The Role of Information Institutions in Promoting Information Literacy and Access to Information for Sustainable Development in the Post-Truth Era

The right to access government information has been a key element of sustainable development since the 1992 Rio Declaration. It is further recognized in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Therefore, governments are through open government initiatives making information available to the citizens. This is based on a supposition that everyone is information literate and yet this is not the case. Information literacy is defined as the ability to be able to act on the information that is provided to us citizens. Being able to locate, evaluate, and ethically use information is an ability that is crucial to the citizens' participation in society. It requires individuals to be in possession of a set of skills that can enable them to recognize when information is needed to be able to locate, evaluate, and use it effectively. Information institutions have been the gateways to knowledge, and hence, their resources and services have been crucial to the development of information literate, creative, and innovative societies. This study sought to establish how the information institutions in Sweden were promoting information literacy in accordance with Sustainable Development Goal 16 amidst the post-truth era. The author has applied a qualitative research methodology where interviews have been used as a data collecting technique.

Assessment of E-Government Portals

This research revealed the importance of public service web portals for an e-government information system. An e-government portal is interacting with its administrators, citizens, businesses and other governments helping them increase their operations performance. The authors have developed, modeled, formulated and compared an efficient assessment framework for e-government portals. In order to accomplish such task many quantitative factors and indicators were taken under consideration; also, other frameworks have been studied and compared. The authors focused on the web portals services quantity that the interested parties should use, in order to create an well designed public services’ web portal. This research provides a framework model to evaluate the basic common digital public services that a government offers to its interactive stakeholders, so that all other countries across the world can predefine weaknesses and strengths, improve existing or formulating new e-services. The importance of the assessment framework model is thoroughly explained through the results.

The Relationship between Government Information Supply and Public Information Demand in the Early Stage of COVID-19 in China—An Empirical Analysis

Accurate and effective government communication is essential for public health emergencies. To optimize the effectiveness of government crisis communication, this paper puts forward an analytical perspective of supply–demand matching based on the interaction between the government and the public. We investigate the stage characteristics and the topic evolutions of both government information supply and public information demand through combined statistical analysis, text mining, text coding and cluster analysis, using empirical data from the National Health Commission’s WeChat in China. A quantitative measure reflecting the public demand for government information supply is proposed. Result indicates that the government has provided a large amount of high-intensity epidemic-related information, with six major topics being the medical team, government actions, scientific protection knowledge, epidemic situation, high-level deployment and global cooperation. The public’s greatest information needs present different characteristics at different stages, with “scientific protection knowledge”, “government actions” and “medical teams” being the most needed in the outbreak stage, the control stage and the stable stage, respectively. The subject of oversupply is “medical team”, and the subject of short supply is “epidemic dynamics” and “science knowledge”. This paper provides important theoretical and practical value for improving the effectiveness of government communication in public health crises.

Glocal FOI: Local Government Transparency Across the World

An increasing number of studies are focusing on access to government information across different nations, which is sorely needed to figure out what is the most effective information ecosystem for the average citizen. The studies in this issue of the journal do just that, examining transparency at the subnational levels in the United Kingdom and Argentina.

APPLICATION OF THE THREAT INTELLIGENCE PLATFORM TO INCREASE THE SECURITY OF GOVERNMENT INFORMATION RESOURCES

With the development of information technology, the need to solve the problem of information security has increased, as it has become the most important strategic resource. At the same time, the vulnerability of the modern information society to unreliable information, untimely receipt of information, industrial espionage, computer crime, etc. is increasing. In this case, the speed of threat detection, in the context of obtaining systemic information about attackers and possible techniques and tools for cyberattacks in order to describe them and respond to them quickly is one of the urgent tasks. In particular, there is a challenge in the application of new systems for collecting information about cyberevents, responding to them, storing and exchanging this information, as well as on its basis methods and means of finding attackers using integrated systems or platforms. To solve this type of problem, the promising direction of Threat Intelligence as a new mechanism for acquiring knowledge about cyberattacks is studied. Threat Intelligence in cybersecurity tasks is defined. The analysis of cyberattack indicators and tools for obtaining them is carried out. The standards of description of compromise indicators and platforms of their processing are compared. The technique of Threat Intelligence in tasks of operative detection and blocking of cyberthreats to the state information resources is developed. This technique makes it possible to improve the productivity of cybersecurity analysts and increase the security of resources and information systems.

