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E-government - a service
Tibor VÁMOS Ágota BAUSZ György LENGYEL Klára SÁNDOR
Abstract A complex experiment has been made in southern Hungary, in the region of Kaposvár. The flow and structures of information have been examined and a thorough analysis has been made about the environment in order to create a more flexible and user oriented dialog. In the following the results of a representative sociological survey are reported concerning the attitudes of different social strata about the application of IT in communicating with local administration. Analyses of letters from the point of view of mother language understanding are included. Key words: e-government, sociological aspects, language understanding, artificial intelligence.
1. The experiment environment A complex experiment is launched in the region of Kaposvár, a city in southern Hungary. The region comprises about 120.000 inhabitants. The homepage of the city is www.kaposvar.hu. The specialty of the experiment can be summarized in the following: its complexity relates to several aspects of public administration, high level man-machine communication has been introduced, natural language understanding and decision support test have been included. The project has a strong sociological background; it aims at a more direct democracy, as well as the education of citizens and civil servants in order to elevate the human role with the aid of information technology. The experiment suggests improvements in organization structures and legislation. Self-government, democracy and competence are the three key principles of administration, sometimes in contradictions, sometimes in harmony. The main principles are consolidated by the constitution and related by legal regulations, nevertheless the working connections and checks and balances between them are to be exercised in day by day practice. We hope that this will be supported by the local e-government technology due to its transparency, on line direct communications and reasoning possibilities. The general council of the city is an elected body representing the lay civilian population, headed by a directly elected mayor. The electronic interface should be a working agent between the elected and the electors during the four-year term periods. Self-government implies independence from the central government and dependence from or rather responsibility only to law. Nevertheless, the national government can disturb this independence by budgetary means. The transparency of budgetary policy is a major issue for electronic democracy. Competence is represented by the office of the mayor. They were our best partners in establishing the system; their majority understood the extent of the support that a more efficient checks and balances system could provide. Their contacts with the population are sometimes closer and better than that of the elected representatives. On the other hand their communication with the partners (educational, cultural, health institutes, ministries, revenue office, police, fire department, supplier companies, etc.) is slow, bureaucratic and difficult, it requires serious and unnecessary investment from the citizens to understand. The present office routine is very formal; it differs from prevalent style and techniques of everyday life. The project aims to develop a common public language that everyday people can easily use and understand. We would like to deliver the office routine to the citizen's household, to facilitate their everyday life. We offer a solution to resolve this problem by substituting the formal way of the office routine with dialogs in a very circumspect way. (The well-designed dialog structures ensure that citizens can use them more efficiently than the typical instruction sheets of the household appliances.)
2. The position of Hungary in the E-government world A global survey of e-governance titled "Benchmarking E-government: A Global Perspective (Assessing the Progress of the UN Member States)" which was issued in April 2002 by American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) and the United Nations Division for Public Economics and Public Administration (UNDPEPA) defines a so-called e-government index to measure the state of development in e-governance around the world. The e-government index is a mean figure derived from the Web Presence, telecommunications infrastructure, and human capital measures. The results of the e-gov index tend to reflect a country's economic, social and democratic level of development. The global e-gov index is 1.62, Europe's average index is 2.01, and in this survey Hungary has achieved an index rate of 1.79. The survey divides the index results into four categories: countries with high e-gov capacity (with an e-gov index between 2.00-3.25), medium e-gov capacity (1.60-1.99), minimal e-gov capacity (1.00-1.59) and deficient e-gov capacity (below 1.00). The e-gov index of Hungary falls into the second category. According to another approach of the above-mentioned global survey a country's online presence can be categorized by one of five stages: emerging, enhanced, interactive, transactional, and fully integrated or seamless. 32 surveyed countries are located in the emerging stage, 65 in the enhanced, 55 in the interactive and 17 in the transactional stage. No country surveyed has achieved the fully integrated stage. Hungary has been placed into the interactive category.
