Evolving an Open E-Governance Index for Network Societies

"Despite the proliferation of different ICT indices, the OeGI has unique features: (1) it measures the extent to which civil society groups utilise ICTs to ensure their participation in societal steering; and (2) it measures the extent of openness in the social and political environment to ensure that citizen engagement / participation is realised."

The Open e-Governance Index (OeGI) is a framework for measuring open e-governance, developed and tested in four Asian countries in 2012. OeGI goes beyond an understanding of e-governance in terms of ensuring the efficient and transparent use of e-government services within each national jurisdiction, to examine appropriate online tools that allow greater participation by civil society groups in political and economic decision-making, and in the planning, implementation, and assessment of programmes and projects. This research report from Making All Voices Count discusses the second phase of OeGI project, which examined whether the framework was applicable to countries outside Asia. It describes the concept and methodology of the OeGI and provides an overview of its use in five countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

According to the report, open e-governance is about how state and non-state actors use information and communications technologies (ICTs) to steer society collectively. Traditionally understood as a lack of restriction or concealment, openness signifies not only a preference for increased access to information and greater citizen participation in decisions regarding a society's future using technology, but also the presence of enabling or constraining political, legal, economic, and social structures and institutions. With this conception in mind, the Foundation for Media Alternatives (FMA), a non-governmental organisation (NGO) involved in research, training, and advocacy for ICT for development (ICT4D) issues, developed a framework for measuring open governance through the use of the OeGI. The OeGI project defines open e-governance as the presence of:

• meshed e-government: the ability of government to provide integrated, citizen-centric online services;
• e-participation channels: the existence of digital channels for public engagement that complement existing face-to-face or traditional media-led interactions;
• digital inclusion: the presence of policies and programmes that support the public's wider use of ICTs for development;
• civil society use of ICTs: the use of ICTs by non-state actors to promote their interests in the public sphere; and
• an open legal and policy ecosystem: the extent of access among the general public to information and knowledge, and government recognition of the right to free expression and rights over personal communication, cultural freedom, and the use of local languages.

The work in this report builds on an earlier effort by FMA, with partners in several countries, to develop and popularise the OeGI. An initial framework and assessment tool was developed and pilot tested in Hong Kong, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand in 2012, with funding support from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). While it was implemented as a pure research project during the pilot phase (OeGI 1.0), the organisers hoped that future iterations would allow it to be more action-oriented. Thus, the objectives of the OeGI 2.0 project, which ran from January 2016 to March 2017, were to: further understand democratic e-governance, particularly through developing the discourse of open e-governance; help develop policy on ICTs and governance, and engage policy stakeholders directly around the notions of open e-governance; and develop a concrete resource for citizens / individuals and groups / NGOs to engage policymakers on open e-governance.

This framework was used to assess e-governance in Colombia, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Uganda. (The following organisations participated in the assessments: Colnodo in Colombia; ICT Watch in Indonesia; Bytes for All in Pakistan; FMA in the Philippines; and the Collaboration of International and ICT Policy Center for Eastern and Southern Africa (CIPESA) in Uganda. Each country team conducted the three main research activities - desk research, key informant interviews, validation workshop - in their respective countries.) Section 2 of the report provides an analysis of the research’s conceptual framework, followed by a comparison of various e-government indices (Section 3), and an assessment of the methodology used (Section 4). Section 5 presents and discusses the results from the research process, and Section 6 provides conclusions and recommendations.

In brief, a country assessment tool (a scorecard) was used to evaluate the OeGI in each country. Of the dimensions considered, the highest average scores were recorded for digital inclusion and an open legal and policy ecosystem (see Table 3 on page 22).

• The high score for digital inclusion indicates that the five countries place a high priority on closing the digital divide and ensuring that the benefits of ICTs are widely enjoyed. This bodes well for open e-governance, as more people will eventually participate in the collective steering of society using ICTs, and suggests that the majority will soon be on the positive side of the digital divide.
• The high score for an open legal and policy ecosystem means that in these five countries there are few policy, legal, and societal impediments to citizen participation in governance - with or without the use of ICTs.
• The dimension with the next highest score is an ICT-empowered civil society. This means that in the five countries reviewed, civil society organisations (CSOs) are actively using ICTs in their internal work, dealing with allies, and engaging the public.
• The average score for the e-participation dimension was the lowest. This means that engaging citizens using ICTs is not a priority for the five governments in this study. Stakeholders in open e-governance need to lobby for more policies and projects to broaden the channels of participation in these countries. Further, norms for transparency and accountability are critical in ensuring that national ICT systems can be used for political and socio-economic progress.

The researchers assert that, while there are many indices that measure e-governance (see Section 3), the OeGI 2.0 includes specific dimensions not found in similar indices. The other indices put a premium on the efficiency of the delivery of e-government services (and, thus, more economically advanced countries have higher scores), and less on the ability of these nations to improve access to ICTs for different sectors of society, especially NGOs and people's organisations, and their right to communicate. In this specific iteration of the OeGI framework (OeGI 2.0), the researchers found that the framework is appropriate for contexts outside of Asia. More specifically, developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America share common issues in terms of ensuring that the tools and mechanisms in terms of online participation are made available, and in ensuring that there is wide participation by civil society and other groups in policy and project decision-making, planning, implementation, and evaluation.

However, they say, there are still refinements that should be made if the project is to be implemented on a larger scale in the future. For example, there should be focus on the implementation of policies and projects that lead to open e-governance - not just their presence. For instance, Pakistan scored highly in the digital inclusion dimension because it has plans and strategies, but this does not reflect the fact that internet penetration in Pakistan is a little over 30% of the population, and these policies may only be applicable to a small portion of the population. One of the suggestions made during the synthesis workshop was the possibility of including indicators to measure how a policy/policies are being implemented by a country, perhaps by splitting the score for an indicator as 50% for presence of policy and 50% for implementation. In addition, "[i]t would be good to test the OeGI in more countries, to get a sense of what the e-governance trends are in different regions. Furthermore, conducting this evaluation process more regularly should provide a picture of how governments are progressing in each area, starting from the baseline established during this initial study."