E-Government Initiatives through Cloud Computing

The recent development of Web 2.0, cloud computing and its related technologies are contributing towards the tendency to utilize mobile services and e-participation through Web 2.0. It offers users the ability to have greater control of information flow in public spaces, making active participation highly possible. Citizens are empowered in the sense that they control the process of interaction(s), either with the government or with other citizens. This chapter presents a model for empowerment of citizens in e-government systems to enhance e-participation in e-government business processes through the cloud. We believe cloud computing is a platform to implement e-participation using Web 2.0 as many of the existing Web 2.0 applications are deployed in the cloud. The model is derived based on contemporary literature on empowerment and participation in e-government services. This model is expected to fill the gap in identifying a strategy of citizen empowerment in e-participation systems.

Significance of Clouds for Connected Governments

Clouds are emerging as the core IT infrastructure for all kinds of organizations across the globe. Business and government are embarking on the cloud journey with all the clarity and confidence to tackle the associated challenges. The cloud idea represents bringing in optimization and transformation of IT infrastructures to be innately robust and resilient for the forthcoming era of knowledge. With the maturity of ICTs, governments too are keen to embrace them to deliver a bevy of people-centric services to citizens. IT vendors are also working with worldwide governments to chalk out viable plans and methodologies to enhance the service delivery assurance, competency and capability. In this chapter, we aim to discuss how the cloud paradigm is shaping up the unique requirements of connected governments. We also discuss how the Indian government is investing in cloud infrastructures to bring in the much-demanded transparency and accountability in electronic governance.

Cloud Computing Technologies for Open Connected Government

Cloud Computing is an attractive paradigm for organisations that have a requirement to process large scalable distributed applications. It allows for self-provisioning of cloud resources to develop and host applications as well as acquire storage and networking resources. Connected Government (c-government) is an area where cloud technologies can be effectively used to achieve the benefits that the cloud paradigm promises. Social Media, Web 2.0 and mobile technologies can all help to further enhance the connected government capabilities. Using such technologies, governments and citizens can engage in real time in the electronic participation of a government's functioning. In this chapter, we introduce the cloud paradigm and then discussing the requirements of c-government, we outline how cloud technologies can help to achieve an open and transparent c-government. The aim is to provide the basics of relationship between c-government and cloud computing to set the scene for other contributions in this volume.

A Support Framework for the Migration of E-Government Services to the Cloud

Public and federal agencies from countries around the world are increasingly providing information technology based services via the Internet - known as e-government. Several of the general requirements of e-government services are satisfactorily met by the emerging Cloud Computing paradigm that promises a number of benefits such as service elasticity (the ability to handle peaks and troughs of demands); optimization of costs; capacity to handle large volumes of data; and a generalized model of Internet-based access for end-users. For this reason, it is no surprise that Cloud related technologies are gradually leveraging e-government platforms. In this chapter, a support framework is outlined that complies with and extends the well-known ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) set of best practices for IT (Information Technology) service management. It is suggested that the proposed framework can be usefully deployed to assist in the process of migrating e-government services provision to the Cloud Computing environment.

Legal Issues Surrounding Connected Government Services

Recent technological advances have led to a knowledge-driven economy, where we expect and need information accessible from anywhere. Connected Government (c-government) enables governments to communicate through technology with their citizens and other governments. The use of ICT and emerging technologies has made this relationship much more effective. Although, most research is focused towards infrastructures and flexible services provision, form, there is a need for a layer of legal regulations to be followed. Legal issues can further aid in the provision of transparency, data confidentiality and encryption techniques. This is where Cloud Computing infrastructures can play an important role. This chapter looks into the Cloud infrastructure and discusses how Clouds are being used for connected government services, while further extending the discussion by looking at the legal issues surrounding the use of Clouds, particularly focusing on the UK G-Cloud as a case study.

Cloud Computing Applications in the Public Sector

Cloud computing brings key advantages to the governments facing conflicting IT challenges. However, the cloud paradigm is still fragmented and concerns over data privacy and regulatory issues presents significant barriers to its adoption. Cloud computing is expected to provide new ways to run IT in public sector. At the same time, it presents significant challenges for governments, and to make the most of cloud, public sector organizations need to make some important decisions. Governments planning to migrate to the cloud are actively moving to harness digital services but with different focus, reasons, and strategy. However, the degree of cloud adoption by the public sector around the globe varies significantly. Most governments are piloting cloud computing but there are huge differences between each country. This chapter explores the state of the art of cloud computing applications in the public sector; various implications and specific recommendation are also provided.

An Extensible Identity Management Framework for Cloud-Based E-Government Systems

Numerous Cloud Identity Management (IdM) systems have been designed and implemented to meet the diverse functional and security requirements of various organizations. These requirements are subjective in nature; for instance, some government organizations require security more than efficiency while others prioritize performance and immediate response over security. However, most of the existing IdM systems are incapable of handling the user-centricity, security & technology requirements and are also domain specific. In this regard, this chapter elaborates the need to use Cloud Computing technology for enhancing the effectiveness and transparency of IdM functions and presents a comprehensive and well-structured Extensible IdM Framework for Cloud based e-government institutions. We present the design and implementation details of the proposed framework, followed by a case study which shows how government organizations of Pakistan would use the proposed framework to improve their IdM processes and achieve diverse IdM services.

A Cloud-Based Framework for Connected Governance

The advancement of various computer technologies has led to the migration of traditional governance to e-governance that enables the citizens to access the government services through Internet. Although, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) act as backbone for e-governance in helping the government meet its citizens' needs through efficient service delivery, e-governance lacks the cross-agency communication as the e-services are offered by the government agencies independently. A better version of e-governance is c-governance (connected governance) in which the government agencies are connected and offer an integrated service to the citizens. Cloud is now a leading technology that enables collaboration across agencies and seamlessly integrated services. This chapter suggests the importance of adopting cloud technologies for c-governance and presents a discussion of the existing government clouds of Singapore and UK. A c-governance framework is also presented to illustrate how the cloud deployment and service models can be adopted for c-governance.

Enabling Open and Collaborative Public Service Advertising through Cloud Technologies

The importance of cloud computing and its benefits for public sector has already been recognised by national and supranational organisations. Meanwhile, public service advertising is seen as a powerful tool in the hands of public administrations in raising awareness and changing public behaviour towards a social issue. After introducing the main concepts of cloud computing, this chapter describes an interactive, cloud-enabled platform for public service advertising. During the validation phase, which involved seven European case studies, we learnt not only the benefits for both data producers and consumers coming with the platform, but also helped us identifying the gap between these two sides. In order to bridge this gap we propose a novel, open and collaborative platform for public advertising based on semantic Web technologies for service discovery and message delivery. Enabling technologies of the platform are next identified and, finally, the deployment on hybrid cloud environments is discussed.

E-Vote

The electoral system is an essential element for the survival of the democracy. Efforts are being made to develop voting systems that are convenient, reliable, transparent and secure. However, considering the security problems that can occur using the underlying technologies, it is difficult to construct an impenetrable system. This chapter presents e-Vote, a distributed electronic voting system architecture that is designed to ensure the accuracy, privacy, verifiability, convenience, and the openness of the democracy of a large-scale electoral process. We describe the necessary requirements for the e-voting protocol, and propose a cryptographic voting scheme that achieves them. The e-voting protocol makes use of several well-established cryptographic primitives e.g. symmetric and asymmetric encryption, digital signatures, blind signatures and secret sharing. Using the suggested framework, we also demonstrate an approach using the current computing and network technologies to effectively describe an architecture that can support a computationally secure and reliable voting process.