Research
eGovMon – eGovernment Monitor
A massive digitalization of public services is underway.
The main challenge in this development is to ensure that the new online services effectively address the real needs of the citizens, businesses and governmental agencies. A system to monitor this development can give a better understanding of how to build good online service for citizens and enterprises.
The eGovMon project is developing methodology and software for quality evaluation of web services, in particular eGovernment services, concerning four areas:
Additionally eGovMon will provide a policy design tool based on simulation models.
A set of well defined indicators are to be identified for each area, using a coherent assessment methodology. Evaluation results will be gathered through automated tools when possible, and supplemented by surveys, manual assessments and other sources as needed.
eGovMon will deliver demonstrators for:
- Tools for testing and improving selected parts of websites. The first release of the eAccessibility Checker can be found at http://accessibility.egovmon.no.
- A large scale, online demonstrator for benchmarking eGovernment services. An inital version for accessibility evaluation is in experimental deployment.
- An online simulation model to investigate the estimated impact of planned eGovernment initiatives, and to see how the particular indicators impact the eGovernment status and progress.
The demonstrators will be designed for the Norwegian context in a close collaboration with a group of 20 selected Norwegian pilot municipalities.
To draw on international results and to easily share project outcomes, eGovMon is built on an open policy with open licensing for documents and for software; this way, the project can re-use the results from other open projects and focus the overall resources more efficiently on the scientific issues. All software is open source and the project results are released under an open license.
This openness can also foster synergy among related initiatives; in particular, interaction with the eGovMoNet project is very useful for eGovMon methodology development.
eGovMon is a user-driven innovation project co-funded by the Research Council of Norway, under the VERDIKT program focusing on innovation in the public sector (Project no.: Verdikt 183392/S10.) The project started in 2008 and will last for 3 years.