Digital technology is instrumental in designing e-government services to achieve environmental sustainability. This study aims to implicate essential human values for designing a Digital Government Collaborative Platform (DGCP), which seeks to enhance the collaboration between citizens and government officers to address environmental issues in Sri Lanka. The study adopts a value sensitive design (VSD) approach to identify human values to conceptualize the design. The results reveal 15 human values shared by citizens and officers of environmental authorities: transparency, safety, universal usability, feedback, authenticity, fairness, representativeness, accountability, legitimacy, informed consent, autonomy, awareness, human welfare, attitude, and trust. In addition to the identified human values, four system feature categories have been proposed from interviews. Thus, the study advances knowledge in designing an e-government system for collaboration between citizens and government officers, especially in tackling environmental problems in developing countries. Further, the study contributes knowledge to VSD for digital collaboration for improving environmental sustainability.
Purpose
This paper aims to evaluate the Digital Government Collaborative Platform (DGCP), which facilitates collaborations between the citizens and the government to address environmental issues in Sri Lanka. The DGCP is an artifact developed by the value-sensitive design approach.
Design/methodology/approach
The DGCP is evaluated following the Framework for Evaluation in Design Science Research (FEDS). In total, 224 citizens participated in the survey based on the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) and open questions about human values embedded in the design. Fifteen government officers were interviewed to enhance the evaluation.
Findings
The DGCP received positive evaluations from the citizens and government officers. The platform is attractive, novel and pragmatic, also generating hedonic experiences for the citizens. The users believed that human values are reflected in the DGCP. Furthermore, they shared a few suggestions to improve it.
Originality/value
The paper contributes knowledge to evaluating digital government systems, especially in developing countries. The human-value-centered DGCP was evaluated using multiple methods of quantitative (i.e. UEQ Survey) and qualitative (i.e. qualitative interviews with stakeholders) techniques. Furthermore, the systematic process of DGCP evaluation produces a case-based guideline for evaluating related and similar digital government systems using FEDS.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.