2. Starting sociological reviews The project has started with two basic reviews. The first was a thorough analysis of existing functions and structures of local administration, the clarification of responsibilities, for example, who reports to whom etc. The survey of information flow identified the character of that flow, i.e. those having a straightforward procedural line, the rules that are based on and those that would need some kind of arbitration. In those processes the requirements of interior and external data documentation were collected and the formal and legal rules were clarified for obtaining them from the clients or from other agencies or other departments of the same organization. In that flow the existing communication channels and legal barriers of non-unification of personal data were identified. Frequencies of different operations were estimated and their procedural character (i.e. communication requirements with the interested persons, use and experience with prefab questionnaires, data sheets, form of final and intermediate documents, their delivery regulations, deadlines, the appeal procedures of distinct cases) was revealed. The second review concerned the social environment. An 800-strong representative sample of the adult population was selected according to residential areas, age groups, and gender. The questions was oriented to computer literacy, access; computer and web linked experience, habits within the family and with any kind of local access (school, telecafé, telehouse, post office). The current percentage of the population in possession of computers is nearly 30 and this proportion is growing in an accelerated rate. Further 22% of the population are planning to buy a computer in the near future. An interesting result of the survey was that within this part of the population the income differences had no definitive role. Those who do not intend to use computers are mostly old people. There is almost a linear decline in the frequency of computer wizards with the rise of age: more than four-fifths of those below 20 can, while more than nine-tenths of those above 60 cannot use a computer. While computers are rare in the households of people with 8 elementary grades of schooling only, among graduates of tertiary education the rate is 58.5%. It must be stressed that no gender-specific features can be gleaned about competent computer usage: among both men and women the rate is around the mean of the whole sample. The effect of the family experience is relevant: in families where a member has computer experience the attitude is mostly positive. This emphasizes the role of education radiating much beyond the generations in school. Refusal of computers was on a rather low level, lower than expected in face of widespread negative media publications. More than 60% was the ratio of those who consider positively the application of network connection to the administration. Special research was devoted to sociolinguistic problems. Basic position of the research was the refusal of the wording; linguistics from that point of view is a social phenomenon. The linguistic survey focused on the informants' reports about their comprehension of formal, official texts in general, and on texts offered to them in formal and in less formal variants. Both the informants' covert (unconscious) attitudes and their overt (explicit) opinions towards these varieties were studied to reveal what linguistic style people would prefer in official texts. The linguistic research was carried out on a sub-sample of the general sociological survey with 200 informants and included social groups similar to the general population survey.
3. Opinions about electronic administration The minimal program of electronic administration is announcement of information electronically, while the maximum program is integrated interactive administration. The idea of an electronic information supply by the local governments is received positively on the whole in the Kaposvár district: three-fifths of the respondents, and over two-thirds of the sure respondents would support such an initiative. Slightly more than one-third of the people had no experience of administrative matters or refused to utter their opinions. If we disregard them, the majority - some three-fifths - believe their pending matters could be arranged on line. Since not merely provision of information but also interactive administration of affairs is presupposed here, it can be declared that the population has positively received both the narrow and broad concept of electronic government. True, there is far greater support for the on-line announcement of information than for the arrangement of official matters on the net. The bottleneck is caused by the technical conditions at first sight: less than a quarter of the settlements has a public place where Internet access is available for all. If we add that less than one-tenth of the respondents are connected to the net at home, one must conclude that the objective circumstances allow for very limited, if any, exploitation of the potentials of electronic administration. It is again true that in the majority of the settlements an institution or some inhabitants are internet users, and only one-eighth of the settlements are devoid of it. Less than one-fifth of the settlements have local papers and also less than one-fifth have local television, about half of these overlapping. The opinion about electronic administration is strongly correlated with the intensity of office experience. Those who had several matters to contact various offices with, have far firmer and more positive opinions at an above average rate about on-line administration. Those who had no such experience rejected it more firmly than the average. By contrast, there was no correlation between the approval of electronic government and the length of arranging matters, or the client's degree of satisfaction with administration. This may be attributed to the fact that in the latter group there is a well above average rate of those who would welcome electronic administration and a low rate (one-fifth) of those who are dissatisfied with the current practice of administration. While there is a close correlation between the acceptance of the maximum and minimum programs of electronic administration (arranging matters vs provision of information), it can be demonstrated that more than half of those who think that their matters could not be arranged on line think that the local government should announce information on the Internet. Labour market presence, income and subjective class position show strong correlation with the evaluation of information supply by the local authorities. School qualifications, language skills, self-confidence in using the technical language were more closely correlated with studied attitudes than the material resources. As can be expected, the specific cultural resources connected to information technology correlate more closely with the evaluation of electronic administration than are material resources and the more general incorporated cultural endowments. That especially applies to the possession and use of computers. It is also noteworthy that the use of