What follows is the concluding chapter of my Master’s thesis.

E-government is revolutionizing the business of government. It has the potential to single handedly bring citizens closer to their governments in a time when government mistrust and mismanagement has run rampant. By allowing citizens the opportunity to gather information, conduct online transactions, and more easily interact with their government, the e-government phenomena has begun to cement itself into the fabric of American culture. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: efficiency, free software, Internet, IT, linux, open-source

Over the past many years, America has seen a slow degradation of trust in the structures of government. While the source of this eroding confidence is debatable, what is not of contention is the desire to return the public’s trust in the processes and control of government through the process of legitimation. One major area of both consternation and promise is that of information technology use in government. The modern age has brought us a tool for both good and evil in the form of computer and Internet technologies. As government slowly adopts these technologies as a means of efficiency and enhanced service delivery, the question that presents itself is, “what legitimacy is inherent in the technologies that government employs to conduct the public’s business?” Are we to simply trust that the computer programs used by government are written with the interest of the public in mind? Does the government itself even know what its chosen applications are doing? If not, then what can be done to legitimate the use of these new technologies on the citizenry? Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: e-government, legitimacy, open code, open-source