Time series analysis of government information about COVID-19 on social media and the number of new cases during the first 6 months of the pandemic: the Brazil case

This retrospective study sought to assess the association between the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil and the quality of educational materials published in the official profiles of Brazilian government health agencies on Instagram. Posts about COVID-19, published between January 31 and August 15, 2021, were selected, dated, quantified and classified according to their content by three researchers. Public’s engagement was calculated by the number of likes, comments and views. The quality of the educational posts was assessed by two trained and calibrated researchers (Kappa intra and inter-examiners, k=0.96 and k=0.92, respectively), using the Brazilian version of the Clear Communication Index (BR-CDC-CCI), the number of new COVID-19 cases was collected using the COVID-19 epidemic calculator provided by PAHO at https://covid-calc.org/. The relationship between the evolution of the COVID-19 indicator and the quality of educational posts was calculated using the statistical model of a fortnightly time series. On average, educational posts reached 6.4 in the BR-CDC-CCI score (median = 6.5). In the multiple model adjusted for the amount of educational posts and public engagement, it was observed that for each increase of one point in the BR-CDC-CCI score, there was a reduction of 327,864 new cases of Covid-19 (p <0.001). It was concluded that there was a relationship between the low quality of posts and the greater number of new cases of the disease, indicating the need for greater attention from Brazilian government agencies with the quality of information made available on social networks to help control the COVID-19 pandemic.

E-Government Information Systems (IS) Project Failure in Developing Countries: Lessons from the Literature

E-government information systems (IS) projects experience numerous challenges that can lead to total or partial failure. The project failure factors have been identified and studied by numerous researchers, but the root causes of such failures are not well-articulated. In this study, literature on e-government IS project failures in developing-world contexts is reviewed through the application of qualitative meta-synthesis, design–reality gap analysis, and root cause analysis. In the process, 18 causal factors and 181 root causes are identified as responsible for e-government IS project failures. The most prevalent of the 18 causal factors are found to be inadequate system requirements engineering (with 22 root causes), inadequate project management (19 root causes), and missing or incomplete features (16 root causes). These findings can be of use to future researchers, policymakers, and practitioners seeking to identify methods of avoiding e-government IS failures, particularly in developing-world contexts.

Influence of Government Information on Farmers’ Participation in Rural Residential Environment Governance: Mediating Effect Analysis Based on Moderation

Rural revitalisation in China relies heavily on the rural residential environment and is vital to the well-being of farmers. The governance of rural human settlements is a kind of public good. The external economy of governance results in the free-riding behaviour of some farmers, which does not entice farmers to participate in governance. However, current research seldom considers the public good of rural human settlements governance. This research is based on the pure public goods attribute of rural human settlements governance. It begins with government information and, using structural equation modelling (SEM), researchers construct the influence mechanism of government information, attitude, attention, and participation ability on the depth of farmers’ participation. The empirical results show that ability, attention, and attitude all have a dramatic positive influence on the depth of farmers’ participation, and the degree of impact gradually becomes weaker. Additionally, government information stimulus is not enough to promote farmers’ deep participation in governance. It needs to rely on intermediary variables to indirectly affect the depth of participation (ability, attention, attitude), and there is a path preference for the influence of government information on the depth of participation. As an important organisation in the management of rural areas, the village committee can significantly adjust the effect of the degree of attention on the depth of participation of farmers. Therefore, the government not only needs to provide farmers with reliable and useful information, but also needs to combine necessary measures to guide farmers to participate in the governance of rural human settlements.

Requests made under the Official Information Act 1982 : a survey at the agency level

<p>The Official Information Act (OIA) has been in force for almost two decades. During these years there has been little research published about how citizens use this legislation, or how agencies have responded to requests made under the Act. The aim of this project is to produce basic research data from a range of agencies to quantify use made of the Act, and to examine what other request information sample agencies hold. The study uses the Act as a survey instrument to produce a high response rate to the questionnaire and to produce qualitative and quantitative data about the request process. The results show that only a minority of surveyed agencies records the number of requests they receive or the category of information requesters e.g., news media and political parties. Compared to the detailed information recorded by the Ombudsmen there appears to be little consistency of request record keeping across sampled agencies. This record keeping gap has implications for our ability to either assess the effectiveness of the OIA against its original purpose, or to review it in the context of government information policy.</p>