Open Source Community Portals for E-government

The value of the Internet as a flexible tool for the posting and exchange of information is expressed in the potential it has for governance, commerce, and social interaction. The Internet is symbolic of the digital revolution of the 20th century that changed the packaging and dissemination of electronic information. In politics, the potential of the Internet is perceived to be in e-government. In the book The Internet Galaxy, Castells (2001) indicates how the Internet is expected to be an instrument to further democracy. The Internet has a significant role to play in government or politics; it provides a two-way medium of communication between government and society in flexible personalized and mass forms of communication. Through the Internet, information can be easily accessed by both citizens and their leaders as a means of effective communication. All kinds of information, public records, service forms and requests, and a wide range of non-classified information can be disseminated on the Web. The interactive nature of the Internet technology allows for on-demand accessing of information in the form of citizen request, the voicing of opinion, and in some cases, asking government representatives for information or answers to issues of concern. The typical use of Internet portals by governments has been in the form of information access points where governments post information without a concerted attempt at interacting with the potential users of the resource. Such approach to egovernance is cast in the traditional mode of top-bottom political activity that focuses on what government leaders or their administrative systems want to give to their constituents, with little concern or regard to issues of interest to their constituents. Chadwick (2003) makes a distinction between what he calls e-government and e-democracy. According to him: