The mission of the Electronic Governance Community Group (formerly W3C e-Government Interest Group) is to build and strengthen the community of people who actively develop, use or promote the use of W3C technologies to improve the working of government (Electronic Government) and its interactions with citizens, businesses, civil society and other arms of government (Electronic Governance).
As a part of its activities, the Group will identify and discuss essential areas of technology, organizational and social change, and related policy issues. Such areas include but are not limited to: access and accessibility; cloud computing; data licensing; education and outreach; government as a platform; interoperability; information sharing; innovation and innovation transfer; impact, public value and economic evaluation; knowledge management; mobile government; open government; privacy, security and sensitive data; standardization versus adaptation; transparency and accountability; whole-of-government; and others. The discussions will occur, among other places, on the Group's mailing list, in teleconference seminars, and at face-to-face gatherings. On the topics with sufficient interest and motivated participants, the group will form task forces to produce technical documents and policy recommendations, reach out to relevant communities, and even encourage the formation of specialized EGOV-related community groups.
Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time
Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.
Topical is facilitating the noting of content and the organizing of and use of notes. Ergonomics topics include the ease of noting content in Web browsers and implementation topics include the interoperability between browsers and notes and productivity software. Multimedia technology topics include speech recognition, electronic notetaking, transcriptionsoftware, online video formats and tracks, captioning and subtitles, multiple devices and second screen scenarios.
During campaign seasons, for each election and for each ballot issue interesting and relevant to users, users can note content, news articles, webpages and multimedia content, and can comment about content with their notes and comments later available for uses including review before voting. Users can do so, in a civic participation capacity, both during and between election campaign seasons.
Software users can dynamically indicate specific topics interesting to them and those topics can be of use in indexing, organizing and navigating their noted content. Users’ notes can be navigable with multiple visualizations (e.g. topic-based and calendar-based). Users’ notes can be indexed by candidates, ballot issues, keywords and the topics which interest users, so that each user, each voter, can make use of their notes conveniently.
On the topic of opinion polling, lists of topics interesting to users can be an opinion polling topic, empowering users while additionally conveniencing journalists and candidates.
In addition to the topics of e-voting, broader pertinent topics include: group decision making, digital forms, questionnaires, their construction, surveys, related data collection and opinion polls. Some technological topics include the design of forms, questionnaires, surveys and opinion polls, existing and new user interface components or widgets, and the collection, assurance, aggregation, analysis and visualization of more complex data.
That which was possible with paper can be far surpassed with digital technology and there exist opportunities in the advancement of technologies in the aforementioned areas including in ways which can facilitate new website features, new websites and new web services. We can advance technologies while addressing and overcoming concerns; for instance, those indicated in Social Influence Bias: A Randomized Experiment by Lev Muchnik, Sinan Aral and Sean J. Taylor.
With regard to both form and function of Web content resembling digital forms, questionnaires, surveys and opinion polls, in terms of comparing hypotheses and approaches, metrics can include that: (a) on some websites, that which the users are trying to do is to participate in rational group decision making processes, (b) on some websites, that which the users are trying to do is to express their opinions for aggregations which provide some benefit or utility.
Onto the topics of user interface elements or widgets, a list of user interface widgets is available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUI_widget#List_of_common_generic_widgets. New user interface concepts can expand what is possible in terms of the form and function of forms, questionnaires, surveys and opinion polls in ways pertinent to user experiences and to the collection, assurance, aggregation, analysis and visualization of more complex data.
An example of a new user interface or widget design concept is one with which users can drag and drop a number of items from one area of items, possibly randomized, into a sorted list area; that is, selecting 1 to n1 items from n2 items and sorting them. Example scenarios for such a widget include selecting items and prioritizing lists of items from larger numbers of policy topics or city budget topics. There may exist a larger number of new ideas for components and each new component or widget can facilitate an entire category of form, questionnaire, survey and opinion poll question.
In addition to lists of questions, directed acyclic graphs of questions or of groups of questions are possible and premises of sequences of questionnaire questions are additionally applicable to dynamic routes through questions which can vary based upon user input. Possible are forms or questionnaires with answer-dependent follow-up questions or sections of such questions in content and, furthermore, dynamic questionnaires can calculate topics and subtopics relevant to participants. In addition to intra-form navigation topics, there are inter-form navigation topics, for instance hyperlinks presented after the completion of forms, questionnaires, surveys and opinion polls with topics including the indexing, search and retrieval of such content and the data utilized in generating such content.
I think one of the first things we need in relation to e-governance is evoting .
For there to be a government people need to vote first. Considering all the noise that the Zimbabwe election is creating in terms of vote rigging , i just thought we should consider something along the lines of an electronic voting standard.
Here is a definition of evoting by Wikipaedia
Electronic voting (also known as e-voting) is a term encompassing several different types of voting, embracing both electronic means of casting a vote and electronic means of counting votes.
