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“YOUR SEAT at THE TABLE”:
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The Development of e-Government Groupware
and Its Future
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Naoya Makino
100106040
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Langara College
Department of Computing Science
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and Information System
pasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasBryan Green
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March 16, 2009
naoyamakino@gmail.com
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In 2006, five years after September 11th, New Yorkers were terrified by a small craft
crash, which reminded them of the traumatic terrorist attack. However, all national security
agencies knew what was going on at each moment; they were able to determine that this was not
a terrorist attack within two hours, shared the up-to-date information with different agencies and
gathered more than eighty updates to collectively make the decision (DiGiammarino and
Trudeau, 7). Intellipedia, a wiki site that lets sixteen national intelligence agencies to speedily
Government Groupware. This is one of the practical uses of groupware, which is an information
technology to that lets people effectively share information (Baecker, 1995). Facing the toughest
challenges of the times, such as climate changes, financial crisis, energy, and others, a
government itself is no longer capable of solving these very complicated issues; effective use of
groupware in governments is key to surviving in the 21st century. While this change is still in
development and therefore has noticeable problems such as information retrieval, security and
privacy, allowing citizens’ engagements help governments become more accountable to people.
way people cooperate with each other. Groupware is to be “intentional [group] processes and
procedures to achieve specific purposes” and to “support and facilitate the group’s work”
(Baecker, 1995). According to De Sanctis and Gallupe, groupware can be categorized into four
different systems: Face to Face Interaction (same time, same place), Remote Interaction (same
time, different place), Ongoing Tasks (different time, same place), and Communication and
Coordination (different time, different place) (Baecker, 1995); the matrix demonstrates the each
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(Cscwmatrix.jpg, 2007). Each system has its own purposes and usages, and one that can be used
are “an integrated communication and data base network application, designed to gather,
organize and distribute information among work groups, regardless of individual members’
records and structures collaborative knowledge into a hypertext to enhance collectively educated
decisions. Advancing research and development in this field, some governments notice the power
and improve public services: e-Government Groupware (eGG). Leo G. Anthopoulos – a PhD
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candidate in the Department of Informatics, of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece –
states that eGG “is a tool that can be used for establishing public servants” (354). This may be
informative tools or collaborative tools that a government applies groupware to interact with
citizens, promoting better public services. For instance, a government lets citizens see how the
government uses tax, monitoring each transaction to eliminate corruptions and inefficient uses of
tax spending. According to Whitehouse.gov, every American is able to see detailed tax spending
in the stimulus plan at Recovery.gov (“Remarks of President Barack Obama”, 2009). This is an
that a “central government supervises the design and execution of national e-Government
initiations” (Anthopoulos, 354). On the other hand, bottom-up development is another use of
eGG. This means that it encourages citizens to involve themselves in discussions and actively
engage in governments (Anthopoulos, 354). Top-down and bottom-up development of eGG need
and areas, achieving the number of government’s accomplishments. The primary case of top-
information across a variety of federal intelligence agencies” (Mintz, 22). It enables various
agencies to share confidential information, keep up-to-date, and discuss with different groups,
often across different agencies, to make collective decisions. In a case of Intellipedia, it clearly
shows the positive result of information sharing in the case of 2006 small plane crash in New
York City. This mixed use of two groupware features, discussion boards and collective
knowledge building, helps the agencies to determine collective decisions speedily and distribute
the most up-to-date information and has “dramatically changed [their] capacity to share
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information in a timely manner” (DiGiammarino and Trudeau, 7). Another illustration of top-
down procedure is eEurope 2005. The european committee is aiming to set up online public
services and open wide range of governmental contents accessible throughout widely available
enables stronger communication between governments and provides wider citizens’ access to
information. This top-down transition of eGG is still under implementation, and it has not used
there are considerable shortcomings. In the case of eEurope 2005, there is no citizen
engagement. Although it allows a variety of information available on the Internet and has many
targets, eEurope 2005 has no specific focus on problem solving, resulting in passive
communications with citizens. In fact, eEurope targets a variety of the Internet-based services,
such as e-learning, e-health, and a dynamic e-business environment (“eEurope 2005: Executive
Summary”, 2007); however, none of these provides a platform for citizens to engage with the
governments in discussions. That is, these are only one-way communications, treating citizens as
e-Government must be carefully designed to ensure collaborative works. This poor interaction
with the public results in less satisfaction, reducing the public engagement (Anthopoulos, 360).
