Of course, where your government is in the table may have influenced how you voted. It is unlikely that many of our readers from Korea, which is sitting pretty at the top of the 2010 United Nations E-Government ranking, will have clicked ‘no’ (our content management system keeps the identity and location of voters anonymous).
Though Korea’s e-government exploits over the past two years shouldn’t be knocked, all e-government rankings, including the UN’s, have taken a hammering from critics in recent years. And arguably for good reason.
Rankings like these have been around since e-government entered the Oxford English dictionary a decade or so ago. Back then things like how many services were online, or how pretty a government web site was, mattered. E-government was the new frontier and many administrations were at a similar stage of development. Lining one system up next to another was useful, interesting and made sense for government stakeholders.
Now most governments have hundreds of services online (the government of Bahrain still pumps out weekly press releases to announce the launch of a new web-based service) and countless web sites, each with links to Twitter feeds and Facebook pages. The more e-government systems mature, the more they become tailored to a highly defined governance structure, and the less they resemble the misnomer that is a universal e-government model. Like for like comparisons become increasingly hard to make, and decreasingly useful - except as something politicians can shove under the noses of the opposition.
But, as one government official told me this week, perhaps e-government rankings make more sense in an economic downturn. Which is why the timing of the UN survey’s release makes sense too.
A choppy global economy has proved to be a leveler for many governments’ economies. And as flawed as e-government rankings may be, to have some indication of how effectively online service delivery, infrastructure and “e-participation” are proving to be relative to countries similar in size and governance structure to your own, is useful - as long as the tables are taken with a pinch of salt.
As is always the case with tables like these, they are only as good as the quality of their data. A weakness in the UN’s methodology is said to be the Infrastructure index. What the UN is trying to do is measure the ability of citizens to access e-government services and connect with governments. But the coarse measures of the number of mobile phones, PCs and telephone lines do not give much of an indication of this, say the survey’s detractors.
But say what you like about the UN’s e-government survey, the organisation has done something right from the start, or at least interesting. It has released the survey’s raw data early, before the survey’s official launch, expected at the end of January (2010).
The UN E-Government Development Knowledge Base not only allows governments (and citizens, if they are so inclined) to play with the data in a way that is useful to them. It is a practical example of what the UN takes very seriously in its methodology – making data publically available for others to use.
This information may not prove particularly useful to all governments, but for now it should be fun for Korean officials play with.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Robin Hicks
Quelle/Source: futureGov, 20.01.2010
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