Download:

pdf-Format: Dokument 1.pdf (746 KB)

Kurzfassung auf Englisch:

The Digital Governance in Municipalities Worldwide Survey assessed the practice of digital governance in large municipalities worldwide in 2007. This research, replicating our continuing surveys in 2003 and 2005, evaluated the websites of municipalities in terms of digital governance and ranked them on a global scale. Simply stated, digital governance includes both digital government (delivery of public service) and digital democracy (citizen participation in governance). Specifically, we analyzed security, usability, and content of websites; the type of online services currently being offered; and citizen response and participation through websites established by municipal governments (Holzer and Kim, 2005). The methodology of the 2007 survey of municipal websites throughout the world mirrors our previous research in 2003 and 2005. This research focused on cities throughout the world based on their population size and the total number of individuals using the Internet in the nation. The top 100 most wired nations were identified using data from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), an organization affiliated with the United Nations (UN). The largest city, by population in each of these 100 countries was then selected for the study and used as a surrogate for all cities in the respective country. To examine how the local population perceive their government online, the study evaluated the official websites of each of these largest cities in their native languages. Of the 100 cities selected, 86 cities were found to have official municipal websites and these were evaluated between August 2007 and December 2007. For the 2005 survey, 81 of the 100 cities had official websites, which 6 Digital Governance in Municipalities Worldwide · 2007 increased to 86 for the 2007 survey. This represents a significant increase in the adoption of e-governance among municipalities across the world. Our instrument for evaluating city and municipal websites consisted of five components: (1) Privacy/Security; (2) Usability; (3) Content; (4) Services; and (5) Citizen Participation. For each of those five components, our research applied 18-20 measures, and each measure was coded on a scale of four-points (0, 1, 2, 3) or a dichotomy of two-points (0, 3 or 0, 1). Furthermore, in developing an overall score for each municipality we have equally weighted each of the five categories so as not to skew the research in favor of a particular category (regardless of the number of questions in each category). This reflects the same methods utilized in the 2005 and 2003 studies. To ensure reliability, each municipal website was assessed in the native language by two evaluators, and in cases where significant variation (+ or – 10%) existed on the adjusted score between evaluators, websites were analyzed a third time. Based on the 2007 evaluation of 86 cities, Seoul, Hong Kong, Helsinki, Singapore and Madrid represent the cities with the highest evaluation scores. There were noticeable changes in the top five cities when compared to the 2005 study. Seoul remained the highest ranked city, and the gap between first and second had slightly increased. In some cases, the scores may have slightly declined from the previous study. Table 1 lists the top 20 municipalities in digital governance 2003 through 2007, with Table 2 listing the 20 municipalities from the 2007 study along with their scores in individual categories. Table 3 to Table 7 represent the top-ranking municipalities in each of the five categories.

Zugriffsstatistik
(Anzahl Downloads)