Web Sites for Senior Citizens

In the information era, the main source of productivity lies in the technology of knowledge generation, information processing, and symbolic communication (Castells, 1996; Van Dijk, 1999). As Rifkin (2000) observed, it raises a service industry that substitutes the material economy, and the wealth relations are decided in the arena of the access and correct exploitation of these services. For sociological scientists, the biggest challenge is to overcome the classical sociological concepts of knowledge gaps (Tichenor, Donohue, & Olien, 1970) and the digital divide, often technologically determined, aiming at investigating the social and cultural problems that obstacle elderly people, housewives, and many other social groups in using the Internet and making it useful for daily life. We need to make the cultural codes available for using new media through remediation work (Bolter & Grusin, 1999) linking digital languages to the main communication practices and media languages.

Virtual Innovation Environment

Major new trends of our era emerge from the spread of information society and the increasing role of innovation as source of competitive advantage, development, and wealth. Innovation, however, is a tricky issue. We do not dispose adequate theories for predicting innovation in different sectors of industry and services, though we have plenty of tools and methods which assist and facilitate innovation in product development, process reorganization, and quality improvement. We tend to compensate the lack of theory about radical innovation (none can tell what the next big thing will be in an industry sector) with environments of innovation enabling the use of tools, instruments, and methods: financial tools, institutional tools, communication and information tools, creativity tools, and others. The rise of the information society opened new possibilities in the creation of environments of innovation. Digital tools and virtual (digital) innovation environments may assist organizations in learning and practicing innovation. They offer new forms of government (digital this time), online or offline, for mastering the complex processes of technological development and innovation. These virtual environments are important for companies, research institutions, technology intermediary organizations, and the public administration involved in innovation and research and development (R&D) management as well.

Transformation of Government Roles toward a Digital State

Information technologies (IT) and the new (virtual) space of dominion that they create can alter the order of the powers of the democratic states. This article will discuss the idea that the digital state is becoming a Virtual state with less power of control over its territory, because the historic power of the state is being restricted by the rise of governance beyond the state. The process of globalization, as well as the larger use of digital technologies, challenges the Westphalian nation-state, changing the state’s boundaries so that new forces and new actors acquire even larger space of dominion. We will explain that the information society challenges, but does not eliminate, the effectiveness of the state. The Web, with its open spaces, extends the state’s boundaries, creating new spaces of virtual dominion and changing governments structures: Actually, digital technologies affect functions of direction, control and organization of governments, and democracy quality, opening new areas of dominion for governments. Even if some of the functions of the states, like those related to economics, are diffuse under the new globalized and virtalized world, the states still preserve most of their political and military power. And more, the regulatory role of the state is considered pivotal: In the future, national governments need to define a new code of regulation of the Internet to defend citizens’ rights in the virtual space.

Technological Innovation in Public Organizations through Digital Government

The rapid adoption of computer networks, such as the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW), within various segments of society has spurred an increased interest in using such technologies to enhance the performance of organizations in both the public and private sectors. While private sector organizations now commonly employ electronic commerce, or e-commerce, strategies to either augment existing business activities or cultivate new groups of customers, organizations at all levels of government have also begun to pay renewed attention to the prospects of using new forms of information and communication technology (ICT) in order to improve the production and delivery of services. As with many technologies, the increased use of ICT by government was in response not only to the increased use of ICT by government stakeholders, such as citizens or businesses, but also in response to a growing call for governmental reform during the 1990s. As public organizations at the federal, state, and even local level began to initiate organizational reforms that sought to bring private sector norms to government, they often sought to employ ICT as means to increase efficiencies and organizational coordination (Gore, 1998; Osborne & Gaebler, 1993). Such attempts to reform the operations of public organizations were a key factor in promoting an increased interest in use of new forms of ICT (Fountain, 2001). This growing focus on the broader use of ICT by public organizations came to be known as digital government. The term, digital government, grew to mean the development, adoption, and use of ICT within a public organization’s internal information systems, as well as the use of ICT to enhance an organization’s interaction with external stakeholders such as private-sector vendors, interest groups, or individual citizens. Some scholars more specifically characterize this broader use of ICT by public organizations according to its intended purpose. Electronic government, or e-government, has often been used to describe the use of ICT by public organizations to provide programmatic information or services to citizens and other stakeholders (Watson & Mundy, 2001). For example, providing an online method through which citizens could conduct financial transactions, such as tax or license payments, would be a typical e-government activity. Other uses of ICT include the promotion of various types of political activity and are often described as electronic politics, or e-politics. These types of ICT-based activities are often characterized as those that may influence citizens’ knowledge of, or participation in, the political processes. For instance, the ability of an elected body of government, such as a state legislature, to put information about proposed legislation online for public comment or to actually allow citizens to contact members of the legislature directly would be a simple example of e-politics. However, ICT is not a panacea for every organizational challenge. ICT can introduce additional challenges to the organization. For example, the increased attention on employing ICT to achieve agency goals has also brought to the forefront the potential difficulty in successfully developing large-scale ICT systems within U.S. government agencies. For example, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) recent announcement that it may have to scrap its project to develop a Virtual Case File system that was estimated to cost $170 million (Freiden, 2005). The adoption of new ICT is often marked by setbacks or failures to meet expected project goals, and this characteristic is certainly not limited to public organizations. However, adherence to public sector norms of openness and transparency often means that when significant problems do occur, they happen within view of the public. More significantly, such examples highlight the difficulty of managing the development and adoption of large-scale ICT systems within the public sector. However conceptualized or defined, the development, adoption, and use of ICT by public organizations is a phenomena oriented around the use of technology with the intended purpose of initiating change in an organization’s technical and social structure. Since the development and adoption of new ICT, or new ways of employing existing ICT, are necessarily concerned with employing new technologies or social practices to accomplish an organizational goal, they meet the basic definition of technological innovations (Rogers, 1995; Tornatsky & Fleischer, 1990). If public organizations are to improve their ability to adopt and implement new ICT, they should better understand the lessons and issues highlighted by a broader literature concerning technological innovation.

