A joint study by researchers at Rutgers-Newark and Sungkyunkwan University, Korea, of the official websites of the world’s major cities has ranked Seoul, Hong Kong, Singapore, New York City and Shanghai as the top five municipalities in “digital governance”.
Digital governance is the degree to which a website — in this instance those of 100 large cities worldwide — enhances citizens’ ability to learn about and participate in governmental affairs. New York’s website was ranked first worldwide in terms of content.
Twelve African cities were included. In South Africa, Cape Town was selected, and its website was ranked in 31st place — the highest-scoring African city. Johannesburg was not selected for evaluation by the researchers, despite having a thriving website.
Researchers examined the largest city in each of 98 countries with the highest percentage of internet users, as well as Hong Kong and Macao.
Collin Hossack, an online journalist and web editor with Big Media, the company that runs Johannesburg’s website, sent an e-mail to survey researcher Chan-Gon Kim about the fact that Johannesburg was not included, pointing out that the best website may be that of a city with a low online population density.
Hossack also objected to the survey being labelled “worldwide” when only one city per country was selected. The report’s title reads “Rutgers-Newark and Korean researchers name top five municipal websites worldwide”.
“I do not object to your research. I object to the manner in which you’ve announced your research to the world,” Hossack said.
A short reply from Kim simply referred Hossack back to the survey website.
The survey was conducted by the E-Governance Institute of Rutgers-Newark and the Global e-Policy e-Government Institute of the Korean university, and was co-sponsored by the United Nations Division for Public Administration and Development Management and the American Society for Public Administration.
It is the first study to evaluate digital governance in municipalities throughout the world, according to Kim.
The study evaluated the official websites of each city in their native languages. Investigators applied 92 measures that covered five important areas: security and privacy, usability, content, services and citizen participation.
Each website was assessed by two independent evaluators between June and October 2003, and in cases where significant variation existed on the raw score between evaluators, websites were analysed a third time.
Based on the evaluation of 100 cities, the researchers ranked the top 10 cities in digital governance (in order) as Seoul, Hong Kong, Singapore, New York City, Shanghai, Rome, Auckland, Jerusalem, Tokyo and Toronto.
The research also identified a predictable digital divide between developed and less developed countries. For example, 67% of the cities originally selected in Africa have not established official city websites, whereas only 3% in Europe have no municipal websites.
Professor Seang-Tae Kim, president of the Global e-Policy e-Government Institute, said: “Government services can be improved remarkably by e-government, but the ‘digital divide’ is a problem to be solved. We can encourage e-government among cities in the world by measuring them and giving this kind of award.”
On the web: www.andromeda.rutgers.edu/~egovinst/website