Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 14th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview VI. Working Group on E-government Author(s) Kristina Reinsalu e-Governance Academy Tallinn Estonia Title Local government in interaction with its citizens in information society. The case study of Tartu, Estonia File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract As a key factor for improving efficiency, transparency and accountability of local governance in Europe is provision of online high-quality services delivered in the most effective and secure way to citizens. Development of local eGovernment systems provides city administrations with a powerful tool for stimulating citizens’ involvement and participation in democratic decision-making and community empowerment. The city of Tartu, Estonia, is also major regional centre faced with similar structural challenge. The city administration is undergoing comprehensive transformation to provide modern public services ensuring ease of access and interaction for citizens. To investigate this argument, I take examples of e-services and also even more innovative m-services of city of Tartu. My paper aims to provide an overview of problems, possibilities and challenges concerning the interface between local governance and ICT. It does this through exploring current trends in local government and by giving a description of particular ICT initiatives and exploring the users of ICT –enabled services. The paper also outlines the existing theories on Information Society in general (Castells), Internet communication (Fawkes and Gregory), e-government development (Reddick, Wiklund, Dutta-Bergmann). The paper is constructed as following: After the first, theoretical part of the paper, I will provide a short paragraph about the activities implemented in Tartu in the last few years: Tartu has piloted and fully implemented 6-10 G2C m-government services in different sectors of city government including m-teacher project, m-neighborhood watch, m-library, new mobile based catastrophic alert system; sms-based information provision for sending quick government information to citizens and businesses; improved city WAP and Java portals for convenient access to city services and information. The empirical part of the paper also presents feedback of citizens of Tartu concerning its e- and m-services. The data presented is based on large-scale survey conducted in Tartu in 2005 by present author and research company Faktum. 406 citizen of Tartu were surveyed with a written and oral questionnaire of more than 160 variables. The respondents were randomly selected and the sample is representative of whole citizenship of Tartu. In the last section, discussion section of the paper, under the focus, discussion and valuation are usability, need and reliability of the e- and m-services of mentioned local government. That the infrastructure has potential is one thing, the usage is another. Today about 82 % of citizens of Tartu use the Internet which is very high. But my data suggest that citizens rarely use the Internet for political purposes. The fact that citizens rarely use the Internet for political purposes manifests that access to means of communications is not enough. The key aspect is the motivation. The studied local government has almost perfect web page concerning the transparency, interactivity, user-friendliness and logic. Anyway, citizens are quite passive to all its interactive possibilities for involvement. They do not use often the possibility to ask officials under the linkage „The official answers“. They even do not comment decisions anonymously, neither they observe meetings of city council on-line. One important question for discussion is: What are the local government’s goals for developing e-services – to deepen democracy or to improve efficiency?
