Citizen Participation in e-Government: Management Tools Development

Governments around the world now use information and communication technologies (ICT) to improve the delivery of services and information to their users (citizens, businesses or other governmental bodies). In literature, the application of ICT in this context has been labelled as “e(lectronic)-government”. Similarly than with other industries, the governance model in government has also evolved: ICT empowered the citizens, often relegated to passive users, to have more control in the decision-making process and more impact in the tasks of administrations. Therefore, e-government does not simply enable a better service delivery but also enables citizen participation. However, practitioners are still reluctant to embrace the benefits of this participation due to a lack of strategic view on participation, a lack of time, a misunderstanding of potential benefits or a lack of methodology. Therefore, this thesis aims to develop three tools for practitioners to manage citizen participation. These tools have been built following the Design Science Research Methodology. Diverse use cases were used to evaluate the artifacts of the tools iteratively. In order to develop these management tools, this thesis wishes to research citizen participation in an integrative manner in three main ways. First, we want to provide management tools at different governance levels (large-, medium- and small-scale). Second, we want to identify all means by which citizen can participate in different research fields (e-government, user participation in information systems, or smart cities). Finally, we want to perform this identification with all stakeholders impacted by this participation (citizens but also the project managers that can be software developers, public agents or political representatives).

The research performed is decomposed in three main steps, linked with the three governance levels. First, it was necessary to take a high-level view on the research fields to determine the main ways citizen can participate in an e-government setting. In this first step, we have identified three main strategic areas of citizen participation: citizens as democratic participants, citizens as co-creators and citizens as ICT users. As main research output of this step, we designed the CitiVoice Framework that structures and evaluates this participation. This tool enables to manage citizen participation at large scale, taking smart cities as use cases. Second, after this high-level look, we have decided to examine more extensively one specific part of the CitiVoice Framework within the co-creation category: citizens as participants in the development of e-government services. For this step, the main research output resides the UParticipate decision support guide. This guide enables project managers to make more sound decisions about the participation of citizens (and other users) in the development of e-government services according the several influencing factors. This tool enables to manage citizen participation at medium scale, taking the development of e-government services as use cases. Finally, we investigate in-depth the specific “workshop” participation method of UParticipate. We instantiate this workshop and design its content to develop our own method. The smart city domain is once again taken as domain example to enable citizens to learn about the smart city, give their own ideas and collectively build their own solutions. This tool enables to manage citizen participation at small scale, taking classrooms as use case.