According to this librarian blogger....The Taubman Center for Public Policy at Brown University in Rhode Island has just released its 7th annual ranking of e-government initiatives.
The findings are based on the analysis of 1,687 government websites in 198 different nations. The types of websites analysed included executive offices (president, prime minister, ruler, party leader, or royalty), legislatures, major courts, and major agencies and ministries.
Among the major findings:
- 28 percent of government websites offer services that are fully executable online, about the same as last year
- 96 percent of websites this year provide access to publications and 80 percent have links to databases
- 29 percent (up from 26 percent in 2006) show privacy policies, while 21 percent have security policies (up from 14 percent in 2006)
- 23 percent of government websites have some form of disability access, meaning access for persons with disabilities, the same as last year
On a ranking scale of 0 to 100, the study concluded that South Korea offered the best e-government services of any country with a score of 74.9%.Other countries in the top 10 were, in descending order: Singapore, Taiwan, United States, Great Britain, Canada (6th place with a score of 44.1%), Portugal, Australia, Turkey and Germany.
Taiwan has actually come in first three times in this survey. These largely successful e-government initiatives date back to the Lee Teng-hui era, to that most important of policymaking bodies you've never heard of, the RDEC.
[Taiwan]
I'm a supporter of e-government, and believe it plays a critical role in allowing citizens of a state to access information on what authorities are doing to run said place. However, irrespective of how much information is online one fundamental problem exists: the implementation of policy on the ground. Taking sustainable development for example, Taiwanese governments at central and local level push through the internet their 'green' environmental capabilities and use e-sources as a means to do this. This does not change however the fact that Taiwan is an appalling place for sustainability and ranks amongst the lowest in the world for it! So, as useful as the e-indicator is I'd much rather see pragmatic policy on the ground that fancy websites exaggerating what really is happening.
ReplyDeleteIf they counted support for open standards, or tested with non-windows/IE platforms, Korea would be dead last and Taiwan would be a close second.
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