e-Government.

• Position: From the Library - Metropolitan Web sites - Brief Article

"Urban E-Government: An Assessment of City Government Web Sites"

West, Darrell M.

Inside Politics, September 2001, pp.

West's team at Brown University evaluated the Web presence of the 70 largest metropolitan areas, which included 1,506 actual Web sites. Every city agency with a site was evaluated based on 28 criteria that measured the features, information, and services available online. Average scores were computed for each city. Like most evaluations, there was significant variation between the cities in terms of the quality of their sites. West found that cities are doing some things well, but much like state governments, they continue to lag behind the private sector in terms of Web development. Only 13 percent of cities offer services that are fully executable online, mostly because only three cities accept credit card payments. One of the greatest concerns of potential users of e-government is privacy and security, yet few cities display their policies on...