Digital Commons Network^™

An Assessment Tool For E-Government System Performance: A Citizen-Centric Model, Shatha A. Al-Haddad, Peter Hyland, Geoffrey Hubona

Associate Professor Peter Hyland

Governments worldwide have, increasingly, implemented e-government initiatives for their potential significant benefits; among which, delivering better services to citizens through increasing citizens' convenience, satisfaction, and independence; and saving their time, effort, and cost. Achieving each benefit is an objective to these governments and fulfilling each objective is considered a critical success factors. Hence, governments need to assess the extent to which they were able to obtain their preset goals. This study merely focuses on the citizens' perspective of the evaluation. However, the literature seems to lack studies that propose such a sufficient evaluation tool that has been reliably validated. Therefore, …

Regional Development And Local Government: Three Generations Of Federal Intervention, Andrew H. Kelly, Brian Dollery, Bligh Grant

Bligh Grant

Contemporary Australian local government faces several daunting problems, not least escalating financial un-sustainability and local infrastructure depletion. The main response of the various state and territory governments has taken the form of a series structural reform programs, with a strong emphasis on forced amalgamation. However, widespread dissatisfaction with the consequences of these compulsory consolidation programs has led to a search for alternative policy solutions based largely on shared services and various types of regional co-operation between local councils. This paper seeks to place proposed ‘regional’ solutions to contemporary problems in historical perspective by providing a comparative account of three distinct …

Waldo In The Light Of Austerity And Federal Debt Crisis, Part 2, Jan Kallberg

Jan Kallberg

Waldo’s predictions about the future for public administration describe five areas that would be problematic in the future: legitimacy, authority, knowledge, control, and confidence. Legitimacy includes not only that the government is legally legitimized but capable and focused on an intention to deliver the “good society.” Authority, according to Waldo, is the ability to implement policy with the acceptance of the people based on rationalism, expectations of public good, ethics, superior knowledge, and institutional contexts. Knowledge is institutional knowledge, the ability to arrange and utilize knowledge within the bureaucracy since coordination is the major challenge in knowledge management. Government has …

Waldo In The Light Of Austerity And Federal Debt Crisis, Part 1, Jan Kallberg

Jan Kallberg

Dwight Waldo wrote The Enterprise of Public Administration in 1979 looking back on a long and fruitful academic career, but also as a reflection about the future for public administration. Can a 30 year old book still be relevant? You bet. Today, the public sector is increasingly facing fiscal challenges. Federal, state, and local governments throughout the country have major budget deficits followed by austerity measures that undermine the ability to deliver the good life of the future. In this day and age rereading Dwight Waldo’s The Enterprise of Public Administration is an intellectual exercise worth pursuing. Several of Dwight …

Location-Based Services For Emergency Management: A Multi-Stakeholder Perspective, Anas Aloudat, K. Michael, Roba Abbas

Dr Roba Abbas

This paper investigates the deployment of locationbased services for nationwide emergency management by focusing on the perspectives of two stakeholders, government and end-users, in the cellular mobile phone value chain. The data collected for the study came from a single in-depth interview and open comments in a preliminary end-user survey. The themes presented have been categorised using a qualitative analysis. The findings indicate that although governments and end-users believe that location-based services have the potential to aid people in emergencies, there are several major disagreements over the proposed deployment. This paper is an attempt to help determine the underlying motivations …

The Legal Ramifications Of Microchipping People In The United States Of America- A State Legislative Comparison, Angelo Friggieri, K. Michael, M.G. Michael

M. G. Michael

The ability to microchip people for unique positive identification, and for tracking and monitoring applications is becoming increasingly scrutinized by the legal profession, civil libertarians, politicians in positions of power, human rights advocates, and last but not least, citizens across jurisdictions. The United States is among the few nations internationally, that have moved to enact state-level legislation, regarding the microchipping of people in a variety of contexts. This paper provides an overview of nine state laws/bills in the United States of America that have either enacted anti-chipping legislation or have recently proposed bills regarding the enforced chipping of persons. The …

The Legal Ramifications Of Microchipping People In The United States Of America- A State Legislative Comparison, Angelo Friggieri, K. Michael, M.G. Michael

Professor Katina Michael

The ability to microchip people for unique positive identification, and for tracking and monitoring applications is becoming increasingly scrutinized by the legal profession, civil libertarians, politicians in positions of power, human rights advocates, and last but not least, citizens across jurisdictions. The United States is among the few nations internationally, that have moved to enact state-level legislation, regarding the microchipping of people in a variety of contexts. This paper provides an overview of nine state laws/bills in the United States of America that have either enacted anti-chipping legislation or have recently proposed bills regarding the enforced chipping of persons. The …

Historical Lessons On Id Technology And The Consequences Of An Unchecked Trajectory, Katina Michael, M G. Michael

M. G. Michael

This paper traces the use of identification techniques throughout the ages and focuses on the growing importance of citizen identification by governments. The paper uses a historical approach beginning with manual techniques such as tattoos, through to more recent automatic identification (auto-ID) techniques such as smart cards and biometrics. The findings indicate that identification techniques born for one purpose have gradually found their way into alternate applications, and in some instances have been misused altogether. There is also strong evidence to suggest that governments are moving away from localized identification schemes to more global systems based on universal lifetime identifiers.

Historical Lessons On Id Technology And The Consequences Of An Unchecked Trajectory, Katina Michael, M G. Michael

Professor Katina Michael

This paper traces the use of identification techniques throughout the ages and focuses on the growing importance of citizen identification by governments. The paper uses a historical approach beginning with manual techniques such as tattoos, through to more recent automatic identification (auto-ID) techniques such as smart cards and biometrics. The findings indicate that identification techniques born for one purpose have gradually found their way into alternate applications, and in some instances have been misused altogether. There is also strong evidence to suggest that governments are moving away from localized identification schemes to more global systems based on universal lifetime identifiers.

From Dataveillance To Überveillance (Uberveillance) And The Realpolitik Of The Transparent Society, K. Michael, M. G. Michael

M. G. Michael

The 2007 Workshop on the Social Implications of National Security: from Dataveillance to Überveillance and the Realpolitik of the Transparent Society was organised by the Research Network for a Secure Australia (RNSA) funded by the Australian Research Council. The Workshop will become a biennial event bringing together both researchers and practitioners in the fields relating to the national research priority entitled Safeguarding Australia. In 2007, the workshop was held on the 29th October, at the Function Centre at the University of Wollongong between 8.30 am and 5.00 pm.

The Workshop was organised by RNSA members from the IP Location-Based Services …