Building the ‘front door’ within a web ecology: Informational governance and institutional shaping of national government webportals

Abstract

Government webportals are central to governments' web strategy. They are designed to be nodal hubs, or gateways, for encountering government, and as such position government in the online world. Yet the designs of government webportals, particularly their location within wider web ecologies are scarcely studied. In additional to these web ecologies, this paper conceptualises webportals as being located within wider information and institutional ecologies. Methodologically, it comparatively examines the hyperlink structures of the national government webportals of the top ten e-government countries: Australia; Canada; Finland; France; Japan; Netherlands; New Zealand; Singapore; UK; and USA. Different ways governments approach this task are analyzed using webcrawls of the webportals and their neighboring webpages. Variations are considered in relation to the constitutional structures of the countries (i.e. unitary vs federated; centralized vs decentralized).This research highlights information referral versus information repository webportal designs, the latter of which appears to arise more in unitary and city states, than federal states. The hyperlink networks also demonstrate the important structural role of commercial social media websites in half of the countries, revealing a new interactive webportal design. Despite being constructed as whole-of-government entryways, national government webportals typically fail to connect to regional and local tiers of government. The paper provides the basis for assessing the effectiveness of different portal designs and investigating how portal designs arise out of varied government institutional settings.