Dramatic developments in information technology are transforming society, challenging our nation's many governments to keep pace. As e-governance grows in popularity, Web pages could well become the new face of government. But how are citizens responding? We suggest that government Web sites may provide a new vehicle for citizen-initiated contacts with government, and, drawing from the literature on those traditional contacts, we propose a number of hypotheses on citizen interaction with government via the Web. To test those hypotheses, we examine data from a survey concerning how Georgians are contacting government via the Web. We find that citizen visits to governmental Web sites are increasingly common, and as such appear to have become a major new form of the traditional citizen-initiated contact. To date, however, most of these Web contacts have been made only to obtain information, thus lacking the interactive quality crucial to other citizen-initiated contacts. As an encouraging finding for government, visitors to governmental Web sites appear to be mostly pleased with their experiences, rating those sites as at least comparable in quality to other Web sites. A discouraging finding, however, is that the demographics of these visitors suggest cause for concern, since the digital divide is even more pronounced among government Web site visitors than among Internet users in general. In the concluding section, we discuss the implications of the findings for government and for future research. One of the most remarkable and dramatic changes in recent decades has been the explosion of interest in the Internet, with the phenomenon of e-commerce-unheard of only a decade ago-becoming in just a few years a principal growth area in the American economy. As use of the Web by the private sector has grown, the public sector has followed closely behind, and virtually all large U.S. governments and their agencies-federal, state, and local-now having their own Web sites. As public-sector Web sites proliferate and expand in function, they are rapidly becoming a new aspect of government. Many citizens who previously would visit or call gov

Scholars and practitioners have long debated what role the public should play in public management. When members of the public interact with the administrative side of government, should they be treated as customers, as citizens, or in some other manner? This article takes as its premise that members of the public assume three principal roles relative to public management: as customers, as partners, and as citizens. After placing these roles in the context of the history of public administration, the article draws from recent research to recommend guidelines for how public managers can work effectively with the public in these several capacities.

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