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The World Bank will help open government data in Ulyanovsk Oblast (Russia)

ICT Team's picture

Open Government is increasingly perceived as a new paradigm for ICT-enabled government transformation offering a number of instruments for improved governance, transparency and innovation. Ulyanovsk Oblast of Russia has already made substantial progress in e-government, IT industry development and IT literacy, and has taken practical steps that have made it an early leader in Open Government initiatives in Russia, as recognized in a study published in May 2012 by the Russian Institute of the Information Society.

#5: The UN E-Government Survey: Towards a More Citizen-Centric Approach

Tanya Gupta's picture

Our Top Ten Blog Posts by Readership in 2011

Originally published on January 10, 2011

Last year South Korea ranked first in global e-government ranking among all the countries in the world according to the United Nations E-Government  Survey 2010, with the US in second place.  The UN E-Government Survey provides a bi-annual assessment of national online services, telecommunication infrastructure and human capital of 192 Member States. 

  • Is South Korea’s government really making the best use of ICT for governance? 
  • Does it even make sense to measure the “level” of e-government development in a country and is it possible to do so?  
  • Are rankings preferred to “best practice cases”?  
  • Do the rankings include aspects of MDG priorities such as e-inclusion (gender equality)?  
  • Do they measure usage of technologies such as mobile technology and social media?  
     

Myneta.info: India’s Technology Transition From Software Giant to Fighting Corruption

Tanya Gupta's picture

When India first started using technology for national development, it used technology to build a huge software industry which helped the economy grow in the 1990s. In the decades that followed, with a much improved economy, civic minded Indians set their sights on a much loftier goal – tackling corruption.

In July 2008 The Washington Post reported that nearly a fourth of the 540 Indian Parliament members faced criminal charges, "including human trafficking, immigration rackets, embezzlement, rape and even murder". The criminalization of politics causes a huge drain of public resources and the resulting loss of credibility for politicians dissuades civic minded citizens from stepping forward. Unfortunately the average voter often has little to no idea of the criminal background of some of these Parliament members and hence public opinion cannot be used to throw them out of power. The media, too, does not have capacity to focus on all the corruption cases and usually focuses on the most egregious violations.