icegov2012 proceedings
icegov2012 proceedings
icegov2012 proceedings
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methodology, and few national governments collect and<br />
compare these data at the national level.<br />
There is clearly a high potential value in the development of<br />
collaborative methods of collection, measurement and monitoring<br />
of e-government administrative data, leveraging web metrics and<br />
other performance data generated by e-government service<br />
providers. These data can be collected in direct contact with web<br />
administrators and lead to the analysis of usage statistics<br />
alongside life events for example. Use of web analytics is ideal for<br />
organizations and individuals who do not host websites on their<br />
own web servers and are mostly concerned with human activity<br />
on their websites. Most web analytics services are available for a<br />
monthly fee based on volume, although there are some available<br />
free of charge such as Google Analytics or Alexa.com. Web<br />
analytics can be used to supplement data collected by<br />
governments to provide insight into e-government usage.<br />
5.2.2 New Ways to Capture User Experience –<br />
Social Media Analytics and Crowd sourcing<br />
With the increasing digitalization of everyday life, much<br />
information on the experiences and satisfaction with egovernment<br />
services and the main barriers encountered could be<br />
found through the use of social media analytics and/or<br />
crowdsourcing. There is a variety of tools available – generally<br />
referred to as listening tools – including sentiment analysis, which<br />
allow the analysis of online conversations on websites such as<br />
Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, blogging sites and wikis.<br />
Governments can use sentiment analysis to assess positive or<br />
negative sentiment trends for selected topics over time. More indepth<br />
sentiment analysis can also shed light on relative sentiment,<br />
i.e. differentiated by service/life-events, administration or web<br />
site, as well as highlight hot-words and similar.<br />
However, the potential scope of social media analytics can be<br />
much broader and potentially also cover emerging and perceived<br />
issues; top influences in terms of authors, blogs, forums, etc.; key<br />
themes driving customer sentiment over time; top sites by selected<br />
types and concepts; high level affinity analytics; top channels; a<br />
drill down into key ‘hot spots’ or sentiment areas via an in-depth<br />
affinity matrix; social media image versus competitors; hot-word<br />
distribution (percentage of conversations associated with a<br />
particular hot-word); insight into sub facets, products or features<br />
driving positive and negative sentiment; and key themes that are<br />
opportunities to enhance customer perception.<br />
All these in turn can be used to define specific action items to tap<br />
into social media opportunities and mitigate potential risks, define<br />
top social media priorities and even draw up a detailed social<br />
media roadmap or strategy with clear milestones. Although, tools<br />
like these which can cope with large numbers of countries with<br />
different languages, and to guarantee statistical validity, are still<br />
immature, rapid progress is being made in this area. Such tools<br />
could potentially complement or replace traditional user surveys<br />
and allow for much more frequent monitoring or thematic<br />
monitoring, and potentially at considerably lower cost.<br />
5.2.3 Software-Powered Evaluation of e-Government<br />
Service Availability<br />
The second generation of web-crawlers, such as used in Norway’s<br />
eGovMonitoring project, offer an automated way to assess the<br />
availability of online services and thus could be a major building<br />
436<br />
block in the review of key e-government websites. The eGovMon<br />
project was established to create new open source tools to help<br />
improve the quality of public web sites. Twenty-two pilot<br />
municipalities have participated in the design and testing of the<br />
tools. eGovMon consists of a tool for running automated tests at<br />
regular intervals and combines two approaches:<br />
o The deterministic approach checks for distinct features which<br />
can be detected programmatically. For example, checking for<br />
the presence of RSS feeds, links to Facebook/Twitter within<br />
a web page or web site. Provided that the boundaries of the<br />
web site can be clearly defined, this approach is<br />
straightforward to apply and gives very reliable results.<br />
o The learning algorithm approach checks for features which<br />
cannot be programmatically determined. An example of this<br />
is checking whether a local government web-site has a help<br />
page assisting citizens in the use of social media. In contrast<br />
to for example an RSS link, a help page is not formally<br />
defined and a crawler can therefore not immediately<br />
determine whether a given page is a help page or not. A<br />
learning algorithm will find online services based on the<br />
features extracted from a set of manually selected examples<br />
of help pages. Such features can be the presence of words<br />
like ‘help’ and ‘question’. The frequency of the words in the<br />
data from these example pages (the training data), together<br />
with other features, are subsequently used to determine<br />
whether the pages being assessed are help pages or not.<br />
Learning algorithms cannot guarantee 100% correct results<br />
and additional manual quality assurance is required. As<br />
opposed to manual assessment, however, the effort needed to<br />
carry out the learning approach is almost independent of how<br />
many web sites are checked, which enables large scale<br />
monitoring.<br />
The results from the eGovMon project have been used to produce<br />
data on accessibility for mobile users and for people with<br />
disabilities as presented in the 2012 UN report. Some of these<br />
tools are also freely available as online services to provide<br />
evaluation results on demand. They currently support the<br />
identification of barriers for people with disabilities in web pages<br />
and in PDF documents. 10<br />
5.2.4 Smart Data Visualization<br />
The web is not just social but has also become more visual. There<br />
are plenty of examples of new mapping tools, like Andy Lintner<br />
on Beowulfe.com who responded to the 2011 BP oil spill – the<br />
Deepwater disaster in the Gulf of Mexico – with a map mash-up<br />
that compares the size of the slick to others elsewhere in the<br />
world. Or the OECD which in key policy areas has launched<br />
progress maps that feed off global indicators and are updated<br />
regularly. This initiative is called wikiprogress. The core mission<br />
of wikiprogress is to create a global information tool supported by<br />
a worldwide partnership of organizations and individuals wishing<br />
to develop new, smarter measures of progress. Wikiprogress aims<br />
to provide a health check for all societies that enable every citizen<br />
to better understand the economic, social and environmental<br />
factors that determine whether or not their lives are getting better.<br />
Wikiprogress is powered by an OECD indicator framework and<br />
clearly defined taxonomies. The tool empowers local partners to<br />
discuss and contribute.<br />
10 http://accessibility.egovmon.no/ (Accessed 15 April 2012)