The absence of user involvement in the design and development of e-government is often cited as a reason for the lag in e-government uptake. Drawing on our involvement with PortNL, an integrated e-government service for expatriates in the Netherlands, we explain this absence as a result of an inevitable tension between usercentred design -the most common way to involve users -and e-government. User-centred design is a structured approach to produce interactive systems by involving users or potential users and addressing their needs at every stage of the design process. Governments, while concerned with their users' needs, have their own considerable needs to address. We outline four manifestations of the tension between user-centred design and e-government: users' and governments' contradictory visions of the tasks to be accomplished; governments' mandate to design for exceptions, as well as for the mainstream, governments' and users' differing commitments to the law and governments' and users' contradicting desires about the nature of their relationship. We conclude with observations about the design and development of e-government services to improve their quality and, thus, increase their uptake.
The fleeting life cycle of Internet technologies poses new challenges to the pillars of scientific method, validity and reliability, in research about technology. Time compression—the concentration of numerous and rapid technological changes into shorter, erratic time cycles—affected the author's research on Web site design skill, resulting in a disappearance of data that is unexpected in the Information Age. Given the intensifying digitization of human life, the discipline of sociology increasingly confronts a tension between an imperfect, realistic data situation with which history has already made its peace, and an ideal type of scientific method that was always challenging, but now seems even more formidable. History, the past and the discipline, offers tools and insights to address the complexity of time in the digital world and its effect on evidence and methodology.
In this article we describe people's online contribution practices in contexts in which the government actively blocks access to or censors the Internet. We argue that people experience blocking as confusing, as a motivation for self-censorship online, as a cause of impoverishment of available content and as a real threat of personal persecution. Challenging ideas of blocking as a monolithic, abstract policy, we discuss five strategies with which Internet users navigate blocking: self-censorship, cultivating technical savvy, reliance on social ties to relay blocked content, use of already blocked sites for content production as a form of protection and practiced transparency. We also discuss strategies that forum owners and blogging platform providers employ to deal with and to avoid blocking. We conclude by advocating for more research that acknowledges the complexity of the contexts in which all Internet users contribute to the Internet and social media.
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