Assessing transparency of eGovernment services

The OECD defines transparency as one of the pillars of good governance: "Transparency, meaning that reliable, relevant and timely information about the activities of government is available to the public."

Transparency can be viewed from different perspectives.

• From the political perspective, transparency is a necessary prerequisite for taking part in the democratic processes.
• For the media, transparency is the manifestation of freedom of information.
• From a business perspective transparency is important to secure competition based on equal terms.

The eGovMon project focuses on the user perspective of transparency, where users include citizens and businesses. Citizens take the roles of voters, tax payers or more generally as customers of the public administration.
It is a major goal of the project to improve the quality of eGovernment services offered by the Norwegian municipalities.

Some sources of information that can be considered to indicate transparency of municipality eGovernment operations include

• mail records,
• contact information,
• the use of document formats, and
• financial information.

Planned Activities

• Finalize a survey on the state of the art for eGovernment transparency measurements.
• Prepare a specification for software implementation.
• Implement evaluation demonstrator for single services.

Norwegian Legal background

The Norwegian Freedom of Information act Offentleglova addresses aspects of transparency and government.