eKarine.org - Information and Society » e-Government

10 Recommended Gov 2.0 Blogs

karineb — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:55:39 +0000

Wired to Share posted their recommendations to follow the following 10 Blogs that deal with Gov 2.0 issues:

Maxine Teller – MiXT Media

Ari Herzog – AriWriter

Steve Radick – Social Media Strategery

Jefferey Levy – Government 2.0 Beta

Mark Drapeau – Cheeky Fresh

Gwynne Kostin – On Dot-Gov

Andrew Kryzmarzick – Generation Shift

Nick Charney – CPSRenewal

Craig Newmark – CNewmark

Marylin Clark – Hello Happy Pitbulls

Librarians and e-Government: Mixed Feelings?

Karine Barzilai-Nahon — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 22:55:32 +0000

e-Government track HICSS-42

Good papers were presented at the eGovernment track at HICSS-42. One particular paper that attracted my attention was the paper of John Bertot titled Emerging Role of Public Librarians as E-Government Providers. According to the paper libraries are becoming a central place for certain populations to access e-Government services. Some of these services you can see in the following figure taken from the article:

: e-Government activities in libraries

One of the main findings of the article is that, the demand for e-government services in libraries pose challenges. Suddenly librarians are requested to do things they were not trained for. For example, help filling up a driving license form, a birth certificate, helping with medical records etc... Add to that the belief that many librarians share about their "neutral" role, and consequenly the article shows that librarians in some cases may serve as an obstacle to e-government deployment in Libraries. I thought one way to interprete their reluctance can be through Network Gatekeeping Theory . Gatekeepers have different rationales for gatekeeping and so librarians - it looks like one of these is the attempt to preserve their culture, the librarian's culture. E-government activities may be grasped as a threat to their training, to their neutral professional stance. Also, from a power perspective, some of them do not have enough skills to help users/patrons. That makes them feel uncomfortable and maybe afraid to be reflected externally as non-professionals or technically not-competent.

BTW - It was nice to learn that there are 17,000 public libraries in the US (which is more than the number of McDonalds branches in the US).

Finally, Jochen Scholl and I presented at this track our paper about the differences and similarities between e-Commerce and eGovernment. This paper was nominated as the best paper of its mini-track. In this paper we pay attention particularly to 5 domains: process management, information managemen, digital divide/s, stakeholders relations and cost/benefit analysis.

E-Government/E-Commerce Comparative Analysis – ready for the next phase

Karine Barzilai-Nahon — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:27:52 +0000

The E2ECA project (E-Government to E-Commerce Comparative Analysis) just concluded the cluster analysis phase. In that phase the team tried to identify the main challenges that e-governement and e-commerce are facing, how these challenges are being addressed and what these two sectors can learn from each other. The next phase will be conducted in January 2009, where integrated focused groups, both from the public and private sectors would be analyzed together.

For conference papers published regarding the first phase of the project see here:

Scholl, Jochen, Karine Barzilai-Nahon, Jin-Hyuk Ahn, Olga Popova and Barbara Re. January 2009. “E-Commerce and E-Government: How do they Compare? What can they Learn from Each other?” 42nd Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2009), Hawaii. [This paper is a runner-up for a best paper]
Barzilai-Nahon, Karine and Jochen Scholl. January 2007. “Similarities and Differences of E-Commerce and E-Government: Insights from a Pilot Study.” 40th Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS2007), Hawaii.

These pictures were taken in the last week of marathon, before we sent the HICSS paper: