E-Participation Mechanisms on the Web-pages on Public Institutions – Final Report

News | Civic Tech and Innovations | Publications | Open Governance and Anti-Corruption | Report 25 June 2013


Monitoring of communication mechanisms of the web-pages of public institutions detected the following tendencies:
In most cases government institutions use their official pages inefficiently. This e-resource is not perceived as tool of communicating with the citizens and providing their involvement in political processes;
Mainly institutions just share news about their own activities and pay less attention to evaluating the activities and getting feedback. Very few of the institutions provide calendar of planned activates on their web-pages. In case the calendar is available, it just provides the information about already held meetings and activities. This is not enough for citizen participation in the process of decision making.  
The majority of the institutions do not provide the e-communication and public relation action plan and strategy. This indicates the inconsistent approach of the institutions towards this issue.
Monitored web-pages lack applications and recourses that are oriented on bilateral interaction (blog, forum, petitions, discussion, poll, voting). In case they provide such services, administrators of these web-pages mostly leave the comments of the users without response;
Web-pages of Georgian public institutions gained the lowest rates in e-decision-making component which is the last one out of three components of e-communication (e-information/communication, e-consultation and e-decision-making). This indicates that the institutions do not attempt to provide citizen inclusion in discussions and planning process, to conduct online consultations simultaneous to working out strategic documents and consider the views of the society via interactive services.
The majority of the institutions do not keep the list of questions and letters sent via official e-mail address. Thus it is impossible to control the communication quality. The same problem was detected regarding the online contact forms. The number of responses from the government institutions is quite low.
 

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