Government At Glance

A new and very interesting survey from OECD has recently been launched called Government at Glance. This survey focuses on public administration and is intended to be a bi-annual survey of the OECD members.

The survey is categorized into indicators. Each indicator is composed of results from multiple questions. These are individually weighted discretized into a single score per grouping of indicator. The indicators are grouped as following:

• Delegation: Composed of among others checking if there is a agency for human resources on national level.
• Recruiting system: Composed of among others how a person becomes a public servant (direct application or competitive examination).
• Performance-related pay: Composed of among others who gets performance related pay.
• Performance assessment: Composed of among others how important performance assessment is related to career advancement.
• Mid-term perspective: This is divided into; Estimates such as how often are multi-year estimated updated and Targets/Ceilings such as how many years does a target cover.
• Performance Budget: Composed of among others if the ministries are required to report on performance against targets.
• Executive flexibility: Composed of among others if the ministries have the authority to cancel spending once the budget has been approved.
• Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA)-process: Composed of among others if RIA carried out before new regulations are adopted.
• Programmes for reduction of administrative burdens: Composed of among others if there is an explicit programme to reduce the administrative burdens.

The survey also includes how core values within government has changed from 2000 to 2009, shown in the following figure:

Some of the other key findings includes that governments are increasingly using private and non-profit entities to provide goods and services. Furthermore, that only between 10% and 60% of the population use eGovernment services.

Online Tools for Analyzing your Web Site

It is unfortunately not possible to get a complete overview of how well a web site is working for the users by only using automatic analysis tools. However, there exists many tools which give valuable indications.

Web Accessibility

It should be clearly noted that in order to make a web site successfully working for all users, including users with disabilities, automatic accessibility measurements is not sufficient. In fact, only 20% of the tests defined in the Unified Web Evaluation Methodology can be measured automatically. However, many tools of automatic accessibility evaluation exists. Following are some of these;

• The eAccessibility Checker detects web accessibility barriers using tests from the Unified Web Evaluation Methodology.
• Walidator is another online tool based on the Unified Web Evaluation Methodology. In addition to automatic evaluation, the Walidator also assists in manual evaluation.
• WAVE is interesting tool for web accessibility analysis which, in contrast to most other tools, does not a report or list of all the detected barriers. It presented the evaluated web page visually as well as clearly marking the detected barriers.
• TAW is a tool which, in addition to WCAG1.0 and WCAG2.0 could present accessibility according to the W3C mobileOK Basic Tests.

Code Validation

(x)HTML and CSS are the most used technologies on web pages. There are many reasons to have valid (x)HTML and CSS. To mention a few; valid code is important to make sure the web pages are rendered similarly in different browsers, to help faster loading in web browsers and to reduce maintenance. The World Wide Web consortium (W3C) has also gathered opinions from the web community validation of web pages.

I would be surprised if many disagree with me when I say that hard to take a professional web site seriously if there has not even valid HTML. Thankfully, making sure web pages are implemented with valid (x)HTML and CSS is both easy and fool proof.

• The classic and de facto standard of (x)HTML validation is the W3C Markup Valid Service.
• Similarly, the de facto standard for CSS validation is the W3C Jigsaw.
• Additionally, the CSE HTML Validator Lite does similar work as the W3C Markup Validator, but it has a little more detailed interface.

Broken Links

Another issue which can easily be checked automatically is detecting links which are no longer working (broken links). When you create a web site you typically link to the relevant resources – both internal and external. As the web site grows, chances are that the number of links to external resources also grows. Naturally, it would be a tedious process to manually verify that your links are still working, which is why we have automatic tools for doing exactly this:

• One such tool is the SiteReportCard. In addition to broken links, it also checks for spelling errors, search engine hits and more. This is definitely worth a try.
• Another similar tool to check for broken links, HTML syntax, etc. is Dr Watson.

Performance

Web Site performance can also be carried out automatically.

• Websiteoptimization.com has a web page speed test.  This tool provides information on the web page size and download duration with various connection rates. In addition, it provides suggestions on improve the performance of the evaluated web site such as adding HTTP compression, reducing the size of scripts etc.

• Load Impact is a more  thorough performance analysis tool. Among the useful features, it sends multiple requests to the evaluated web site in order to get an overview of how many simultaneous requests (users) the web site can handle.

Open Source in French eGovernment

Recently, a very interesting survey on open source in the French government has been presented. Following is a short summary of this survey, which I thought could be a nice follow up on my recent blog post on open source in eGovernment.

This French survey shows that 96% of the French public sector use open source.

According to the report, 77% use open source for the maturity of the software, which is the most common reason. This is of course not a property of open source itself but a consequence of well carried out open source development in these projects.

Furthermore, very much related to government transparency, 67% say they use open source software to be independent from their vendor. 48% say they use open source for interoperability, while 43% say they use it because of public policies.

