Annelie Ekelin

Making e-government happen everyday co-development of services, citizenship and technology

In a joint research project concerning the use and design of IT in public services, we are using a simple figure of on-going design-oriented interactions to highlight shifting foci on relationships of co-development of services, citizenship and technology. We bring together a number of concrete examples of this on-going everyday co-development, presented from the different perspectives that we, as researchers from different disciplines and traditions, represent in the project. The article explores and discusses working relations of technology production and use that we see as central to what is actually making e-government happen - or not happen. The main challenge in this area, as we see it, concerns making visible, and developing supportive infrastructures for, the continuing local adaptation, development and design in use of integrated IT and public services.

Educational Programs in e-Government – An Active, Practice- and Design-Oriented Network?

In the autumn of 2004 two higher educational programs in e-government will be starting up at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden. Each will be the first of its kind in Scandinavia, and both will be offered as net-based education. The interdisciplinary group of researchers developing the educational programs sees the co-construction as the beginning of an active network of competence around higher education, R&D in the e-government area. Participatory Design, as well as ideas about e-government as ongoing co-construction, have inspired us in our work with developing the educational programs.

The AUGMENT project: co-constructive mapping and support of accessibility and participation

This paper presents an ongoing multi-disciplinary research-and development project in which we are exploring emerging methods and practices for participatory design of tools and content of accessibility information in India and Sweden, based on user created content. The initial development of the AUGMENT-Project also includes the production of a prototype for sharing information. The joint set up and unfolding of public digital spaces and cooperative creation of processes and infrastructure for user-driven accessibility information is making use of existing handheld mobile phones which offer the possibility to upload pictures and comments via an application with a map-based interface. The research initiative is exploring and comparing cross-cultural participatory methods for cultivation of shared transformational spaces. The paper discusses both the notion of user-driven content and co-creation of tools and methods, drawing upon the tradition of Scandinavian Systems Design, explicitly arguing for direct user-representation in systems development.

To be or not to be active: exploring practices of e-participation

This paper discusses the interplay of participation and non-participation within institutional and public practices of electronically mediated policy-making in the local public sector. The aim is to contribute to practice-centred development of situated theoretical conceptualisation in the research domain. Applying a dialectical analysis, including also examples and processes of dissociation detected in ethnographic studies of actual use and design of these technologies, suggests a re-specification of the conceptual basis of e-participation.

Enrolling local strategic actors in public portal development

This paper focuses on the seemingly routine but essential aspects of network formation by actors in an E-government context. A qualitative case study is used to explore portal development in public healthcare. The theoretical framework applied is Actor-Network Theory (ANT). The research question is: What factors contribute to the enrolment of strategic local actors in technology development in E-government? The results of the study show that the basic functionalities are of strategic importance for the enrolment of local actors in the portal development and its use. These functionalities act as enrolment devices. In complex environments, critical success factors for network formation require local support based on present usefulness of the functionalities and on long-term project organization that safeguards their future development.

What Have We Learned from the TANGO Arena for Regional Cooperation Around e-Government in Southern Sweden?

The TANGO e-government arena is a project in Southern Sweden, funded by the Innovative Actions of the European Regional Development Fund. The project is now nearing its end, and we are thus at the stage of reflectively reviewing what has actually been accomplished and how this relates to the original goals of the project. In July 2002, when the project began, the aim was to establish cooperation between the public sector, private enterprise and university-based research in designing public e-services. In cooperating around development of new, integrated services, catering to various categories of users as well as to a growing diversity of mobile technologies, we have aimed towards establishing feedback channels between practice and theory, between use and design, and between different academic disciplines where we see a need to synchronize the models and methods we work with. Our research questions have focused on exploring and managing multi-perspectivity as a resource for design. In this paper we look at how we organized our cooperation around these goals, and attempt to address those basic summing-up-the-project questions; How well have we succeeded? What have we learned in the process?

Discourses and Cracks

This paper discusses information technology as political and practical discourse. This repetitive discursive model can be distinguished in global, regional and local contexts and contains an optimistic belief in technology as an independent power that automatically furthers democratic development. The second part of the paper presents empirical material and experiences from the ‘Women Writing on the Net’ project. The aim was to build up a virtual space for women and use writing as aim, tool and method. This created a more complex understanding of the values of the predominant IT discourses and revealed the ‘cracks’ and possibilities for feminist definitions of these values.