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The interest in the eGovernment initiatives of the European Commission has gained constantly interest among expert and technical professionals in recent years. In this paper, we use the post i2010 action lines as a framework of reference for understanding the interest of the mass in eGovernment. We provide a longitudinal study that answers to quest...

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... services. What is the response of people to all this effort? Answering to this question is the goal of this article. If the mission of the European governments is to promote policies toward future developments of the society, one of the goals of the researchers is to understand the effects of the governments‟ actions. To this intent, various research projects have been implemented to evaluate the introduction of 1 2 eGovernment in public administrations (COSPA , IntelCities , etc). Technical and economic aspects 3 4 have been analysed and various case studies have been reported (IDABC , ISA ). Nevertheless, at our knowledge, little is known about the involvement of common people in this technological revolution. The goal of this article is to analyse the effect on the mass of the Action Plan i2010 after the Lisbon agenda. Namely, we wonder whether the mass - non-expert and non-qualified citizens - perceives what is going on in the European Public Administration. To this means, we analysed the top three national newspapers of various countries according to their st circulation audited on December 31 2009. We believe that the more interest on eGovernment reaches the mass, the more newspapers publish articles. Under this assumption, we measure the number of publications in top three daily newspapers. In the following sections, we discuss the action lines and analyse their effects on the mass. In particular, we identify the most popular concepts and their evolution in the last years. This research helped us to identify the correct keywords and concept with whom mining Internet. The paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, we briefly introduce the EU Action Plans and their lines. In Section 3, we introduce the research goal of this article. In Section 4, we provide some related studies, and we develop then our mining technique in Section 5. We discuss our results in Sections 5 and 6. We discuss our findings in Section 7. In this section, we briefly review the evolution of the strategy toward eGovernment that motivates the present study and provides the basic vocabulary that we used to mine Internet articles. The EU i2010 strategy (European Commission, 2005) originates from the Lisbon agenda (March 2000) and it draws on the Ministerial Declaration adopted at the third Ministerial eGovernment Conference (November 2005, Manchester, United Kingdom), setting expectations for eGovernment 2010. In the initial i2010 Action Plan, five top priorities for further development of eGovernment have been identified. 1. Access for all. Everybody should benefit from the action of eGovernment. Access on-line to services should be eased for all citizens. 2. Increased efficiency. Member states have been committed to augment ICT presence and to reduce the administrative overhead by 2010. The Action Plan emphasizes the comparison and evaluation of the impact and benefits of eGovernment. 3. High-impact eGovernment services. A number of services delivered across borders make a significant difference to citizens, businesses and administrations. They can consequently act as flagships for European eGovernment. 4. Putting key enablers in place. Certain enablers should be combined to make it easier the access to public services, like the existence of a public infrastructure for electronic document identification. 5. Increased participation in decision-making. ICT must be used to augment the involvement of citizens in the decision-making process and lead towards processes that are more democratic. The Action Plan i2010 - part of the EU i2010 strategy after the Lisbon agenda - defined a set of specific objectives to be pursued (Figure 1). Such objectives have been broadly defined as a) to accelerate the delivery of tangible benefits for citizens and businesses through eGovernment, b) to ensure that eGovernment at national level does not create any new barriers in the internal market, c) to extend the benefits of eGovernment to European Union (EU) level by allowing economies of scale. Various studies on the assessment of the Lisbon strategy show that structural reforms start to pay off but the economic landscape is fragmented: Therefore, in 2009, the European Commission has rethought the strategy and the goal in eGovernment for the public services. The redefinition is referred as Action Lines post i2010 and is described in the (Orientation Paper, 2009). In this document, the European Commission has defined a classification of the action lines determined by conditions and applications. The conditions are activities that are necessary for the realization of the application-oriented action lines (Table 1). To give an example, interoperability can be used to increase the diffusion and ease the adoption of