Open Source in eGovernment

I have recently had the fortunate opportunity to listen to several talks from the open source evangelist Bruce Perens. This inspired me to do a short survey on the use of open source in eGovernment.

There is no question that open data and open source are key elements to ensure transparency in government. Any scientific survey on these topics will tell you this, such as: Government Transparency via Open Data and Open Source, Open Source Government Transparency Projects, etc. Furthermore, not surprisingly, the European Commission reported that open source software as well as the use of open standards are necessary for successful interoperability.

Despite of this, a recent paper by Robert Deller and Veronique Guillox,

Determining relevance of “best practice” based on interoperability in European eGovernment initiatives, identified that open source and open systems are unfortunately significantly under utilized when efficiency is measured in government services. In fact, Deller and Guillox’ data indicates that open source is the most under-represented characteristic when benchmarking interoperable systems. The study shows that only 6% of the best practice initiatives from the ePractice portal had explicit requirements for an open systems. Similarly, as much as 84% of the initiatives had absolutely no indication that open source were part of the initiative.

In contrast, an excellent project which won the ePractice good practice label 2007 is PloneGov. The project is still innovating and is again a finalist for the good practice label in 2009 (and has won several other impressive awards). The project has realized that government agencies world wide often have similar requirements and face similar challenges. Thus, PloneGov attempts to unite efforts and focus on creating portals for local governments and cities. There is no question that they do this very well; the PloneGov reference list is impressive and speaks for itself.

Joomla is another open source portal which has been used for local governments web sites. We are for example starting to see this used by several Norwegian municipality web sites. I work with Norwegian municipalities myself and have often been surprised that we have not seen more open source projects such as Joomla used for the web sites. Norway has 430 municipalities, most of which have very similar requirements, this is specially true for their web sites. This should be the ideal situation for use of open source software. It will be interesting to see how Joomla will compete with the well established proprietary vendors in the Norwegian marked.

Another eGovernment tool based on open source and open standards recognized by ePractice is openFWPA. Even though it is currently only deployed used in Asturia, Spain, it is a large application which has the potential to make collaboration between public entities more transparent and much easier – both in Spain and globally. This project has a huge potential and it will be exiting to see if other government agencies will start to utilize this in the future.

Let us hope that we see many more excellent open source government projects in the future as well as more transparent eGovernment.

unfortunately

ITU promotes implementation of UN convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) promotes an implementation of United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. A forum, hosted by the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology of Thailand, addressed policy and regulatory measures to promote accessibility in ICT. According to the press release, this is the first effort to promote implementation of ICT provisions in UN on the rights for persons with disabilities.

For more details, see the press release from ITU.

European eGovernment Award

The list of finalists and good practices for the European eGovernment Award has been made available.

Among the most interesting finalists are:

• Jämför service (Sweden) – Comparing services in Stockholm.
• NemHandel (Denmark) – Open Shared e-business infrastructure.
• PloneGov (Belgium) – Open Source Collaboration for Public Sector.

Among the most interesting good practices are the

• MyGuide (United Kingdom) -  eGovermnent courses.
• e-VEM (Slovenia) – One-stop-shop for companies. e-VEM was also among the winner of the United Nations public service day award.

Accessibility of Evaluation Tools

A very interesting blog has been posted by Peter Krantz addressing the Pitfalls of Accessibility Evaluation Tools.

This post shows that web accessibility evaluation tools are not consistent when it comes to presenting accessibility barriers. Furthermore, most of the evaluation tools find a significant amount of barriers on the remaining tools as well as on their own tool.

The post is available at Standards Schmandards.

Correlation Between Manual and Automatic Accessibility Testing

In this post we provide a short introduction to two methodologies for measuring accessibility of public web sites; (1) Norge.no – an annual survey carried out by the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (DIFI) on quality of Norwegian public web sites and (2) eGovMon – a fully automatic tool based on the Unified Web Evaluation Methodology. Finally we present, despite methodological differences, a strong correlation between the results of these two surveys.

Norge.no

The survey is carried out by the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (DIFI) on quality of public web sites. The results are presented annually and are receive a lot of attention by web site owners, policy makers as well as in the popular media.

The survey consists of 34 indicators in the area of accessibility, usability and relevance. Twelve of the indicators are on accessibility from which seven are directly related Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 level 1,2 and 3. The survey is carried out manually by experts and the results are presented as stars on web site level; 6 stars are awarded to the best web sites while the web sites with most potential for improvement receive only 1 star.

eGovMon

The eGovMon tool is based on Unified Web Evaluation Methodology using the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 level 1 and 2.  The
eGovMon system is an implementation of the fully automated monitoring application scenario. In total the system consists of  23 web accessibility tests both on (x)HTML and CSS. On web site level, the results are presented as number of barriers found over number of tests applied (UWEM score). The most accessible web sites will receive 0%, while those with most improvement potential will receive 100%.

