THE MASS INTEREST IN EGOVERNMENT

Abstract

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 questions like a) what are the concepts that acquired more interest in recent years? b) what is the distribution of interest in concepts across countries? c) what is the evolution of interest across the years? Answering these questions is useful to understand the involvement of citizens in the strategy toward eGovernment. We mine Internet news and daily newspapers of various European countries and of the United States of America. Findings show that the popularity of the term become evident only around 2005 rapidly increasing in the last two years. There is an overall expectation on the new forthcoming strategy although not all the action lines have been assimilated in the same way.

Full text

tGov Workshop ‟10 (tGOV10)
March 18 – 19 2010, Brunel University, West London, UB8 3PH
Bruno Rossi et al. 1
The Mass Interest in eGovernment
THE MASS INTEREST IN EGOVERNMENT
Bruno Rossi, Center for Applied Software Engineering (CASE), Free University of Bolzano, Italy.
bruno.rossi@unibz.it
Barbara Russo, Center for Applied Software Engineering (CASE), Free University of Bolzano, Italy.
barbara.russo@unibz.it
Giancarlo Succi, Center for Applied Software Engineering (CASE), Free University of Bolzano,
Italy.
gsucci@unibz.it
Abstract
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 questions like a) what are the
concepts that acquired more interest in recent years? b) what is the distribution of interest in
concepts across countries? c) what is the evolution of interest across the years? Answering
these questions is useful to understand the involvement of citizens in the strategy toward
eGovernment. We mine Internet news and daily newspapers of various European countries and
of the United States of America. Findings show that the popularity of the term become evident
only around 2005 rapidly increasing in the last two years. There is an overall expectation on
the new forthcoming strategy although not all the action lines have been assimilated in the same
way.
Keywords: eGovernment, mass interest, European Commission Action Plan.
1 INTRODUCTION
In 2009, the European Commission has called for consultations for the new forthcoming Action Plan
i2020. In the consultations, the European Commission has rethought the top priorities in eGovernment
of the European governmental policy towards 2020, (Orientation Paper, 2009; Botterman, 2009). One
of the assumptions for this change is that eGovernment has experienced an evolution in the core
concerns of its policies. In its origins - after the Lisbon agenda in March 2000 (European Council,
2000) - eGovernment focussed on the introduction of ICT as support to governmental policies, as an
attempt to reach higher efficiency of the public service and, at a second stage, to the service
effectiveness. In particular, the first actions of the eGovernment strategies regarded the provision of
on-line services and the Internet literacy of the mass (European Commission, 2007). This led
eGovernment to focus on the quality of services offered to citizens as consumers. Later on, the more
mature concept of eGovernment moved to value to citizens and benefits to the stakeholders.
The evolution of eGovernment and the related strategies of the EU commissions have been issued in
the so-called Action Plans toward eGovernment, the Action Plan, i2010 (European Commission,
2005b). This happened five years after the Lisbon agenda. The current consultations for i2020 reveal a
new great ferment at political level. The EU government wants to move further, toward a new society
based on efficient public services that exploit IT to be competitive, user centric, and integrated. As
such, IT needs to support shared services and a single European platform for public 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

tGov Workshop ‟10 (tGOV10)
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Bruno Rossi et al. 2
The Mass Interest in eGovernment
this intent, various research projects have been implemented to evaluate the introduction of
eGovernment in public administrations (COSPA1, IntelCities2, etc). Technical and economic aspects
have been analysed and various case studies have been reported (IDABC3, ISA4). 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
circulation audited on December 31st 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.
2 EU ACTION PLANS AND ACTION LINES
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.
1 www.cospa-project.org
2 http://intelcities.iti.gr/intelcities
3 http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/
4 http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7706

tGov Workshop ‟10 (tGOV10)
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The Mass Interest in eGovernment
Figure 1: eGov i2010 policy deriving from the Lisbon Agenda (source: Varghese, 2005).
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:
“While the 2007 Strategic Lisbon Report confirms the prominence of ICT in structural reform
and half of the Member states have strengthened their R&D and ICT policies, many parts of the
EU still lag behind in adoption ICT. … As the Internet permeates daily life, public expectations
and concerns about the information society are changing. Safeguards need to evolve to match
technology and market developments, without stifling the huge opportunities that on-line social
and economic activity offers.” (European Commission, 2005a)
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).
Conditions
Applications
Interoperability
eID management
Legal Frame
Service Directive & Human Mobility
Inclusiveness
Cross Border Services
User Centricity
eParticipation
Organisational Change
Green Government
Table 1. Action Lines for a post i2010 policy (source: OrientationPaper, 2009).
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.