Social Critiques of Electronic Voting

The use of computers in the electoral process—to count punch-card ballots, or to maintain a register of voters—has been in place in many countries for some time. We now see many countries move to more thoroughly integrate computers into the voting experience, by introducing what are commonly known as “electronic voting” systems. The use of such systems in public elections combined with the role of voting in creating and maintaining democratic institutions requires that we pay attention to the impact that changes to the electoral process have on the construction of the public nature of elections.

Regulatory Ontology-Based Interagency Informatin and Service Customization

The government services needed by citizens or businesses often require horizontal integration across autonomous government agencies. The information and services needed are typically scattered over different agencies in diverse formats, and therefore are not interoperable. This results in the so-called “stove-pipe” service and information paradigm, which raises a number of challenges. First, the service consumers, both citizens and businesses, face the challenging task of locating relevant services and information from a large number of documents scattered at different locations on the Web. Therefore, it is beneficial to have a system to locate and integrate available services that are tailored to individual preferences and needs according to regulations. Second, due to the fact that information is not shared among the different agencies, service consumers are required to re-enter certain data repeatedly to obtain interagency services. Service integration should allow sharing among agencies. Digital governments have been evolving with different focuses in terms of information and transaction services. The evolution has shown at least four different stages. At the first stage, with the Internet and the WWW, governments digitized paper forms and started to disseminate information with static Web pages, electronic forms, and data displays. The focus of this initial stage has been to make information digitally available on the Web. The transaction services tended to resort to off-line paper-based traditional methods (e.g., by submitting the printed form with a payment) such as by credit cards. In the second stage, governments started to provide services for the citizens by developing applications for service delivery and databases to support the transactions. The citizens and businesses can “pull down” the needed services and information through “active” interaction with individual agency Web sites separately, as in self-services. In both of these stages, the digital government efforts did not consider what other government agencies have been doing and how their services may be related to other agencies’ services. The information and service consumers need to “visit” each agency separately and actively search for information and services. The digital government up to this stage mimics the physical government, and citizens and business entities navigate digital boundaries instead of physical boundaries for complex services, such as business registration or welfare benefits. When agency interactions are needed, data and forms are forwarded in batch mode to other agencies through paper or fax, where the data is re-entered, or the digital data captured from a form is forwarded in a file via CD-ROM or a floppy disk. The streamlining of business processes within individual agencies may have been achieved, but not the streamlining of business processes across agencies. In the third stage, digital government agencies strive to provide seamless, integrated services by different agencies with sharing necessary information. The services and documents are organized such that they are easily identified and the consumers do not have to scour large amounts of information for the right ones. This stage of digital government is characterized as one-stop portal stage. In the fourth stage, the governments create digital environments where citizens’ participation is encouraged to define government policies and directions. The services up to the third stage are often enforced by government regulations and policies. These very rules and policies can be modified by citizens’ participation. In this fourth stage, digital government efforts focus on developing collaborative systems that allow collaboration among government agencies and citizens in order to reflect the constituents’ inputs. Today’s digital governments characterized by “self-service” and “one stop portal” solutions, between stages two and three, need to provide front-end (citizen-facing) tools to deliver relevant, customized information and services, and a back-end (processing) infrastructure to integrate, automate, manage, and control the service delivery. The service integrations vary according to user requirements and need to be dynamically achieved in an ad-hoc manner with personalized processes as end results.

Record Keeping for Digital Contracts

A challenge in electronic commerce is to keep proper records of business contracts made over the Internet. A common type of contract is a purchase order that a buyer places on a vendor using the Web or a private network. The government has to step in to adjudicate disputes if and when they arise. It is in the public’s interest, therefore, that formal and indisputable methods are developed for recording contracts digitally. On June 30, 2000, the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (E-sign Act) was passed in USA, and it legalized electronic signatures in contracts. This paved the way for the rapid growth in electronic commerce which is estimated to be $3.2 trillion in the USA (Freeman, 2004). With this sizable business, it is very likely that disputes involving electronic contracts arise. In this article, we suggest a few models and processes for creating and storing authentic contract documents so that future disputes can be settled more effectively.

