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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.

Tempered by the maturity of the e-government field, hype was countered to some extent by a pragmatic discourse on its practicalities.  However, the work on e-government focused mostly on public services, and often put technology before underlying governance issues.  Actually, e-government is still viewed by many as the use of information technology in government, having Government to Government (G2G), Government to Business (G2B), and Government to Citizens (G2C) as its main components.  Although there is a focus on critical issues such as efficiency, effectiveness, and transparency of governments, attempts to scope out e-government have failed to express the myriad aspects of governance.

The accompanying conceptual prison essentially limits e-government efforts to mere use of ICTs in government with an uneven emphasis on technology.  As Dani and Alfredo pointed out on GonGo or Governance-on-the-Go, there is a need to re-conceptualize the concept of e-government to express the broad parameters of governance in the modern world, and to more fully capitalize on the promise of e-government.  It is important to note that this is not simply a terminology problem.  The way we define e-government impacts the development work that actually gets done.  Thus, definitions narrowed to the simple use of technology in government will make development practitioners to focus only on this issue, missing out on the incredible and full potential of e-government. 

It may therefore be more useful to view e-government as “the transformative use of technology and networks to support the use of authority and power in a country (at all levels) not only through enabling rules, capacities, processes, behaviors, institutions, and traditions, but also transnationally and globally, involving various actors and mechanisms including individuals, as well as formal and informal institutions and entities”. 

In this context, e-government also supports fundamental elements of good governance such as democracy, democratic processes and institutions that reflect national circumstances, fundamental human rights, the rule of law and independence of the judiciary, effective, just and honest government, openness, participation/ inclusiveness, accountability, and effectiveness.

The Sunlight Foundation in the US is an excellent example of e-government in action under this broadened definition.  The Foundation is an educational organization founded on the premise that increased transparency will improve the conduct of Congress, increase the public’s confidence in government, and foster more openness and accountability in government.  Their ultimate goal is to strengthen the relationship between citizens and their elected officials and to foster public trust in Congress.  They help citizens, bloggers and journalists to be their own best congressional watchdogs, by improving access to existing information, digitizing new information, and creating new tools and websites to enable citizens' collaboration in the promotion of greater transparency.  Since 2006, they have assembled and funded an array of web-based databases and tools including OpenCongress, Congresspedia, FedSpending, OpenSecrets, EarmarkWatch and LOUISdb, all of which make available online millions of bits of information about members of Congress, their staff, legislation, federal spending and lobbyists. 

Another example of a broader e-government application is Porto Alegre, a city of about a 1.4 million people and the capital of Brazil's southernmost state, Rio Grande do SuI.  Porto Alegre goes beyond offering online public services: it utilizes the Internet to bring the common citizen directly into the decision making process.  The city has a tradition of broad democratic participation in local government decisions, so much that in recent years its innovative system called "Orcamento Participativo" or OP (a direct democratic budgeting system that decides the priorities for the City's Annual Investment Plan) has been studied and copied around the world. Through the OP initiative, citizens decide on services to be offered and investments to be undertaken by the local government.  For example, with the municipal elections of 2000, Brazil became the first country in the world to have a fully electronic electoral process in all of its municipalities.  In the 2002 presidential elections, official results were known in less than twenty-four hours in all of the 26 states.  The World Bank did a comprehensive study on Participatory Budgeting in Porto Alegre early this year.

In sum, my argument is that e-government has been perhaps excessively focused on government services, and that e-government applications have not sufficiently emphasized broader aspects of governance, particularly regarding the roles of ordinary citizens, organizations and institutions such as civil society.  Citizens have not been at the center of e-government.  If we both broaden the definition of what e-government is, and apply this new definition in our development work, I argue we will benefit both development and the common citizen, and hopefully this will ultimately fuel a richer and more vibrant brand of democracy around the world.