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Central Government, Policy

How government web sites build citizen trust

By Robin Hicks | 12 March 2010

Government modernisers in Asia and Europe have stressed the importance of building transparent official web sites as a way to boost citizen trust. In interviews with FutureGov, public sector experts from Singapore and the Netherlands said that more needs to be done to make information on government web sites more accessible, timely and searchable if closer ties are to be built with netizens.

Dr Pan Shan-Ling, Senior Research Fellow, Singapore e-Government Leadership Centre, National University of Singapore, said that public sector web sites that seek to embrace transparency should not simply be a repository for information on the organisation’s functions. “It should have functionalities, such as search and an information directory, that enable citizens to locate the information they need efficiently and effectively.”

Dr Pan uses Singapore’s myCPF portal for the Central Provident Fund Board as a good example of a transparent government web site. “Information on the CPF policies of the Singapore government is categorised by life events, which makes it really easy for users to locate the information most relevant to them. There is a life event called “getting married” and all the information on the CPF policies related to marriage (e.g. nominating the beneficiary, subscribing to the dependent’s protection scheme of the Singapore government) are available for this specific group of users.”

In the Netherlands, a set of Web Guidelines were introduced to boost the transparency of government web sites in 2007. Matt Poelmans, Director of Citzenlink for the Dutch Ministry of the Interior, told FutureGov: “These guidelines consist of 125 requirements that deal with all aspects of the digital relationship. Accessibility, transparency, clarity, openness, predictability. From its introduction, new websites had to comply. As of the end of this year, the guidelines will be mandatory for all existing national government websites. Provincial and local government sites will follow suit.”

To measure the performance of its web sites, the Dutch government uses a self-assessment tool that covers 78 of 126 criteria to gauge performance. “Anyone can use this tool to check whether a certain web site meets the requirements. The other criteria have to be checked manually by experts,” said Poelmans, who is the Vice President of the Dutch Web Accessibility Foundation. The Foundation keeps the guidelines up to date, publishes an ongoing performance ranking and stages annual awards for the best performing public sector sites.

Dr Pan of the Singapore e-Government Leadership Centre, pointed out that web site transparency is difficult to measure, because only the organisation that publishes the site “would know the extent and the accuracy of the information they are disclosing. She also noted that it is difficult to weight different qualities of web site transparency since each quality is tightly interrelated. “A web site that contains completely inaccurate information cannot be deemed transparent no matter how timely, accessible or extensive the information on it is,” she said.

Her comments follow a study in the United States that found a strong correlation between government web site transparency and citizen trust. The Federal Communications Commission study used survey data from 36,000 visitors to federal websites in 14 participating agencies to form an E-Government Transparency Index. The results of the study will be used as a benchmark to improve agency website transparency.

The report’s authors concluded that while it may seem obvious that public trust in an agency can be increased by building a more transparent web site, the correlation is very strong.

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