eIDManagement, eParticipation or potentially any other application. The introduction of the conditions would help defining the new Action Plan towards 2020 providing concrete activities implemented by means of the Applications (Table 1). Figure 2 illustrates the major changes from the Action Plan i2010 and the strategy toward 2020. The evolution is illustrated reading the diagram from left to right. As researchers, we are perfectly aware of the great ferment about eGovernment in the technical and political communities, but we wonder whether this debate has ever reached the mass. We believe indeed that the majority of the actions in eGovernment are addressed to the mass as non-qualified and non-expert citizens. Such actions have a potential strong impact on the daily life of such people. As such, we believe that it is of foremost importance to measure the reaction of the mass to the governments ‟ actions in eGovernment. In our work, we assume that such reaction is measured by the interest in the subject and we measure it with the number of articles in non-specialised daily newspapers. This is because news focuses on those arguments that have the foremost potential to reach the mass. We are aware that ours is a specific assumption and other perspective may result in different research outcome. For this reason, we also investigate the interest of the Internet users, mining articles with Google news. Overall, in our research we address the following questions: is the mass aware of what is going on in the social and organizational life of the citizens? In particular, is the mass interested in eGovernment? How this interest is distributed across the countries in Europe? Are the United States of America considering the European public ferment? Which countries have driven the mass interest? Does the mass see eGovernment as a political, social, or technical revolution? The definition of the concept of eGovernment and its evolution in time has been the focus of a large body of research (Fang, 2002; Metaxiotis et al. 2004; Yildiz, 2004; Hu et al. , 2009). More or less restrictive definitions of eGovernment have been given, but there is still no unique definition of the term (Yildiz, 2004). Nevertheless, it has been generally recognized that eGovernment offers a huge potential to increase the impact of government activities for citizens (Fang, 2002) . In this work, we use the general broad definition as follows: Given the non-unique nature of the definition, the research we propose can provide an analysis that can shed some light about the evolution of the general eGovernment concept. A similar approach has been applied to gather more information about the shared definition of eGovernment (Allan et al. , 2006; Hu et al. , 2009). In particular, authors were interested either in analyzing the evolution of the term in academic studies across a time-frame of 10 years, providing a sort of ontology of the eGovernment concept (Hu et al. , 2009) or in identifying differences in the usage of the concept in the academic world (Allan et al. , 2006). Our aim is just about identifying the popularity of the term among the masses. Our goal is to investigate the mass interest on eGovernment. We have used Google search engine ( www.google.com/ncr ) to search for articles all over the world. We started with collecting data from the most active European countries in eGovernment. Based on our experience (Russo and Succi, 2009; the COSPA project, FP6 STREP project ) and the case studies reported in IDABC repository , we decided to start with Spain, Germany, United Kingdom, Italy, Belgium and France. We later added Hungary to have both a representative of the East Europe and a country whose government we experienced to be motivated toward Open Source initiatives (partner of the COSPA EU project). After a first attempt of data collection, we realized we were too much optimistic. We had problems in mining newspapers‟ archives for non -Anglo-Saxon countries. Although we tried to use the localized translation of the keywords - e.g. in Spain we translated eGovernment in Admistracion Electronica and in France in administration electroniquè - we could not get a significant sample at the end. Specifically, this happened partially with France, and completely with Belgium and Hungary. With Spain, we succeeded, instead. Therefore, we decided to eliminate the data that were comparably low for France, Belgium, and Hungary and extend the research to USA in order to have a different perspective than a strict European one. To decide the engine to use in our collection, we have comparatively used the single web archive of the newspaper and Google news. The output of Google news was poor when used with several keywords and per single newspaper: slightly different queries reported different output. Searching in each newspaper‟s w eb page resulted more efficient, but we decided to use the advanced search of Google so to have a unique common engine, avoiding any difference in the queries, and to use the same algorithm of search. In any case, we compared our method with the single search in the newspaper‟s engine and we found little differences in our sample test. At the end, we used Google ...