eGovernment

The use of the internet to help the government become more efficient, effective and transparent seems, at first thought, to be the logical progression that would naturally save money and make information gathering and transactions easier for constituents. However, there are many things to be considered in e-governance that a business, for example, would not have to take into consideration. As was outlined by Richard Heeks in his article "Most e-Government-for-Development Projects Fail. How Can Risks be Reduced?" there are many costs to a failed e-government project that must be taken into consideration from the planning stages. They are direct financial costs, indirect financial costs, opportunity costs, political costs, beneficiary costs and future costs. In addition, there are heightened risks related to privacy concerns, security concerns and accessibility failure for impaired users. The issues around e-governance are best summarized by J. Bertot and E. Jaeger in their article "The E-Government paradox: Better customer service doesn't necessarily cost less" when they stated the following:

In short, citizen-centered E-Government is labor-intensive,is costly, and requires a range of expertise in research methods, qualitative and quantitative data analysis techniques, technologies, systems and application design, a fundamental understanding of what citizens want from E-Government, and an ability to elicit from citizens their needs from E-Government.

In order to assess how some innovative projects are approaching these challenges, I compared two websites with similar goals and compared them to websites established to be of high quality, such as whitehouse.gov, data.gov, recovery.gov and serve.gov. Both of the pages I evaluate are promoting local participation in green projects. The first is for a project called Energize Phoenix found at http://www.energizephx.com/. This is a project of the City of Phoenix that wants to promote installation of energy efficient projects and offers incentives to residential and business owners. The second is San Jose, California's Green Vision found at http://greenvision.sanjoseca.gov/. This is a city wide fifteen year plan for "economic growth, environmental sustainability, and an enhanced quality of life for its community."

Regarding transparency, the first thing I noticed when I compared the two websites to the quality baseline sites is that the San Jose Green Vision site clearly states at the top that it is affiliated with the City of San Jose and and URL is part of sanjoseca.gov. The Energize Phoenix site, on the other hand, is not formatted in the same way as the City of Phoenix web page and does not say at the top who produced the page, nor does the URL indicate any affiliation with the City of Phoenix.  It does have, at the bottom of the page, logos with hyperlinks to the City of Phoenix, APS and ASU. Honestly, I think this only hurts the credibility of the site, because the logos are clearly copied and pasted in with poor formatting and the links only go to home pages, not to specific sites addressing the affiliations. The baseline sites all state clearly at the top what government agency they are affiliated with.  The data.gov site even states "An Official Web Site of the United States Government." This is likely because some people may assume it is produced by a third party or an interest group, so it is intentionally put there to be clear that the information is backed by the federal government.

In evaluating for efficiency and effectiveness the Green Vision site is crisp and square with only a few colors and the goals and visions clearly listed on either side of the main picture. It only takes a few minutes to see the purpose and how citizens could be involved.  It also shows progress that has been made with charts and has names, phone numbers and email addresses of individuals that can be contacted regarding each aspect of the goals.

The Energize Phoenix page, on the other hand, has a logo that is very colorful and not in line with the logos of any of the affiliated agencies or the City. The first page talks mostly about saving money and since part of the project involves having a private contractor from the approved list come to your house for an evaluation (that costs the homeowner $99) it could be mistaken for a third party site that is simply trying to get business for those contractors. There is a link that says there is financing available to assist with installation of energy saving measures, but the link opens a new window with the same web site, which, again, makes it seem like a site that is untrustworthy and only routing the user in circles in the same page. This page is also inefficient in that the eligible buildings are in a very restricted area of the city along the light rail corridor, but in order to find out if you qualify, a user has to submit their address and then get a message stating they don't. There should be a map of the coverage area to avoid wasting people's time as well as avoid asking people to input their address.  If this were a site trying to sell something, the addresses could then be used for a mailing campaign or even to send people door to door to try to sell to interested parties. It only makes the site more suspicious.

I am not an expert in accessibility of web pages, and hadn't given it much thought until reading about Section 508, but I can see right off the bat that some of the sites do better than others. Recovery.gov has text sizing options and Serve.gov has a link to read the page in spanish. Neither the Green Vision nor the Energize Phoenix pages seem to have any alternate ways to view the page, although the Green Vision page is uncluttered and clean, while the Energize Phoenix web page has various colors in the background and inconsistent fonts and spacing.  There also is no menu that links to all of the pages on the site, such as the financing page or the list of contractors, those both are found only in the text of other pages as hyperlinks.

Additional issues involving transparency and credibility have to do with the descriptions of the projects and funding. The Green Vision site has annual reports which state what has been done and what the goals are regarding job creation and funding from sources such as Recovery Act funding. It also has newsletters that discuss progress and how citizens can be involved. The Energize Phoenix web site states that it is funded with a "$25 million federal grant from the U.S. Department of Energy Better Buildings Neighborhood Program and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to launch the Energize Phoenix program in partnership with Arizona State University and with support from Arizona Public Service. The Energize Phoenix program saves energy, creates jobs and will transform a diverse array of neighborhoods along a 10-mile stretch of the Metro light rail." It also lists as one of its goals, the creation of 2,000 jobs. The site does nothing to support these claims, but another city of Phoenix site shows that less than 12 jobs have been created/saved.

Overall, I would say that the company that built the Energize Phoenix web page was completely unfamiliar with the concepts outlined by Heeks, and further reinforces his idea that the fundamental issue with e-governance is a gap between the designers and the reality. The Green Vision site, since it was done in a similar fashion to the rest of the City of San Jose site, is more thought out and standardized, which gives it accessibility and credibility.