Public Administration Websites Research Articles

Robustness analysis of DNS paths and web access paths in public administration websites

Attacks at the naming or the routing infrastructure of the Internet have long become a reality and one single such attack has the potential of affecting access to Internet-facing services in many organizations. An important question to address is assessing the potential impact of attacks of this sort on the web infrastructure of an entire nation. In this work we examine the dependence of a large set of public administration websites on DNS entities and autonomous systems of four different countries: Italy, Germany, UK and US. We collected the dependencies of those websites from DNS zones, nameservers, networks, autonomous systems, and assessed the potential global impact of localized attacks on those entities. We also analyzed the prevalence of such defensive technologies as BGP Route Origin Authorization, DNSSEC and HTTPS Strict Transport Security. Our analysis highlights the structural interdependencies within the web infrastructures of public interest and illustrates the corresponding open problems, issues whose relevance can only grow.

A logit model to assess the transparency of Italian public administration websites

The reform of Italian public administration, which started in the 1990s, shifted the consolidated paradigm towards a results-oriented management of the res publica. The new regulatory framework emphasised the role of the evaluation process carried out by the designated audit authorities (OIV or NDV); legislators provided a new information system principally making accessible the audit-related data and other information via the institutional websites of Italian cities. In this context, the Minister of Public Administration promoted the platform called ‘Bussola della Trasparenza’, the goal of which is to ensure easy access to institutional data of the municipalities and to evaluate the available information. However, we found that the results provided by this platform were unreliable. Our study of 525 municipalities showed severe discrepancies with Bussola's evaluation, suggesting a lack of transparency. We therefore propose a logit model as an alternative framework to evaluate the probability that a municipal website is compliant with the new regulations using a set of predictors to consider a broader and more complete definition of transparency. This model is thought to be a practical tool to correctly evaluate the compliance of municipal websites.

The use of official languages in electronic communications in the Valencian local administration

AbstractThe Valencian autonomous community is a bilingual Spanish region where, alongside Spanish, a second language is officially recognized. Yet in many areas of the Valencian administration the language law is not implemented. This article explores the presence of the two official languages in the electronic communications of this region’s city and town council agencies. It combines a variety of methods (use of secondary data, content analysis and a variation of the “mystery shopping” technique) with statistical analysis of data merged into a unit matrix of 397 municipalities. A comparison of present web page data with data from 2005 to 2010 reveals that there has been advancement on the implementation of legal provisions: Spanish monolingual web pages are being replaced by bilingual portals. Evidence also shows a greater presence of Valencian in the official social media accounts and in telephone and email interactions. However, the use of Spanish on public administration websites is still prevalent. Likewise, this study confirms the significant power of the social use of language, influenced in part by the political party in power.

How to Learn About Users and Understand Their Needs? User Experience, Mental Models and Research at Public Administration Websites

How to Learn About Users and Understand Their Needs? User Experience, Mental Models and Research at Public Administration Websites

Antecedents and consequences of public administration’s social media website attractiveness

With regard to the increasing use of social media channels in public administrations, this study investigates antecedents and consequences of public administration’s social media website attractiveness, focusing on the local government level. We derive a model based on the Uses and Gratifications Theory and apply a structural equation modeling approach by testing our model based on a survey data of 164 citizens in Germany using social media websites in the context of public administration. As a result, we find that Social Motivation, User-Generated Content and Public Administrator-Generated Content have a significant positive influence on Attractiveness. Moreover, Attractiveness positively affects both Intention to Use and Word-of-Mouth (WoM) Intention. Points for practitioners The attractiveness of public institutions’ social media websites such as Facebook depends on three factors: (1) users wish to get connected to other users and (2) the appeal of its content generated by the public institution as well as (3) by other users. Empirical data suggest that the increase in attractiveness of respective social media pages will make users use the social site more often and will also make users recommend the page to others. Against this background, social media page managers of public administration websites will focus on providing an open platform for citizens to exchange information and provide appealing and citizen-oriented content.

Extending and Refining Usability Heuristics to Better Address User Centered Design Issues in the Development and Evaluation of Municipal Websites

Usability of public administration websites is a key issue in the information society. Unfortunately, the web content is still difficult to use if not unusable in many websites. Developers seem to neglect basic principles of user centered design. Usability heuristics are valuable resources for both developers and evaluators during and after the development process. The purpose of this work is to extend and refine an existing set of heuristics in order to better address some user centered design issues. Previous studies revealed specific usability problems of municipal websites as well as some evaluation issues. Two heuristics were added that refer to user guidance and task support. The revised heuristics could better help evaluators to explain and developers to understand usability problems in municipal websites.Keywords: Evaluation Process, Usability, Heuristics, Information Architecture, Task Guid-ance, Municipal Websites, E-Government1 IntroductionThe information society requires good quality information and better access to e-government services for end users. In this re-spect, usability of public administration web-sites is a key issue. According to many au-thors, effective e-government services for the citizen means useful and usable applications [2], [19], [30]. Unfortunately, the web con-tent is still difficult to use if not unusable in many municipal websites. The developers seem to neglect the basic principles of user centered design. The websites are more ori-ented towards the presentation of the town, City Hall structure, and offices than to the practical information a citizen might need to solve a concrete problem.User centered design requires understanding users and tasks. This means to know who the users are and which are the goals they try to achieve. It also means to take a task-based approach to design and evaluation.Improving website usability requires usabil-ity heuristics and guidelines that could better orient development and evaluation. Usability heuristics play an important role in the design process and should be both useful and usable for developers and evaluators.Up to now there are two kinds of approach to website evaluation and two kinds of evalua-tion criteria that are used to evaluate munici-pal websites for usability.First approach aims at assessing website usa-bility at general level. The evaluation criteria refer to general usability measures that are coded on some scale (e.g. a four-point scale [12]). The evaluation attempts to measure the degree to which such criteria are respected. Based on such measures a usability score is computed that enables ranking and compar-ing of municipal websites.The second approach aims at identifying the difficulties a user has in performing a task and achieving a task goal with the website. The evaluation criteria refer to various design knowledge structured in form of principles, criteria, heuristics, and / or guidelines. This enables evaluators to identify and explain us-ability problems.While the first approach to evaluation is summative the second is formative since it helps to uncover and fix usability problems as early as possible during the development process [32]. Although both approaches are useful, the latter is closer to end user re-quirements and could substantially improve the usability of public websites.Previous usability studies targeting municipal websites revealed several specific usability problems [15], [28], [29]. Usability evaluation has been carried out in a scenario-based approach and revealed some difficulties in using an existing set of usability heuristics to explain and document these specific prob-lems.In this paper an extended and refined set of usability heuristics is proposed that elabo-rates on some insights gained from previous usability studies. In this respect, the existing set is extended with two usability heuristics related to user guidance and task support. …

Evaluating Geographic Information Provision within Public Administration Websites

The authors are concerned with the provision of public sector geographic information (GI) and the use of GI technologies (GITs) within public administration websites, with particular reference to planning. Results of a survey carried out by the authors on an Italian case study are evaluated with respect to the GI content and technology adopted. A rapid evaluation method is proposed to analyse and compare GI/GIT-diffusion frameworks within public administration at the national level.