the SMS service of mobile phones - far wider spread than computer usage affecting more than half the respondents - is at least as important a watershed. Internet access at home, though lop-sided in distribution (such households, as we have seen, came up to less than one-tenth of the sample) was also significant. Regression models lead to the finding that trust in local governments, use of mobile phones activity in the labour market, high qualification, urban residence, telephone supply and access to Internet are the personal and settlement-level factors that considerably and positively influence the evaluation of electronic public administration. The findings reveal that it is not only the citizens' communicating habits with offices that are unevenly scattered but so are their attitudes toward official administration of public affairs, or, more concretely: their abilities, self-confidence and respective satisfaction, as well as their opinions about the possibilities of information are widely scattered. At present, affairs - in public offices, authorities and financial firms - are predominantly arranged personally, with correspondence and telephone arrangement of matters being far rarer. Strata of higher social status have more intense contact with offices than those who are beneath them by financial or cultural or labour market status. This phenomenon is probably in connection with the fact that on the one hand office services are inseparable parts of sophisticated consumer habits, and on the other hand, they constitute part of proprietorship, of the functioning mechanisms of property. The higher the social and material situation of a stratum, the more varied the office service they avail themselves of. The settlement type of the respondents contributes to differentiation in that the inhabitants of Kaposvár can arrange 96% of their matters in town, while the inhabitants of nearby settlements can only see to a quarter of their affairs locally. The members of higher social strata - including those with higher school qualifications - typically understand better the statements and official or business documents of institutions, the media and the offices. The higher trained a stratum is, the larger rate of them wish to arrange their matters themselves. A high rate of the strata who have to handle a lot of official matters, e.g. the entrepreneurs, would gladly have others arrange their official affairs for them. The younger generation, the members of higher social strata and the intellectuals are more dissatisfied with the current officials and procedures. The strata that are not skilled in arranging their official matters have greater trust in offices than those who can see to their affairs themselves. Positive attitudes to the infocommunication of local public services and their organisation are frequent in the local society's higher qualified, younger and better-off strata. The higher the respondent's financial, positional or cultural status, and the younger he/she is, the greater need he/she expresses for electronic information from public offices. There are, however, deeper doubts about digitalized administration of matters than about information supply. When development is planned, the broad stratum that prefer traditional procedures in offices for lack of training or for higher age must be taken into consideration too.
4. Application of machine intelligence The upcoming application of machine intelligence has been based on these surveys and has followed two related steps. The first is a natural language understanding experiment, which applies a syntax definition engine developed by a Hungarian group of machine oriented linguists. The engine is able to define syntaxes of different languages and linguistic structures. The special Hungarian syntax is built on that engine. Terminal expressions are the vocabulary items; i.e. they are organised in the same syntactic structure. The vocabularies are the separated and limited word collections of the subject concerned; i.e. the corpuses are not as comprehensive as in general text analyses. The system should identify the subject of the case and by way of that the related special vocabulary. The grammar rules and words are limited to those needed within the treatment of the subject, e.g. problems of social support, construction permit, etc. That is an additional help in filtering the information required for handling the case and automatic omitting the unnecessary details, that are very frequent and confusing in applications of not educated people. This kind of subject restricted recognition was successfully applied in two previous Ph.D. theses, one dealing with contested custody problems of children whose parents divorced, the other in bankruptcy cases according to American Law. The result of the procedure is a linear sequence of syntax rules and words applied. The pattern of the case is the following. The knowledge base stores cases on the subject in a similar linear pattern format, which becomes the basis for identification, looking for precedence, and similar cases. This is the mechanism of the case based decision support system. Application of the decision support will conclude from the consideration of the experiences and rules of order. Nevertheless, we suppose that this will be useful first of all for the citizens, in the role of legal advisor, and will only be a background device in supporting the professional administrators and juries. Voice recognition has not been envisaged within the framework of the present project because it could introduce further ambiguities, many misunderstandings thus discrediting the experiment. After further development of the voice recognition technology the use of voice communication can be included. The procedure is based on dialog techniques, similar to those applied by the early artificial intelligence projects. This helps mutual understanding, avoiding of ambiguities while it offers a more human-like interface and is the legal affirmation of the procedure. The result is a translation of the query into the unambiguous, consolidated language of the administration. Existing procedures and several electronic administration projects apply prepared questionnaires to be filled by the client. In most cases the citizen does not like them, they have difficulties in filling, are sometimes uncertain in giving the right answers and have a desire to explain the case in more details and more specific. We try to formulate the dialog in a personal way, to access the benevolence of the client by the simplest questions, too. It remains an open question for broader practice how to combine the personalised dialogs with the more matter of fact documentation. The conduct of the dialog offers a way of personal impression about the client. Several linguistic signals hint to the social background and to some extent to the hidden intentions of the petitioner. In our project the linguistic analysis of the documents has such a goal, too. The citizen and the administrative partner should receive the full text of the conversation. For those who do not possess sufficient computer literacy support within the family, school, telehouse and other community services are prepared.
