Collaborative Research: Hotlinked Governance: Openness, Effectiveness and the World Wide Web in Public Organizations

George Mason University, Fairfax VA

Investigators

Abstract

The foundations for governance in an information age are developing through the World Wide Web, as it becomes the principal electronic gateway for the public into government organizations, and a key element in administrative structures and functioning. A key information technology-related attribute of public bureaucracies, openness, provides a novel way to measure the change in administrative arrangements vital to democratic governance. This project is testing three hypotheses: Increases in web technology diffusion into public organizations produce increases in organizational openness, which exists to the extent that an organization provides comprehensive information about its attributes and maintains timely communications directly to all key public audiences. Increases in openness in public organizations produce an expansion of web-oriented "new knowledge management" practices that are likely to result in consolidation of managerial authority. Organizational openness to individual citizens via the Web is only indirectly associated with democracy due to the variety of possible institutional arrangements. The project builds on the unique database begun in 1996 by the Cyberspace Policy Research Group (CyPRG). CyPRG scans the Web annually to track national level public agency sites across 192 nations and 26 sectors, creating a longitudinal dataset for comparative studies of technological and organizational change. In order to test these hypotheses, the present proposal plans two main activities. The first is to monitor and analyze the evolution of web-based openness by continuing and expanding the established annual comprehensive identification and evaluation of national-level government agencies' Web operations. This effort will also review and calibrate the Website Attribute Evaluation System (WAES) as needed. WAES measures agency transparency (the extent of data about the agency presented on the Web) and agency interactivity (the extent to which the agency is open to electronic interactions with the website visitor) using 39 specific indicators. The second is the in-depth investigation of effectiveness in electronic governance using targeted cross-national interviews. Both activities contribute to the subsequent quantitative and qualitative analyses that combine data for reciprocal validation. The first activity is critical to understanding the phenomenon; the data collected in identifying sites and then evaluating them systematically is at the heart of investigations into the implications for public agencies and openness of the diffusion of web technologies. The second activity helps practitioners and scholars interested in more micro levels of analysis. Interviews with webmasters and other organizational members provide the best access to charting internal changes due to adoption of web technologies. Together the two activities can provide robust foundations for explaining this remarkable change. Lessons then can be drawn for successfully integrating the Web into public agency operations and enhancing both openness and effectiveness.