e-government... not e-governance... not e-democracy not now!

Abstract

The argument that I offer in this paper, supported by literature and empirical evidence, is that e-government is just that -electronic government -and little more. I define e-government as the delivery by alternate, electronic means of governmental information and services 24/7/365. It is government to citizen (G2C), government to government (G2B) and government to business (G2G). It is the outward face of the use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) by government to (hence the "2") deliver information and services. E-government occurs primarily, although not solely, via official governmental websites. E-government is not e-democracy or e-governance and does not appear to be heading in the direction of becoming either.

E‐Government 2020: Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose

“…To date, a considerable amount of empirical research has been conducted on e‐government, especially in the United States, and especially on e‐government at the local level. One of the principal findings of this research is that the trajectory that e‐government has actually taken diverges considerably from predictions in the early writings (Coursey and Norris 2008; Norris 2010). E‐government began and remains principally information and service oriented.…”

“…Second, the early predictions were based on a heavy dose of technological determinism (Coursey and Norris 2008; Norris 2010). Yet students of technology innovation and diffusion know that the needs and characteristics of the organizations and the people who control them dramatically affect the ways in which technologies are implemented and the ways in which their impacts play out.…”

Social Media and Local Governments

“…Similar to early models of e-government development Thomas 2004 ), progression through these stages of social media use is often viewed as a linear process with governments initially providing increased access to information before offering new avenues for services and then slowly enabling increased interaction and civic participation. However, when considering that e-government developments to-date have largely failed to achieve enhanced civic engagement (Bekkers and Homburg 2007 ;Norris 2010 ), such gradual and linear development of social media use may not meet changing civic demand resulting from the ubiquitous nature of interactive technologies in citizens' everyday lives. found that European local governments are lagging behind their citizens in the use of social media for political engagement.…”

Spatial Data Infrastructures for environmental e-government services: The case of water abstractions authorisations

“…The models predict stepwise, incremental movements of e-government from one stage to the next, but stages can be skipped or mixed. Norris (2010) finds that current e-government development is not leading to e-democracy, as the models predicted.…”

“…Early stages of the models, being more specific in their definitions, provide a useful classification not only for e-government as a whole, but for individual e-government services: informational (web presence), interactive and transactional services. This kind of classification is used, with some differences, in benchmarks like Capgemini et al (2009Capgemini et al ( , 2010 or in the literature (Coursey and Norris, 2008;Norris, 2010).…”