a higher than expected figure. Despite being lower than projected, the UK's Office of the e-Envoy still expects to have 100% of services online by the end of 2005.
Here is access to the official report.
I wish this story about egov initiatives in India was a little more detailed (anyone have a better source for info?), but it does support my continual contention that it is possible for "third world" governments/economies to leap frog over the industrial age into the information age and become strong precences. A government like India's has much more to gain by embracing eGov than most western nations, if only because they've got a wider gap between potential and the current reality. This IT park they mention in the article is an excellent way to begin providing services to those who'd otherwise never be able to interact with government, even if the government were e-nabled, because they personally wouldn't have access to the technology to egage in that interaction. It sounds very exciting, but I'd really love to read more about this.
This article looks at the usability efforts of the big e-government portals. The tips they suggests (example: "Define your audience(s)") are very common and simple, but GPO Access and FirstGov really put those principles into action more than any other large organization, even ones that claim to be concernd with usability (Both those sites are certainly more useable than Jakob Nielsen's UseIt).