Implementation of e-Government Using Knowledge-Based System

Objectives and experiences gained during the first period of the IST project Webocracy (IST-1999-20364 " Web Technologies Supporting Direct Participation i n Democratic Processes ") are described in the paper. Project Webocracy contributes to empowering citizen s with innovative communication; access and polling system supporting increased participation of citize ns in democratic processes and increase transparency and accessibility of public administration. User-driven approach is applied within the project. Therefore, at this initial stage of the project, us er requirements have been identified and based on them ; Webocracy system architecture is being refined. 1.. Introduction In [6] a three-phase strategy for implementing e-democracy is proposed (initiation, infusion and customization). E-government and e-politics are the re identified as elements of e-democracy. E-government informs citizens about their representatives and ho w they may be contacted. It also improves government effic iency by enabling citizens to pay transactions online. Wh ereas e-politics is the use of Web technology to improve the effectiveness of political decision-making supporti ng participation of citizens in this process. The first, initiation phase, starts with establishm ent of a portal that conveniently links citizens to (all lev els of) government. Next, infusion phase means restructurin g the organization in order to accommodate innovation. An d, finally, customization phase of e-democracy system implements a one-to-one relationship between citize n and government [6]. In the proposed system, we focus on support of infusion and mainly customization phases by various specialized modules that will be briefly described in section 3. Customization will enable citizens to fi nely focus on personally critical issues. Our approach is going towards the concept of strong democracy [2]. Unlike quick democracy that wants to speed up the decision-making processes, strong democracy wants to slow them down by involving peop le in discussion and deliberation processes [1]. The Webocracy project contributes to empowering citizens with innovative communication; access and opinion polling system supporting increased partici pation ofcitizensindemocraticprocessesandincrease transparency and accessibility of public administra tion. Main project objectives will be defined in more det ail within the next section 2. To achieve the technical objectives a Web-based Webocrat system will be desi gned and implemented. All project's objectives will be assessed and refin ed by deploying and evaluating the developed technologies in naturalistic settings by the user partners. The pro cess started at the very beginning with users' requireme nts analysis [5]. The results of this particular project phase …