conversations to improve public services: bottom-up development. One of the best uses of
government, collaborative technologies allow [citizens] to invite them in” (DiGiammarino and
communities. Great Lakes Wiki is a community wiki site that allows the public to discuss
environmental issues and share their stories and experiences. The Vice President of National
opportunity for Government that this site “allows private and nonprofit organizations to
collaborate online with government leaders on projects” (9). The wiki community currently has
over 1500 members with science, environment, politics and general interests backgrounds
(Cheredar, 2008). It is run by MediaWiki – web-based wiki software – so that even if users are
not residents of the communities, they can still contribute to the development. Yet it is very open
and has low security in login, it maintains professional level articles and active discussions. This
achievement is remarkable, and it has potential development not only in the communities
issues that prevent governments from becoming more accountable. The primary concern of eGG
is that systems must be easily retrievable and readily available. The fundamental aspect of
accessible and retrievable, especially when dealing with large amount of data, which is often a
case of eGG. In order to deal with enormous amount of information, its technology must be
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“When a user submits a document to the [Organizational Memory System (OMS)],
associating a subject to it, Yaka detects the item and automatically extracts meta-
information, such as its keyword and summary. Users can subscribe to a subject or search
Using this technology, Sergio F. Ochoa explains, users on OMS would be able to reacquire
information and search relative topics easily (2). Information retrieval is leading edge science in
OMS, which structures information and searches relational databases as well for information
organization, which “establishes relationships and context for collected knowledge” (Ochoa, 2).
XQuery, for example, is a commercial query language for examining semi structured data
(Ochoa, 2). The use of this powerful query language enables massive data in governments to be
Besides of the information retrieval, the privacy of stored information is an essential issue
to get significant involvement from the participants. Ochoa warns that if privacy is not protected,
it could result in following negative effects; it could lead to the absence of participation and
dishonesty. Also participants may hesitate to share information, generating poor quality
discussion and participation (2). In order to encourage the full participation with well protected
privacy, Kobsa and Schreck recommend a new method called anonymization, which is “to
control the relation between the user and his data, and encryption, which protects the data from
inspection while being interchanged” (Ochoa, 3). Health services, for instance, need to access a
large quantity of personalized data for statistical purposes. Clearly, these data are very sensitive;
nevertheless, it needs to be identifiable which person has had which treatment and whether the
treatment was successful, where and when, and many others. Also the data should be pursuable
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the specific patient throughout different treatments in time and space (“Identification versus
anonymity”, 36). That is, data and its identity must be connected while providing anonymity. The
contradiction between anonymity and linkability can be met by using cryptographic methods,
produces a bit-string – hash value – for given inputs, generating an unique character string,
which is also infeasible to access an input by given hush value. Effective use of this system
In order to address these privacy issues, eGG needs to ensure the protection of the stored
knowledge and private information, needing to meet several requirements. Ochoa proposes the
• “Privacy level expectation: Users should expect privacy to be similar to that of face-
to-face work, but with greater archiving capacity. That is, the author-information link
could be gradually softened, but the content of the submitted information would not
be lost.
exact times and other detailed information. For example, in the case of information
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• “Ethical guidelines: There should be some ethical guidelines to prevent misuse of the
system, but some amount of privacy should be guaranteed even if the ethical
guidelines were not respected. For example, anonymity should not be revoked for
ethical reasons, but it should also be technically impossible to revoke it, i.e., the
• “Privacy awareness: Users should be able to easily access the applicable ethical
guidelines. Also, the system should provide a level of awareness on privacy issues,
It also notes that users must know what information is stored and the level of identification with
which it will be stored (Ochoa, 4). All e-Government applications should meet these
requirements; Whitehouse.gov, namely, meets the above requirements. It ensures that the
privacy policy applies to every visitor: Automatic privacy enforcement. Also the policy states that
the private data are securely stored by commercially reasonable tools and techniques: Privacy
level expectation. It is easily accessible to the privacy policy and states directly which personal
data are stored, for what purposes and who has access to that information: Privacy awareness
and Ethical guidelines (“Privacy Policy”). Stating these policies help visitors understand how the
data are treated and increase the satisfaction, which contribute to more participation.
