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“YOUR SEAT at THE TABLE”:

The Development of e-Government Groupware and Its Future

Naoya Makino100106040

Langara College

Department of Computing Science

and Information System

CPSC2211 – Human-Computer Interaction:

Section 1

Bryan Green

March 16, 2009

naoyamakino@gmail.com

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

share classified information, is an innovative use of collaborative government tool: e-

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.

Enhancing human interactions and organizational interactions, groupware changes the

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

system with examples:

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(Cscwmatrix.jpg, 2007). Each system has its own purposes and usages, and one that can be used

in e-government most effectively is a cooperative hypertext and organizational memory. These

are “an integrated communication and data base network application, designed to gather,

organize and distribute information among work groups, regardless of individual members’

physical locations” (Conner, 1992). As an example of organizational memory, Intellipedia

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

of organizational memory and start various experimental projects.

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Groupware is used in governments to enhance the interactive relationships with citizens

and improve public services: e-Government Groupware (eGG). Leo G. Anthopoulos – a PhD

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

example of government-centered design of eGG: top-down procedure. Top-down procedure is

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

improvements over time and face their own problems.

Top-down development of e-Government Groupware is implemented in various countries

and areas, achieving the number of government’s accomplishments. The primary case of top-

down procedure is Intellipedia in US, as described above. Intellipedia is “used to collect

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 4

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

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

broadband infrastructure (“eEurope 2005: Executive Summary”, 2007). This administration

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

the full strengths of groupware to become more effective eGG.

While top-down improvement of e-Government progresses remarkably in these areas,

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

passive, “read-only”, participants. Although these developments of infrastructures are important,

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).

Users’ active engagement is essential in groupware; therefore, citizen-centered eGG is

recommended to make government more effective.

5

In addition to top-down practice of eGG, citizens join public transactions, engaging in

conversations to improve public services: bottom-up development. One of the best uses of

groupware is to enhance collective knowledge and create organizational memory. Therefore,

ensuring collaborative environment in eGG is crucial; “rather than pushing citizens out of

government, collaborative technologies allow [citizens] to invite them in” (DiGiammarino and

Trudeau, 10). An interesting bottom-up development of eGG is happening in Great Lakes

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

Academy of public Administration, Frank DiGiammarino, describes in Virtual Networks: An

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

themselves, but also future opportunities in eGG models.

Having these different approaches of e-Government Groupware, there are number of

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

organizational memory is that information is organized and structured so that it is easily

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 6

automated and personally customizable. Yaka is an example of semi-automatic structuring; it

manages an information system based on the concept of subject (Ochoa, 2).

“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

the information repository to find relevant information” (Ochoa, 2).

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

within documents. One of the knowledge management activities is called knowledge

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

effectively managed and organized for retrieving.

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

7

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

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, such as one-way hush-function (“Identification versus anonymity”, 37); it is a

procedure that 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 contributes to the preservation of privacy, increasing the number of contributors.

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

following requirements to supply secure and trustworthy groupware.

“Automatic privacy enforcement: A level of privacy should be guaranteed to

everyone, even users who are not conscious of privacy issues.

“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.

“Relevant information preservation: It should be possible to reconstruct and replay

information generating activities, even if it is not possible to identify contributors,

exact times and other detailed information. For example, in the case of information

8

generated in a decision support system, it should be possible to reconstruct the

reasons why a decision was made.

“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

information needed to reverse anonymity should not be stored.

“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,

avoiding information overload” (Ochoa, 4).

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 9

decisive vulnerabilities (671). Server vulnerabilities occur when collective data and privacy

information is stored in a concentrated database, which increase an intensive point of

vulnerabilities. Secondary concern is client vulnerabilities. It has a high chance of virus

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

required in collaborative work. A document may be available to public as “view-only” while

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 10

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

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

digital identity across the Internet).

The use of a widely used login system

enables enormous number of

participants to be involved in discussions, generating “103512 people submitted 76031 questions

and cast 4713083 votes” in Open for Question Period (Lee, 2009). Using existing applications

lower a barrier and increase satisfaction. It must, however, ensure the privacy protection and

11

Change.gov lets users share their feedback about the U.S. health care system (Eldon, 2008)

need an established privacy policy, clearly stating the safety. This combination of widely opened

accessibility and clear privacy policy makes governments more transparent.

Active improvements of citizen-centered collaborative applications change governments

through e-Government Groupware in the future. Having web-based collaborative groupware,

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 crime statistics

with online maps to help people track

crime. Neighborhood Knowledge

California, moreover, “identifies communities at economic risk by tracking tax delinquency, fire

violations and other signs of deterioration" (Crovitz, 2008). These projects use groupware tools

to share government information, which

used to be 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. Now, these collaborative

applications empower citizens by providing unbiased information. 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 12

(Work, 2008)

is a bottom-up and citizen-centered procedure. The

power of the Internet and widely available commercial

groupware enable citizens to become a significant part

of government, taking a “seat at the table”.

In conclusion, although e-Government

Groupware needs to address future enhancements,

particularly in information retrieval, security and

privacy, having collaborative works and organizational

memory (the key features of groupware) dramatically

improve citizens’ participations in politics and

contribute to government transparency. In order to

ensure their significance and influence, governments

must use 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 governments must advance from 1.0

to 2.0, inviting us in.

13

“In 2006, Time magazine named you the person of the year. In 2008, this was finally reflected in politics” (Marks, 2008).

References

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