Information Polity

This paper describes research to investigate the development of United Kingdom government policy on citizens' access to public sector information from 1996 to 2010, the first such significant project from an information science perspective. In addition to mapping UK policy documents, the main research method was the undertaking of semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders from both inside and outside government. Main findings are: uneven progress in the development of citizen-centric services; the continuing need for intermediaries; and a lack of information literacy policy. The paper also charts the increase in the opening up of government data for re-use during 2009 and 2010. It is considered significant that this increase in transparency, by both main political parties, should come at a time when trust in government was low, citizens' expectations of electronic access to information were rising and the technology was enabling new channels for engagement. The influence of individuals was found to be considerable, for example by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Nigel Shadbolt and Tom Steinberg. Principles for citizens' right of access to information are presented.

Most e-government literature examines outcomes and potential benefits. Yet it is also important to explore the actual process of developing and implementing e-government systems in specific institutional and political environments. In this paper, we analyze the process of developing a website with the Municipal Council of Ruiru in Kenya, a country undergoing democratization and devolution of power. How to support a process that would enable the website to catalyze and support reforms in local government emerged as an important question in this context. We found strategically linking universities and local technology firms to government and fostering their interactions within e-government implementation a helpful approach. Conducting focus group discussions in the course of a participatory design process and discussing each stage of website development with key actors in the government helped bring citizen voices into the process and the final website content. Overall, for the website project to actually help improve government we found it is critical to go beyond participatory design towards a strategic, flexible and longer-term process of engagement in "e-politics", the political negotiations over the use and control of the technology by the government.

This article defines a new methodological framework to examine emerging forms of political campaigning on and across Web 2.0 platforms (i.e. Facebook, Youtube, Twitter) in the North-American context. The proposed method seeks to identify the new strategies that make use of campaign texts, users, keywords, information networks and software code to spread a political communications and rally voters across distributed, and therefore seemingly unmanageable spheres of online communication. The proposed method differentiates itself from previous Web 1.0 methods focused on mapping hyperlinked networks. In particular, we pay attention to the new materiality of the Web 2.0 as constituted by shared objects that circulate across modular platforms. In this paper we develop an object-centered method through the concept of traffic tags – unique identifiers that by enabling the circulation of web objects across platforms organize political activity online. By tracing the circulation of traffic tags, we can map different sets of relationships among uploaded and shared web objects (text, images, videos, etc.), political actors (online partisans, political institutions, bloggers, etc.), and web based platforms (social network sites, search engines, political websites, blogs, etc.).

In an attempt to bring citizens closer to governments, electronic participation is increasingly receiving attention. Despite technological advances regarding smartphones and mobile Internet, mobile extensions to eParticipation solutions are still largely lacking. In this paper, we describe the design of a generic service platform that enables citizens to report incidents and interact with government agencies while on the move. Our service platform utilizes state-of-the-art mobile technologies, georeferencing and wiki concepts. The open and flexible service platform can be used by various government agencies to develop a range of service concepts in an efficient manner. Using a business model approach, we identify critical technological, organizational and financial design issues that government agencies need to deal with before implementing the proposed service platform. Most crucial questions are which agency should govern the service platform, how open the platform should be for other government agencies and how investments should be divided. The paper illustrates how to move from eParticipation to mobile participation, but also how a business model approach can contribute to designing viable mobile government services.

In this paper we report on the importance of trust in the development and operation of distribution networks that attach non-price information to products to mitigate market dynamics introduced by information asymmetries. Often this non-price information is transmitted from producers to consumers through trusting networks or under certifiable labels such as"organic" or "Fair Trade." We are calling such networks Full Information Product Pricing (FIPP) Networks. This study is part of a larger project aimed at understanding how a suite of future-possible data interoperability standards and social computing technologies will set the stage for a set of product labelings, information architectures and policies that may have the potential to supplement a compliance-enforcement approach with a more market-based voluntary approach to significantly expand the share of worker- and environmentally-friendly products within the NAFTA region. This initial exploration of four cases in Canada and Latin America indicated that trust, in the forms of institutional trust, calculative trust, and relational trust, plays key roles in FIPP operations and expansion. It is critical for building collaboration, coordinating network activities, and mitigating the risks associated with information asymmetry.