Greetings from the KnowNet Initiative at http://www.knownet.org and the Digital Governance Initiative at http://www.digitalgovernance.org

Digital Governance is a project of the KnowNet Initiative. KnowNet Initiative aims to popularize the use of ICT for empowerment and development in developing countries, while DigitalGovernance.org explores and disseminates innovative models by which ICT can be used in developing countries to lead to better governance. Do have a look at both the websites and we are sure that you will find a lot of useful resources in it.

We now have over 950 members from over 85 countries as a part of this virtual initiative launched over 18 months back. And this has singularly contributed to maintaining rich and diverse information
resources on both the websites. We now have resources from Nepal, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Vietnam, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Brazil, Peru, Argentina, Costa Rica, Guyana, Pakistan, Israel, India and many others. I thank all the contributors who over the months have shared different web resources, links and case studies through this initiative.

Both the initiatives function on a continuous learning mode. And more knowledge products (similar to this) would be brought into light in the subsequent updates. These occasional updates may be subscribed by sending a blank email to [email protected] The updates are basically a compilation and reflection of the experiences shared by many of the E-governance practitioners and researchers working in the South.

We are still at the beginning of the century and yet very exciting developments are happening on the E-governance front in South. More and more number of people are getting connected to some or other form of telecommunication and the network of interconnected people is geometrically rising. Whilst it is true that link to emails/ Internet is integral to large sections of people living in developed countries and there is a huge North-South divide in terms of connectivity, it does not mean that the South is not benefiting from getting connected to the telecommunications network. Interestingly, in comparison, the impacts of getting connected are very much different. And "Impacting Governance" is the front where the adoption of modern technologies could lead to (and is leading to) more radical changes in South than in North.

And the South may have so much more to offer on how to innovatively use ICT to impact on governance processes. This is because, the Southern models often create communication channels between Individuals and Governance mechanisms where none existed earlier and thus lead to their greater popularity and faster adoption. Nevertheless, this does not imply that E-governance should become an elixir or the only desirable solution for better governance.

Electronic Governance has to be realized by focusing on the two-way link between Government and Citizens.

The link from Government to Citizens, provides an interface for the Government to reach out to the citizens. But this will happen only if the Government promotes the culture of information-sharing and has the intentions to foster participation and create greater awareness among the citizens. This often may not be the case and such an attitude will not happen immediately, especially at the national level. Information continues to be power in countries with high levels of information asymmetry and sharing of information could thus be construed as lessening of power or having to be more transparent- both of which- may high political risks in the eyes of traditional power holders. Nevertheless, changes could be incremental. For instance, in India, some of the States went much ahead in putting state government related information and procedures on the Internet, in comparison to the country as a whole. And it was often because of the positive efforts of some individual politicians/ government offices who take the political risk and in process paved way for a more transparent governance. The incremental effect has led to a more concerted efforts such as national recommendations to earmark $587 million in addition to the 3 percent plan outlay of each ministry for e-governance and convergence projects. In some countries, the seeds of change has been more at the national level and the central governments have served as a role model for the state governments to follow. The process of using e-governance may be incremental or centralized but the effectiveness of such government provided interface will still largely be dependent on the level of openness and risk-bearing capacity of the Government officials/ offices to make way for direct citizen involvement.

The other link is from Citizen to the Government-in which electronic governance opens up an interface where the citizens demand participation in governance mechanisms- be it at the local, national or international level. The caveat is that under normal circumstances, the citizens may not be at the stage where they are pro-actively able to demand and push for spaces in decision-making. To take it even further, there may not be much willingness to directly engage with the governance processes or provide information to the governance machinery. The level of disengagement could be a function of past experiences with government engagement, illiteracy, skewed powered equations, opportunity cost for time spent, and existing information levels. The Empowerment stage is the crucial stage which has to be achieved before citizens pro-actively start to engage in decision-making processes at Individual or Community level. In absence of it, the citizen to government interface will continue to be usurped by a few and may not lead to a governance mechanism which is more effective than the existing one.

This shatters the myth that E-governance occurs automatically, when people are provided with ICT connectivity. Interestingly a benchmarking research study (2001) brought out by Taylor Nelson Sofres, puts countries like Great Britain and Malaysia into low bracket of E-governance users whereas India and Hungary comes into the medium bracket E-governance users. (In terms of Internet penetration, India and Hungary come under low-penetration bracket, and Great Britain and Malaysia under medium-penetration bracket).

For Electronic Governance to become significant and also effective, one has to examine the ways in which government could be made to adopt an information sharing culture and at the same time, ordinary citizens could be made more interested in engaging with the government. The low voter turnout in some of the countries such as Great Britain and India does signify that some sections of people have adopted a minimal engagement approach with the government due to several reasons. Electronic governance cannot be served as an elixir or even a marginally better solution in such cases. Voter turnouts do not become significantly better whether elections get conducted online in comparison to those done in the physical domain.

The solution may lie in 2 domains and both need to be taken up simultaneously for optimal results. The first is the domain of the Government Offices and Officials. It becomes increasingly important to sensitize government officials and bureaucrats to the positive impact of Information sharing and how it could aid their work and bring greater recognition to it rather than creating hindrances and political risks. The younger class of government officials need to be drawn into this mindset so that they may adopt it in a smaller jurisdiction first to gain some immediate successes. This is more likely to create an incremental and expanding effect in terms of number of government officials adopting it and the jurisdictional area in which there is a greater access to information.

The second domain is the Citizens Domain. An active push is required to break the attitude of the common citizen that "Nothing Changes through individual engagement with the government machinery." The role of the NGOs, citizen groups, academic institutions, political leaders is instrumental in demonstrating the strengths of information and knowledge networks and how people can effectively engage in these networks to promote information sharing and opinion building. A community, which shares information among each other, is more likely to succeed when engaging with the government since alternate channels for communications may not have much support. And the value of such a knowledge network grows as more number of users participate in it. As a consequence, some of these networks have been very successful in tacking local issues such as better implementation of government schemes, better health facilities etc. (See our other project- KnowNet Initiative at http://www.knownet.org which explores the use of ICT for empowerment)

It needs to be stated that Better Governance does not always happen automatically. There has to be a demand for it and requires a suitable threshold beyond which bad governance becomes intolerant. E- governance can prove to be a good tool in promoting good governance and making people more intolerant of bad governance.

As always we look forward to your reactions, feedforward on E- governance issues. You are invited to share your independent views as an E-governance practitioner, researcher or a user.