Digital Governance in Municipalities Worldwide

This 102-page document presents the findings of the worldwide survey of municipal digital governance in 2007. The survey evaluates 86 large municipalities which have official websites and ranks them on a global scale based on their scores.

From the Executive summary:

"The Digital Governance in Municipalities Worldwide Survey assessed the practice of digital governance in large municipalities worldwide in 2007. This research, replicating our continuing surveys in 2003 and 2005.... Simply stated, digital governance includes both digital government (delivery of public service) and digital democracy (citizen participation in governance).

This research focused on cities... based on their population size and the total number of individuals using the Internet in the nation. The top 100 most wired nations were identified using data from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), an organization affiliated with the United Nations (UN)... For the 2005 survey, 81 of the 100 cities had official websites, which increased to 86 for the 2007 survey. This represents a significant increase in the adoption of e-governance among municipalities across the world.... To examine how the local population perceive their government online, the study evaluated the official websites of each of these largest cities in their native languages.... Our instrument for evaluating city and municipal websites consisted of five components: (1) Privacy/Security; (2) Usability; (3) Content; (4) Services; and (5) Citizen Participation.

Based on the 2007 evaluation of 86 cities, Seoul, Hong Kong, Helsinki, Singapore, and Madrid represent the cities with the highest evaluation scores. There were noticeable changes in the top five cities when compared to the 2005 study. Seoul remained the highest ranked city, and the gap between first and second had slightly increased. In some cases, the scores may have slightly declined from the previous study...."

The Conclusions include the following:

"The 2007 study highlights the increased attention spent on Privacy/Security and Services, and the need for further attention in the area of Usability, Content and Citizen Participation via municipal websites. Similar to our 2005 finding, citizen participation has recorded the lowest score among the five categories. Cities are yet to recognize the importance of involving and supporting citizen participation online. A promising finding in terms of citizen participation, however, is the growing tendency among municipalities to publish performance measurement data on their websites. The number of websites providing data from citywide performance measurement systems has doubled globally in 2007.

However the overall average scores in the categories of Usability, Content, and Citizen Participation have decreased marginally among cities across the world. This could be attributed to the increase in the number of new cities in the survey, with official websites still in the initial stages of e-governance. Moreover, the rate of change in the categories indicates that municipalities globally are gradually focusing on increasing their services and improving the privacy on existing websites....In addition, the digital gap between [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] OECD and non-OECD member countries in average scores that increased in 2005 had decreased slightly in 2007."