A sizable "E-government" project already exists -- Left-Wing Discussion

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Date Posted: Thu 2003-10-02 12:44:42
Author: arendt
Subject: A sizable "E-government" project already exists

While looking for some government statistics, I bumped into the
"Egovernment" world.

Apparently, there is already quite an extensive bunch of governmental, academic, and industry people busy creating
the government equivalent of an e-business infrastructure.

Unfortunately, most of it automates the governmental structures
already in place. Yes, there is some concern about how the
internet is going to exacerbate existing problems and create
new ones. But, by and large, this group is full speed ahead
on really screwing things up.

I got most of the links below by Googling people from the
National Conference on Digital Government Research:

http://www.dgrc.org/dgo2003/program/schedule_text.jsp

This led me to:

1) Jane Fountain (Kennedy School of Government, Harvard U.)
Director of the National Center for Digital Government (NSF)

http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/people/Jane_Fountain�
�
http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/degreeprog/courses.nsf/wzWebFaculty/Coglianese84?Opendocument

2) A useful bit of software from MIT called "openG"
�
http://openg.media.mit.edu/notes/index.html� (notes on creation of openG)
�
http://new.agentzero.com/~jim/�(jim youll, author of openG)

http://ecitizen.mit.edu/openg.htm�(openG website)

While it looks like Jim Youll is OK, the biography of the professor whose class created
openG reads like your standard Republican apparatchik. Massachusetts lawyer who
worked in the *Montana* attorney general's office, then came home in order to lead
a committee to elect more Republicans to the Mass legislature. The class was about
E-commerce.

Here is the prof's website.

http://civics.com/�(daniel greenwood)

People like him give me the creeps. Everything is a
business. Citizenship is just a form of consumerism. BTW, professor Fountain
of Harvard has referred to citizens using websites to get government info as
"customers"

Bottom line: There is already a well-organized NSF-funded, corporate-captured
effort to use the process of bringing the government onto the internet to further
commercialize government.

Forwarned is forearmed.

arendt

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Replies:

I haven't seen anything particularly scary on Greenwood's site -- Redeye, Fri 2003-10-03 02:42:55