The Impact of the Internet on Political Activism

The core issue for this study concerns less the social than the political consequences of the rise of knowledge societies; in particular, the capacity of the Internet for strengthening democratic participation and civic engagement linking citizens and government. To consider these issues, Part I summarizes debates about the impact of the Internet on the public sphere. The main influence of this development, as it is theorized in a market model, will be determined by the “supply” and “demand” for electronic information and communications about government and politics. Demand, in turn, is assumed to be heavily dependent upon the social characteristics of Internet users and their prior political orientations. Given this understanding, the study predicts that the primary impact of knowledge societies in democratic societies will be upon facilitating cause-oriented and civic forms of political activism, thereby strengthening social movements and interest groups, more than upon conventional channels of political participation exemplified by voting, parties, and election campaigning. Part II summarizes the sources of survey data and the key measures of political activism used in this study, drawing upon the 19-nation European Social Survey, 2002. Part III examines the evidence for the relationship between use of the Internet and indicators of civic engagement. The conclusion in Part IV summarizes the results and considers the broader implications for governance and democracy.

E-Mexico

After six years of challenges and learning pushing forward the e-Government agenda in Mexico, the Presidential succession brought an opportunity for assessing the current progress, recognizing the main unsolved problems, and planning the vision for the future of e-Government in Mexico. This case provides a rich description of the e-Mexico system, including its main objectives and goals, governance structures, IT infrastructure, collaboration processes, main results, and current challenges. Some background information about Mexico is also provided at the beginning of the case. Playing the role of a consultant working for the new Mexican CIO, the reader is asked to evaluate the current situation and help in the design of a work plan, including a proposal for organizing the ICT function, the main strategic objectives, and some specific lines of action for the next six years.

Public Administrators' Acceptance of the Practice of Digital Democracy

The Internet provides a new digital opportunity for realizing democracy in public administration, and this study raises a central question: What factors determine public officials’ acceptance of the practice of digital democracy on government Web sites? We focused on online policy forums among many practices of digital democracy. To gauge public officials’ behavioral intentions to use online policy forums on government Web sites, we examined individual and organizational factors, as well as system characteristics. We administered a survey questionnaire to Korean public officials and analyzed a total of 895 responses. Path analysis indicates that three causal variables are important in predicting public officials’ intentions to use online policy forums: perceived usefulness, attitudes toward citizen participation, and information quality. We discuss implications of this study for practices and theories of digital democracy.

An Empirical Study on the Migration to OpenOffice.org in a Public Administration

The aim of the article is to report the results of a migration to Open Source Software (OSS) in one public administration. The migration focuses on the office automation field and, in particular, on the OpenOffice.org suite. We have analysed the transition to OSS considering qualitative and quantitative data collected with the aid of different tools. All the data have been always considered from the point of view of the different stakeholders involved, IT managers, IT technicians, and users. The results of the project have been largely satisfactory. However the results cannot be generalised due to some constraints, like the environment considered and the parallel use of the old solution. Nevertheless, we think that the data collected can be of valuable aid to managers wishing to evaluate a possible transition to OSS.

A Web Query System for Heterogeneous Government Data

This paper describes a Web-based query system for semantically heterogeneous government-produced data. Geospatial Web-based information systems and portals currently are being developed by various levels of government along with the GIS community. Typically, these sites provide data discovery and download capabilities but do not include the ability to pose DBMS-type queries. One of the main problems in querying distributed government data sources is the difference in semantics used by various jurisdictions. We extend work in schema integration by focusing on resolving semantics at the value level in addition to the schema or attribute level. We illustrate our method using land use data, but the method can be used to query across other heterogeneous sets of values. Our work starts from an XML Web-based DBMS and adds functionality to accommodate heterogeneous data between jurisdictions. Our ontology and query rewrite systems use mappings to enable querying across distributed heterogeneous data.

Performance and Accountability in E-Budgeting Projects

An influential theoretical tradition in information systems research suggests that information and communication technology has the power to transform organizational structures and individual behaviors. This approach has been called “technological determinism.” In contrast, recent studies have found evidence of more complex relationships between information technologies and the organizational and institutional contexts in which those technologies are embedded (Fountain, 2001; Kling & Lamb, 2000; Orlikowski & Baroudi, 1991). The theories that Orlikowski and Iacono (2001) have categorized as the “ensemble view” explain that information technologies should not be conceptualized as physical artifacts only, but that the social relations around those artifacts should also be considered. In addition, the relationship between information technologies and social structures is at least bidirectional, and therefore organizational characteristics and institutional arrangements also have an impact on government ICT projects (Fountain; García, 2005; Kraemer, King, Dunkle, & Lane, 1989). As a result of this embedment of ICT in government settings, certain characteristics of the information technologies are expected to reflect important aspects of the institutional and organizational environment and, therefore, help preserve the status quo instead of promoting change (Fountain; Kraemer et al.).

Statistical Data and Metadata Quality Assessment

Quality was defined in the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) 8402-1986 standard as “the totality of features and characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs,” which slightly changed in ISO updates. However, regarding quality in statistics, “stated or implied needs” are mainly identified by considering several quality dimensions, criteria, or components for the collection, processing, and dissemination of statistical information for the public (see, for example, Eurostat, 2002a, 2002b; Office of Management and Budget [OMB], 2002; Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], 2003; Statistics Canada, 2003; Statistics Finland, 2002).

Text Mining

Massive quantities of information continue accumulating at about 1.5 billion gigabytes per year in numerous repositories held at news agencies, at libraries, on corporate intranets, on personal computers, and on the Web. A large portion of all available information exists in the form of text. Researchers, analysts, editors, venture capitalists, lawyers, help desk specialists, and even students are faced with text analysis challenges. Text mining tools aim at discovering knowledge from textual databases by isolating key bits of information from large amounts of text, identifying relationships among documents. Text mining technology is used for plagiarism and authorship attribution, text summarization and retrieval, and deception detection.

Categorization of Data Clustering Techniques

Data clustering is a discovery process that partitions a data set into groups (clusters) such that data points within the same group have high similarity while being very dissimilar to points in other groups (Han & Kamber, 2001). The ultimate goal of data clustering is to discover natural groupings in a set of patterns, points, or objects without prior knowledge of any class labels. In fact, in the machine-learning literature, data clustering is typically regarded as a form of unsupervised learning as opposed to supervised learning. In unsupervised learning or clustering, there is no training function as in supervised learning. There are many applications for data clustering including, but not limited to, pattern recognition, data analysis, data compression, image processing, understanding genomic data, and market-basket research.

Government Innovation Through Knowledge Management

Contemporary organizations face the challenge of growing and advancing in a complex and changing environment (Johannessen, Olaisen, & Olsen, 2001; Malhotra, 2000). In order to accomplish this objective, private organizations continuously innovate to attract customers (Johannessen et al.). Competition has been accelerated by information technology, which allows the appearance of new business models, introducing new competitors in the business arena (Rayport, 2001). Under these circumstances, it appears that innovation is one of the most valuable activities for any organization (Nonaka, 1996). Furthermore, the management of intangible assets such as knowledge is one of the critical factors to promote innovation and sustainable competitive advantage (Davenport, 2001; De Long & Fahey, 2000; Malhotra; Nonaka).