tGov Workshop ‟10 (tGOV10)
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Figure 2. Evolution of eGovernment. (Source: United Nations, 2008).
3 THE RESEARCH GOAL
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?
4 THE CONCEPT OF EGOVERNMENT
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:
“The use of technology to enhance the access to and delivery of government services to benefit
citizens, business partners and employees.” (Deloitte Research, 2003)
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.
5 THE DATA COLLECTION
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;

tGov Workshop ‟10 (tGOV10)
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the COSPA project, FP6 STREP project5) and the case studies reported in IDABC repository6, 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 web 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
news when we searched for one keyword per time without specifying a specific newspaper and we
used the advanced search engine when we cumulative search over several terms in the top three
newspapers per country.
For each country and newspaper, we have searched for eGovernment and all its modifications (e.g. e-
Government, using Google advanced search). The final data collected consists of hits referring to news
appeared in the newspapers during the time window 2000-2009. The time window starts from the
Lisbon agenda strategy meeting (2000), that was the official origin in Europe of the debate on
eGovernment. Each hit is an html text concerning at least one of the keywords indexed by the date. No
video or document has been considered. We have performed a search filtered on all the major national
newspapers selecting three for each country under study. To select the three newspapers, we have used
the ranking of newspapers by circulation (e.g. for the United States
http://abcas3.accessabc.com/ecirc/newstitlesearchus.asp) and we have chosen the top three out of
them. Table 2 illustrates the newspapers and the total number of articles found for eGovernment.
In addition, to test our technique and to understand the scope of our investigation, we investigate the
interest of Internet users, evaluating the number of articles published on the web in the countries under
study. In this case, we have searched for all the keywords related to the major action lines of the
European Commission (Table 3, per country, using Google news).
5 http://www.cospa-project.org/
6 http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/

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Newspaper
Website
Total for
eGovernment
Country
La Repubblica
www.repubblica.it
73
I
Il Corriere della Sera
www.corriere.it
42
I
Il Sole 24 Ore
www.ilsole24ore.it
142
I
El päis
www.elpais.com
32
ES
El Mundo
www.elmundo.es
18
ES
ABC
www.abc.es
9
ES
The New York Times
www.nytimes.com
108
USA
The Wall Street Journal
online.wsj.com
53
USA
The Los Angeles Times
www.latimes.com
35
USA
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
www.faz.net
192
D
Die Zeit
www.zeit.de
58
D
Süddeutsche Zeitung
www.sueddeutsche.de
46
D
Le Figaro
www.lefigaro.fr
-
FR
Le Monde
www.lemonde.fr
-
FR
La Croix
www.la-croix.com
-
FR
Times
www.timesonline.co.uk
78
UK
Daily Telegraph
www.telegraph.co.uk
56
UK
The Independent
www.independent.co.uk
58
UK
Table 2. The major newspapers considered in the research
5.1 Longitudinal Study
For our queries, we use the concepts identified in the Action lines i2010 (Table 1). Table 3 displays
the resulting tokens used in search engines.
Concept
Tokens used
eGovernment
[„eGovernment‟ OR „e-Government‟]
Interoperability
„interoperability‟ AND [„eGovernment‟ OR „e-Government‟]
Legal Frame
„legal‟ AND [„eGovernment‟ OR „e-Government‟]
Inclusiveness
„interoperability‟ AND [„eGovernment‟ OR „e-Government‟]
OR „eInclusiveness‟OR „e-Inclusiveness‟]
eParticipation
[„eParticipation‟ OR „e-Participation‟]
eProcurement
[„eProcurement‟ OR „e-Procurement‟]
Table 3. Mapping concepts to tokens in search queries.
For each concept, the query consists of a combination of several terms.
6 POPULARITY OF EGOVERNMENT IN EU COUNTRIES
In this section, we discuss the popularity of the term eGovernment in some European countries
(United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, Spain, and France) and in the United States. The popularity
concerns people posting and discussing the concepts in Internet. For this, we query Google News
archives for the term eGovernment and its modification (egovernment OR e-government) (Table 7).
For countries like Spain we used also the local term for eGovernment (egovernment OR e-government
OR e-gobierno OR "administracion electronica") and for France we used the query (egovernment OR
e-government OR e-gouvernment OR "administration electronique"). For each country, we used the
specific instantiation of the Google News search engine.

