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Political Science
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Feb 20, 2024
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Week 4 Forum 2 - Technology and Society Due by 11:59 pm Saturday The article, Government 2.0 is actually an introductory article to an issue of the journal Information Polity 15 (2010). It is a good idea to review the other articles. This issue of the journal, beginning with the assigned article, continues the model of Kamal's e-participation article, that is, open government and citizen participation. The authors of Government 2.0 introduce the concept of e-government occurring in four stages, stating that the first three stages, "based on the information delivery model” (pg.1) have begun but the fourth stage, which should achieve two-way information flow, has not been completed. 1. The authors of Government 2.0 contend that open government can be achieved; what is open government and how might it be achieved? 2. What is the common theme in this week's assigned articles? 3. Considering the “research challenges"” that "digital 2.0 government” must contend with, are there ethical issues that could occur? What ethical issues or situations do you foresee? 1. The idea of an open government can be defined through the explanation of three core principles that encompass this concept. The authors propose three core principles that allow for an open government to come into fruition. These principles are transparency, participation, and collaboration. Transparency allows for government action to be divulged to the public, which increases accountability. It would also allow the public to make more informed decisions regarding policy making, which leads to the second principle of participation. Participation allows for an increase in the opportunity the public has to be directly involved in government decisions, including policy making. This collaboration allows for the collective ability of the government and its people to be realized in decision making which directly increases the capability of the government to make these kinds of informed decisions. This leads to the third principle of collaboration. This principle emphasizes collaboration among the government, its agencies and the public. This would, as stated before, increase capability. 2. The common theme in this week's assigned articles is direct participation of the people in government decision making. More specifically, the term e-participation is used and explained in the Kamal, M.M. publication. E-participation can be allowed effectively through the use of information technology systems. In addition to this, the idea of an open government is explored in the Chun, et. al. publication, which allows us to understand citizen participation with this in mind. 3. Some of the “research challenges” that "digital 2.0 government” must contend with allow for the emergence of some important ethical issues. One of the most important ethical issues that may emerge is underrepresentation. Given that information technology systems will be utilized to provide citizens with a way to directly influence government decisions, it is possible that certain groups unable to access these systems will never be heard, undermining the ideas of a democracy. This is turn may allow for only certain groups of people to be heard. In addition to this dilemma, another issue that may arise is the misconstruing of the people's intentions by the government. This kind of intentional misinterpretation can lead to policy making that declares its representation of the people’s opinion, but does nothing in actuality to support this. This takes the power of e-participation away from the people and leads to further mistrust and negative opinion of the government in general, not to mention the creation of policies that do not represent the true will of the people. The third issue that may arise is in direct reference to my last discussion post, which in part placed a high importance on information literacy and digital literacy skills. A misinformed public, incapable of understanding fact from fiction, and open only to the opinions of the people they believe in, can lead to the creation of policies that do not represent reality. This can also lead to another dilemma, by which the government has no intention to appease the will of a misinformed public and therefore, like stated in the second ethical issue, intentionally misinterprets the will of the people.
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