Security is a critical concern in eGG; since collaborative works let many people access to
a system, it creates new security issues that do not exist for individual-based system. Presenting
in Evaluating and Implementing a Collaborative Office Document, Andy Adler introduces four
decisive vulnerabilities (671). Server vulnerabilities occur when collective data and privacy
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transmission when multiple participants access a same application, sending emails and editing
documents. Moreover, access control is an additional issue in groupware; since it is often a case
that collaborative works have a well defined group of contributors, most groupware requires a
login with a username and a password. Users may forget a password or accidentally let them out.
“This is a significant concern in a web-based system, where a user logging into the system from
an untrusted PC may inadvertently reveal access codes” (Adler, 671). Final, but equally
important, consideration is access level control. Having different access settings are frequently
endeavours in a government have access to edit. Other possible system-access capabilities are
followed: editing, document viewing, access to previous versions, access to change records and
auditing software, workflow and approvals, forcible unlocking of files, adding new documents,
adding new group members, and downloading of files from the system (Adler, 672). Having
these diverse options, it is difficult to make collaborative applications simple to use for ordinary
citizens. Because of this reason, eGG repeatedly fails usability and simplification of access.
While the concerns in security and privacy are still in questions and under development,
the citizen-centered and open environments in e-Government enable citizens to play an essential
part in government by using the great strengths of groupware. As described above, there are still
remaining problems in security and privacy, admitting Ochoa that “they are not enough to
guarantee privacy to all users” (3). Although these problems need to be considered and further
developments are required, one of the best advantages of groupware, which is enhancing the
collective knowledge and sharing valuable information with others, can be met not by restricting
the login security, but by opening a gate widely. It is clear that having a complicated security
system reduces the number of participants. In fact, a survey in Digital City of Trikala – the first
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Digital City in Greece – shows that while 82% of the citizens have high interests and understand
the importance of digital public services, only 10% of participants have confidence of digital
usage of public service (Anthopoulos, 361). The survey in the Digital City of Trikala shows that
people often fail to participate in e-Government applications due to the complicated security
systems and uncertainty about the system itself. Therefore, easy-to-use and comfortability of an
application are important; using the existing commercial applications and easy login access meet
these interests. For instance, Great Lakes Wiki uses a commercially available application,
MediaWiki, to minimize the user memory load. Furthermore, Change.gov – the official web site
of the presidential transition of Barack Obama – allows users to login using OpenID (a single
participants to be involved in
protection and need an established privacy policy, clearly stating the safety. This combination of
widely opened accessibility and clear privacy policy makes governments more transparent.
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Active improvements of citizen-centered collaborative applications change governments
citizens now actively gather and share information to improve their communities or government
services. There are an increasing number of citizen-centered programs that enable people to
share information and make government transparent; EveryBlock.com, for example, releases city
inaccessible, to inform citizens and advocate for a transparent and responsive government,
changing the relationship between a government and citizens fundamentally. It used to be one
way relations; a government had informed people with very limited resources and messy format.
Coordination features of groupware are widely used in these new projects, pushing governments
to become more transparency and accountable. In addition, it is clear that these are not top-down
developments; it is a bottom-up and citizen-centered procedure. The power of the Internet and
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widely available commercial groupware enable citizens
“In 2006, Time magazine named you the to government transparency. In order to ensure their
person of the year. In 2008, this was
finally reflected in politics” (Marks, significance and influence, governments must use
2008).
groupware features effectively to “meet rising
expectations for openness, accountability, effectiveness and efficiency in the public sector"
(Crovitz, 2008). At the same time, citizens take their own collaborative tools to engage in politics
as well as to participate in their communities. It is, however, not perfect and therefore needs
more experiments and further involvements from both governments and citizens are crucial.
People need more understanding about the systems and further participation; governments must
understand the power of collaborations and the needs of transparency. It is clear that
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