| mGovernment for Citizens
We begin a two-part series about mGovernment, the use of mobile technologies to help deliver government services. This article talks about government using wireless to interact with its citizens. The next article talks about government using wireless for its own employees.
A common use of wireless technologies is to give citizens web-like access to information. In some cases, this is static information, such as accessing Governor Schwarzenegger’s Press Releases or State Lottery Results wirelessly (reference 1) or Virginia’s election results (reference 2).
The main consideration in delivering this type of information is the ease of reusing web content in wireless settings. Many web pages display awkwardly even on the best PDA browsers available and not at all on WAP phones.
In addition, many government portals provide exhaustive, conversational information about their services, but are written and organized in a way not useful for a mobile user in a hurry. As a real illustration, try to find Emergency Telephone Numbers, and the location of the nearest defibrillator station on the City of Calgary portal (www.calgary.ca).
See reference 7 for Greyfriars’ Wireless Solutions White Paper on how to design and organize content that can easily be used on the web and on wireless devices
For handling static information, an alternative is to provide packages of information that can be downloaded to a mobile device and viewed offline. The State of California page (reference 3) shows how their content is made available over an AvantGo channel.
Often there is a need for current database driven information, such as traffic conditions, flood warnings, etc. An example is a Highway Information application for the State of California with a simple user entry form (reference 4), which incidentally show the convenience of their highways numbering scheme. Considerable back-end infrastructure has to be in place to capture this information, but extending it to wireless is straightforward.
A better way of delivering current information is to use some type of notification. The Government of Malta provides SMS notifications of an impressive range of services including court deferrals, exam results, and emergency requests for blood donors. See reference 5 for details and your first glimpse of printed Maltese.
Another notification example is Lobbyist-In-A-Box (LIAB), a fee-based service for lobbyists that tracks bills through their life cycle. Lobbyists create profiles of bills they want to track, and receive email notification when changes occur. See reference 6 for pictures of the application running on a Palm.
In terms of getting information back from citizens, there are numerous options including letting citizens send pictures of potholes using MMS, and mVoting using SMS.
What we see from these examples is the need to deliver services to a variety of different devices, over different networks. When we look at Government-to-Employee solutions next month, we will see that we can exercize complete control over the devices and networks that are used. This will simplify solutions delivery, and make feasible the possibility of on-device applications as well.
References
(1) http://my.ca.gov/wireless/
(2) http://www.vipnet.org/cmsportal/index_wap.html
(3) http://www.ca.gov/state/portal/myca_offline_browsing.jsp
(4) http://my.ca.gov/state/palm/palm_traffic.jsp
(5) http://www.gov.mt/egovernment.asp?p=106&l=1
(6) http://www.vipnet.org/productdemos/palm_demo/palm_liab_tracking.htm |