tGov Workshop ‟10 (tGOV10)
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The results show a common pattern in the majority of the countries: a decreasing popularity of the
term that is particularly evident for UK, and US (Table 4). The highest peak is around 2003. In Spain,
there is an evident delay of the popularity and a recent increase.
Country (hits)
Evolution (2000-2010)
US (57.100)
UK (51.400)
Spain (7.850)
Germany (5.620)
Italy (4.480)
France (1.800)
Table 4. Evolution of the popularity of the „eGovernment‟ concept. Source: Google.
6.1 Impact of post i2010 Action Lines Concepts in EU Countries
In this section, we evaluate the popularity of the specific concepts established in 2005 with the i2010
Action lines. We considered United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy as target countries – the ones with
the majority of data - and we browsed the Internet for the terms in Table 3.
For the United Kingdom, the interest of Internet users is particularly high in interoperability and legal
frame in eGovernment. The evolution of their popularity is decreasing in time, though (Table 5). They
are still the two most important concepts in eGovernment, but they are more popular around year
2003. The interest in eProcurement is large in the UK. Nevertheless, the trend shows that the interest is
decreasing gradually starting from year 2002. Conversely, if we look at ePartecipation, the term
acquires more importance in the last few years. eInclusiveness has a peak in 2008 but it does not show
a precise pattern or a special interest in the ten years considered.

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Concept (hits)
Graph
Interoperability (1.640)
Legal Frame (3.340)
eInclusiveness (31)
eProcurement (23.400)
eParticipation (632)
Table 5. UK – historical results 2000-2009. Source: Google.
For Germany, the response is similar to United Kingdom as to what pertains the legal frame, with
peaks in years 2003-2004 and a reduction in interest in subsequent years stabilizing in 2009 (Table 6).
The most popular topics result Legal Frame and eInclusiveness. eInclusiveness also shows a
decreasing interest in 2008-2009, but has raised the attention of the Internet users constantly in the ten
years. There is large interest in eProcurement, but also in this case, the trend is decreasing approaching
year 2009. In Germany, eParticipation has never been so considered. There is a peak in 2004 and small
interest in 2009.

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Concept (hits)
Graph
Interoperability
(136)
Legal Frame
(375)
gesetzlich
eInclusiveness
(396)
integration
eProcurement
(1.350)
eParticipation
(30)
Table 6. Germany – historical results 2000-2009. Source: Google.
For Italy, the results show a delay in the interest in the first two initial years. Interoperability is the hot
topic in eGovernment (Table 7). Legal frames and eInclusiveness have peaks of interest around 2004,
but also an increase in interest in 2009. Differently from the other countries examined, the interest for
eProcurement is growing in the latest years. Also in the case of Italy, there is a growing interest
towards eParticipation in recent years. This is a concept that only recently acquired the interest of the
masses.