Correlation between results.

We evaluated automatically 414 of the Norwegian municipalities using the eGovMon tool and compared these to the results presented by Norge.no. In the figure below we plot the results from both Norge.no and eGovMon. From this figure, we can see that the average eGovMon web site score improves the more stares appointed by Norge.no. From this we can conclude that there is a strong correlation.

This is true for all groups except the web sites which received six stars, which indicates that good accessibility (six stars by Norge.no) can not be identified by automatic evaluation alone but needs to be supported by manual assessments.

This is based on a scientific publication Benchmarking and improving the quality of
Norwegian municipality web sites for 5th International Workshop on Automated Specification and Verification of Web Systems 2009 by Morten Goodwin Olsen, Annika Nietzio, Mikael Snaprud and Frank Fardal.

Measuring Transparency

Transparency is seen as an important part of good governance. It is even one of the eight characteristics of good governance according to UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), defining transparency as following:
“Transparency means that decisions taken and their enforcement are done in a manner that follows rules and regulations. It also means that information is freely available and directly accessible to those who will be affected by such decisions and their enforcement. It also means that enough information is provided and that it is provided in easily understandable forms and media”.

Even though addressing open governments is a common goal for all transparency indicators, there exists no uniformly accepted list of indicators. The approaches are often from different perspectives such as political, economic, media, human rights or business and thus see transparency slightly different.

Following are some of the most well known methodologies/surveys on assessing transparency:

• Sunshine Review: The Sunshine Review presents a list of checklist important for a transparent government. The survey is on web sites in the United States of America and aims at putting pressure on web site owners to become more transparent. Unfortunately, there is no justification of why the items are important.
• eGEP (eGovernment Economics Project): The eGEP project has developed a framework to assess the impact of e-government services in three main areas: efficiency, democracy and effectiveness. Democracy is further divided into openness, transparency accountability and participation. The data sources include third party assessment, administrative records data, web metrics data and automatic web crawler software.
  It should be noted that a second version of eGep, eGEP 2.0, is under development.
• Overheid.nl monitor: Overheid.nl assess Dutch web sites on six different areas including transparency to the public. The data is mostly collected manually.
• BEGIX (Balanced E-Government Index): BEGIX is a self-assessment questionnaire for e-government and e-democracy. consisting oif in total 27 questions. Six of these questions are on transparency.
• Norge.no: The Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (Direktoratet for forvaltning og IKT, DIFI) assess public Norwegian web sites annually. The methodology consists of three parts, accessibility, usability and useful content. Useful content is highly related to transparency as they look at whether users can find basic information, if the web site provides feedback, etc.

This post is based on information from the State-of-the-art Review: transparency indicators originally prepared by Lasse Berntzen, Annika Nietzio, Morten Goodwin Olsen, Ahmed AbdelGawad, Mikael Snaprud

Accessibility of PDF documents

Similar to (x)HTML and CSS, which are the technologies use for traditional web pages, PDF documents may be designed with accessibility in mind. Today, most of the public PDF documents are inaccessible.

Scanned PDFs

A typical example of an inaccessible PDF is a scanned document originally consisting of mostly text. Assistive technologies, such as screen readers used by for example visually impaired users, are designed to read normal text. However, if a PDF is scanned, even when it consist of only text, it is perceived as an image. These images can not easily be interpreted as text by a screen reader, and the document would for the users who require text to be read out loud, be completely inaccessible.

Structured elements.

PDF documents may contain structured elements, often referred to as “tags”.
Tags in PDFs are used to denote the semantics of the text such as headings, images, links etc. As an example, when headings are properly tagged, users can navigate through the document using the chapter and section headings. In contrast, if the PDF is untagged, headings and paragraph texts are indistinguishable and navigating using the headings is not possible. Clearly, for large documents, navigating through the document is challenging if not close to impossible.

It should be noted that as with (x)HTML, tags can be used improperly. Letting a PDF be tagged does not by itself guarantee
that the document is barrier free. This is rather prerequisite for accessible PDF documents.

Access to content.

Occasionally, PDF documents restrict users to copy the text. Unfortunately, by enabling this option, it affects the assistive technologies in a negative manner. These technologies, such as screen readers, are restricted from extracting the content.

Language specified.

When a text is read out it is essential that it is read in correct language / dialect as the text is written. As an example, synthetic reading of an English text with German pronunciation will be impossible to understand. It is therefor important that the language is specified in the PDF so that the proper pronunciation could be applied by screen readers. Most PDFs are missing language specification.

Test PDF accessibility.

To test for the above issues PDFs can be done with eAccessibility Checker and providing a URL toa PDF document. Note that the eAccessibility Checker is experimental and may at times be unavailable.