Virgil Stoica and Andrei Ilas
thorities. Sixteen websites have discussion forums open to citizens, but local officials are rarely present. The websites do not have online opinion polls, do not offer a platform for a digital referendum or for an online petition.
When comparing the five dimensions score( Table 1), it can be noticed that“ usability” obtained both the highest individual score( 14.38) and the highest average score( 7.5). The performance decreases drastically when assessing the“ content”( 2.42) and goes to merely insignificant for the other three dimensions: 0.77 for“ services”, 0.55 for“ digital democracy” and 0.33 for“ security and personal data protection”. In other words, Romanian rural e‐Government scores relatively well on the technical dimension(“ usability”) but very poorly on the four substantive dimensions of e‐Government.
By comparing the rural scores with the urban ones obtained in a different research made by us, using the very same methodology( Stoica and Ilas, 2009), we observe that Romanian e‐rural government obtains lower scores but also much more compact ones( Figure 3). Hence, the average score for rural e‐Government is 11.51 compared with 17.65 for urban, while the results are less scattered for the rural areas.
Figure 2: Score distribution histogram for rural and urban Romanian e‐Government Table 2: Rural and urban e‐Government performance by dimensions
|
Urban |
Rural |
% |
General score |
17.65 |
11.51 |
65.21 |
Security |
0.94 |
0.34 |
35.10 |
Usability |
9.07 |
7.50 |
82.69 |
Contents |
4.18 |
2.42 |
57.89 |
Services |
2.02 |
0.77 |
38.12 |
Digital democracy |
1.45 |
0.55 |
37.93 |
The scores obtained for each dimension of the performance index are lower for rural than for urban. The closest scores are on“ usability”( 7.50 for rural and 9.07 for urban). For the other scores, the urban scores are several times bigger than the rural ones.
Romanian urban and rural e‐Government are identical when comparing the order of the scores obtained for each of the five dimensions: the best performance is obtained for“ usability”, followed in order by“ contents”,“ services”,“ digital democracy” and“ security”( Table2 and Figure3) This order suggests what is happening behind the webpage. At some moment, the page is created with the goal of openness and attraction towards a great number of citizens(“ usability”). It is, after all, a cheap way for local officials to reach the electors. The
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