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Concept (hits)
Graph
Interoperability
(294)
Legal Frame (140)
eInclusiveness (120)
eProcurement (600)
eParticipation (30)
Table 7. Italy – historical results 2000-2009. Source: Google.
7 EVOLUTION OF THE INTEREST OF THE MASS
Table 8 reports of the cumulative results (over all the terms in Table 3) of our search in the top three
national daily newspapers of the countries under study. These numbers significantly differ from the
ones found in the previous section as they refer to articles for non-specialised people found in three
specific newspapers per country. For example, the trend in Germany shows a very low pace and a
small total number. This might be also due to the newspapers culture in Germany and the circulation
of specialised magazine in the country. Traditional newspapers might not be willing to be involved in
technical issues. There might be some resistance to publish article that cannot be understood
immediately by the mass. As such, we would better focus on the type of trend more than on the
number of articles. For Germany, the trend is constantly increasing.
In total, Italy has the major number of hits per year followed by Spain and United States of America.
Italy and Spain follow the trend we found mining the Internet news.
Country
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
Tot
Italy
16
24
32
41
31
18
22
40
78
149
451
Germany
0
2
2
4
4
9
7
19
12
30
89
USA
20
7
14
6
10
6
11
5
37
86
202
UK
8
6
4
3
2
8
6
12
20
32
101
Spain
2
1
4
10
1
7
7
13
24
184
253
Table 8. Interest of the mass- Cumulative results by country

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Reading the evolution over time (Figure 3), we see a clear peak in number of hits in the last year with
Spain that leads the group. Over years, the trend shows a slow pace before 2007 after which a new
increase appears.
Figure 3. Interest of the mass - Cumulative results by country
8 DISCUSSION
In our study, we aim at understanding the interest of the mass in eGovernment. Although there is a
great ferment among the government, political, and IT professionals, little literature refers of any
involvement of non-qualified citizens. Namely, people might not be so excited or aware of this change
in public services. To verify our hypothesis, we analysed the information of on-line mass media
assuming that journalists write on topics of large and mass interest. As such, we inspected both the
internet hits on eGovernment and the corresponding articles in the most circulating daily newspapers
of the major countries active in the change of the public services. We also investigated the interest of
the Internet users as a comparative means on popularity.
Our analysis reveals that the number of articles referring to eGovernment is increasing in the last 10
years after the Lisbon agenda meeting (March 2000). Nevertheless, our data reports that the increase is
slow and therefore the interest in eGovernment has not been fast in taking off. In many cases, articles
start to grow after 2004 and the majority of the news refers to the last two years. Notice that the US
newspapers follow a similar trend.
Different is the trend of hits in Internet. The information over the Internet (with no control on the
source) has a peak about 2003-2004 stabilizing in the last two years. Furthermore, not all the action
lines of the European Commission raise the same interest in all the countries. For example,
eParticipation is almost neglected in the Italian and German websites in Internet. People of Internet
include experts and researchers that have different access and interest in the specific area. The stable
trend of the last two years might be connected again with the expectations for the new strategy toward
2020 of the European Commission. Eventually, when the news on the new actions will be officially
issued, professional articles will increase to discuss and support future changes in eGovernment.
Overall, from our results, it seems that population is now aware of the Lisbon agenda and the related
strategies toward eGovernment. The interest has reached the mass only about 2005, though (Figure 3).
This delay might be motivated by the fact that the European Commission issued a well-defined
strategy toward eGovernment only in 2005. The interest in eGovernment of the mass is not decreasing
and has a peak in 2009. This might be again justified by the forthcoming new Action Plan. Internet
users have anticipated the mass interest although not all the action lines have been considered with the
same attention. There is an expectation of professionals and researchers for the new forthcoming
European plan toward eGovernment. Might it be related to Transformational Government (Russo and
Succi, 2009; Cabinet Office of the British Prime Minister, 2007)?

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9 LIMITATION OF OUR TECHNIQUE
We acknowledge the fact that our data collection might have some limits. The first is the use of
Google. The search with Google is extremely sensitive to the sequence of actions one performs to
define the token and the whole query. We noticed, in fact, that querying several times for the same
concept but with a different type of selection of the dates or using a localization of Google, result with
some little variations of the final answer. For this reason, we were very careful in repeating exactly the
same actions and we used Google international (www.google.com/ncr) for all our searches.
Furthermore, we are well aware that searching for a specific term like e-participation might result in
articles not referring to eGovernment as the term participation is common in other topics and the
search engine of Google might find results concerning the two terms “e” and “participation”. For this
reason, we mined Internet for couple or triples of terms containing eGovernment or its modifications
together with the specific term eParticipation. We also inspected samples of our data to verify that
articles were pertinent.
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