5. Legal and administrative problems Two fundamental problems determine the construction of the system: the legal trade-off concerning privacy and administrative efficiency. The problem is fundamental from many points of views, it has been a fiercely debate issue from the very start of any personal related databases but it is even more timely after September 11. Hungarian Law prohibits the unification of any personal databases, including those that are in the possession of one and the same authority. This is the reason why even in administering rather simple, rule organised procedures require the client is required to acquire personally all certifications that are stored in the databases of the same authority. The problem was discussed with the Parliamentary Ombudsman of Data Protection. All personal documents are accessible for an automatic administration system if the client concerned previously authentically approves them. The permission is valid only for one single case, automatic iteration, extension is excluded and the document cannot be used for any other purposes. The client should receive the full copy of the document even if only a part of it is used for the case to be able to check the complete context. Any access to the data file concerned must be registered, preserved and checked by appropriate legal procedures. The procedure is in some respect similar to personal bank transfers. The use of electronic signatures is related to all procedures executed by the automatic system. This means that, according to our view, the possession of a personal electronic signature should be a citizen's right used free of charge. This remains a problem, however, because until now the authentication of electronic signatures is rather expensive being provided by authorised private companies. Software diversity is the other basic issue. Most of the administrative boards and offices use some kind of software for their own, sometimes primitive, purposes. These softwares are terribly different not only in their programming state but also in their structural philosophy, especially in relation to any kind of co-operative work. Some of the systems are totally obsolete but hardly bound to the continuity of the practice within the office. Some are standardised products by one or another national authority they have no relation to other systems. The local and nation-wide organisations invested a large amount of much work and money into these systems and thus are reluctant to abandon them. Standardisation is a basic issue in every public and non-public government service as it used to be many years ago in the American armed services. Compulsory use of standard and standard compatible software affects many different interests and existing practices. Most of the local administration work should be ideally based on of well-established GIS (geographic information) systems. This means not only the construction-related issues, but also much other decision problems concerning traffic, schools, etc. On the other hand these systems are time consuming and very expensive mostly beyond the present possibilities of the local authorities delaying all other efforts. The region we worked with has a well-maintained homepage for a wide use of information services. This will be developed further to a full-fledged service portal.
6. Old ideas, new initiative How can we reach the ideal of democracy through all these means? The great metaphor of European culture is the idealised picture of the Athenian democracy wonderfully recited in the funeral speech of Pericles parallel with the horrible stories about the same people in Peloponesian War of Thucydides. Athenian democracy was the direct democracy of the Agora. Agora, the market of goods, ideas, policy where all citizens (having the highly restrictive citizen right) could exercise their own rule of balanced majority and minority, empathy and tolerance. The web is our new Agora; mankind did not change too much in the past two and half millennia. The ideals expressed at the down of our civilization drive our best desires in our current high technology epoch, too. This kind of technology can be used in horrible ways, serving hate, dictatorial power or mass killing fury. But it can be used for a more human coexistence as well. In this realm rational and benevolent Law controls the accord of citizens, the administration of that accord is completely transparent and accessible for all, privacy belongs to that practice and the administrators of the community are not rulers or bonehead bureaucrats, but enlightened guardians and social workers. That is a dream. But research and development has the task to progress towards the feasible steps of the possible improvements. We hope that this project does the same. It requires not only much developmental activity in our communication technology but also much education of the citizens. The technological tool itself is and has to be an educational instrument for all of us.
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