An Opportunity for E-Democracy in Rebuilding Lower Manhattan

Following the events of September 11, 2001 (9-11), the Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York established a forum for the purposes of gathering citizen opinions on the nature of the rebuilding of New York City’s Lower Manhattan area. Citizens gave their opinions on the development of space for a memorial, performing arts spaces, museums, restaurants, hotels, residences and businesses. This effort was named “Listening to the City.” Civic Alliance organized two types of citizen opinion-gathering strategies: face-to-face focus groups and online dialog focus groups (www.listeningtothecity.org). The purpose of this article is to assess citizen satisfaction with veness of the online format of citizen involvement in making decisions regarding the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan following the attacks of 9-11. The results contribute to our understanding of the use of Internet technology in gathering citizen opinions in urban development and planning.

Open-Source and Public Sector Environmental Information Services

Free open/source software (FOSS) is a new software development paradigm that emerged in the last decade and relies directly on the volunteer efforts of geographically dispersed developers of varying professional affiliations and proficiencies, that are coordinated in ad-hoc schemes, based on recognition of the work carried out by relevant “core groups” of volunteers, and follow pragmatic directions, emerging from community feedback. In direct contrast with previously established business practices (Raymond, 2000), this software development paradigm is fuelled by full disclosure of the source code, volunteer effort, and a number of “freedoms” granted to the software user regarding his ability to interact with the software and propagate its use. By promoting code reuse and the adaptation of freely available best practices, FOSS development practices minimize redundancy and concentrate “investment” on innovation (Von Hippel & Von Krogh, 2003). The support FOSS projects receive, from the user-developer community, serves to provide guidance, reduce maintenance costs, and enhance software sustainability, while the service-oriented model of FOSS allows for a broad range of contractors to provide support, and helps in minimizing the total cost of ownership. It is these characteristics FOSS, as we will demonstrate in this article, that render it flexible, economical and reusable, and thus appropriate for use in building publicly funded information and communication technology (ICT) projects (Infonomics, 2002), especially those aiming at the dissemination of information to citizens, such as online environmental portals.

Open Source in Government

Open source software (OSS) is computer software that has its underlying source code made available under a licence. This can allow developers and users to adapt and improve it (Raymond, 2001). Computer software can be broadly split into two development models: • Proprietary, or closed software, owned by a company or individual. Copies of the binary are made public; the source code is not usually made public. • Open-source software (OSS), where the source code is released with the binary. Users and developers can be licenced to use and modify the code, and to distribute any improvements they make. Both OSS and proprietary approaches allow companies to make a profit. Companies developing proprietary software make money by developing software and then selling licences to use the software. For example, Microsoft receives a payment for every copy of Windows sold with a personal computer. OSS companies make their money by providing services, such as advising clients on the GPL licence. The licencee can either charge a fee for this service or work free of charge. In practice, software companies often develop both types of software. OSS is developed by an ongoing, iterative process where people share the ideas expressed in the source code. The aim is that a large community of developers and users can contribute to the development of the code, check it for errors and bugs, and make the improved version available to others. Project management software is used to allow developers to keep track of the various versions. There are two main types of open-source licences (although there are many variants and subtypes developed by other companies): • Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Licence: This permits a licencee to “close” a version (by withholding the most recent modifications to the source code) and sell it as a proprietary product; • GNU General Public Licence (GNU, GPL, or GPL): Under this licence, licencees may not “close” versions. The licencee may modify, copy, and redistribute any derivative version, under the same GPL licence. The licencee can either charge a fee for this service or work free of charge. Free software first evolved during the 1970s but in the 1990s forked into two movements, namely free software and open source (Berry, 2004). Richard Stallman, an American software developer who believes that sharing source code and ideas is fundamental to freedom of speech, developed a free version of the widely used Unix operating system. The resulting GNU program was released under a specially created General Public Licence (GNU, GPL). This was designed to ensure that the source code would remain openly available to all. It was not intended to prevent commercial usage or distribution (Stallman, 2002). This approach was christened free software. In this context, free meant that anyone could modify the software. However, the term “free” was often misunderstood to mean no cost. Hence, during the 1990s, Eric Raymond and others proposed that open-source software was coined as a less contentious and more business-friendly term. This has become widely accepted within the software and business communities; however there are still arguments about the most appropriate term to use (Moody, 2002). The OSMs are usually organised into a network of individuals who work collaboratively on the Internet, developing major software projects that sometimes rival commercial software but are always committed to the production of quality alternatives to those produced by commercial companies (Raymond, 2001; Williams, 2002). Groups and individuals develop software to meet their own and others’ needs in a highly decentralised way, likened to a Bazaar (Raymond, 2001). These groups often make substantive value claims to support their projects and foster an ethic of community, collaboration, deliberation, and intellectual freedom. In addition, it is argued by Lessig (1999) that the FLOSS community can offer an inspiration in their commitment to transparency in their products and their ability to open up governmental regulation and control through free/libre and open source code.