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This is the World Bank's blog on governance and anti-corruption. It aims at providing a space for debate and knowledge sharing on this critical field of development. | Learn more...

participatory budgeting

e-democracies: will Digg-like social networks pave the way for participatory decision-making?

Submitted by Alfredo on Fri, 2009-04-24 18:16

The hype about social networking sites doesn't seem to come to an end.  If it's not Facebook, it's MySpace, and now it's Twitter.  Even though some people are still reluctant to believe in the functionality of some of these web 2.0 applications, it's a matter of years before they become a tool that we have to use on a daily basis, as it happened with email and the internet not so many years ago. 

In this entry, I will follow-up on one of Tanya's three points mentioned in her last entry -namely, participation-, and will make the case for Digg, one of some applications for social bookmarking that allow its users to share, comment and vote on their preferred bookmarks.  From my perspective, these participatory features can give us a glimpse of how decision making processes in the public sector might look like in the not-very-remote future.

Putting Governance before the “E” in E-Government

Submitted by Tanya on Fri, 2008-11-07 14:17

Taking e-government beyond the same tired e-government applications require innovations such as social networking, web 2.0/3.0 and mobile technology, all of which are democratizing the web in different ways.  The basics of e-government are in the process of moving from a top-down model (e-government strategy, vision, principles, down to agencies, businesses and citizens) to a bottom-up paradigm (citizen-level application managed and developed at the lowest level) with the citizen being the engine of the new e-government. 

When did e-government become stagnant?  Well, not so long ago it wasn’t stagnant.  The anticipation and optimism behind e-government when it first entered the international consciousness was immense, a prodigious vision of sorts.  Led in the US by the Clinton-Gore administration and pursued by other administrations in developed and developing countries alike, e-government became a mantra, a fix-all for the various problems in the public sector.  As e-government implementation matured, the potential for significant failure became clearer. Yet, when successful, e-government projects could make a real difference.  For instance, e-government -a significant part of Singapore’s “Vision of an Intelligent Island” with respect to public services-, helped to improve public sector performance and governance in a manner that positively impacted the daily lives of its citizens.