With Liberty & E-Governance For All

Welcome Fellow Bloggers,

And so our journey continues.  For the past seven weeks, we have explored everything from the creation of e-Governance to the advances in Geospatial Technology.  Today, however, I would like to talk about something of even greater importance which is the digital divide and ethics in e-Governance.  I think that long ago, the Founding Fathers of the United States would have had no idea about the technological advancements  we enjoy today.  Understanding a bit about these men, they truly wanted a government for and by the people and they wanted the people to be active and inclusive in decision making.  As I start today's blog, I wonder if they had known about our current technology, would they have been for the inclusion of everyone to have equal access to the Internet and all the good and bad that digital communication allows?  Would they have seen e-Governance as the transparent and synchronous tool that it claims to be or would they have taken a moment of pause to address the many concerns we have have today?

The first thing that should come to mind when we think of government in general should be ethics; a philosophy that involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct.  However, when we REALLY think of government, we often think in terms of the cartoon to the left where government claims to be one thing, but is firmly entrenched in something else…..corruption.  We might say to ourselves, if regular government is so corrupted, how do we expect e-Government to be any better?  Recent stories of abuses by the National Security Agency and other government groups prying into our private lives under the blanket of national security would and should give us pause.  That pause is what causes people to not want to be involved in government and oftentimes develops a cynical attitude towards it.  Ask yourself if you feel that way, and then go back to my original question, how would the Founding Fathers have addressed e-Government and digital technology?

Considering all of that, now I would like you to think about the digital divide phenomenon.  If you want to apply for a job today, how do you do that nowadays?  Monster, Indeed, Career Builder?  If you want to partake in government by interacting with our elected leaders, how do you do that?  E-mail, online forums, social media?  Now imagine that you are poor, don't have a computer, and if you do, there is not enough bandwidth in which to use it effectively.  That, my friends, is the digital divide!  It is a widening gap between the wealthy and the poor; between first world nations and third world nations.  Put another way, the have and have nots!  All of us reading my blog right now knows that digital communication is a necessity to make it in this world, not a luxury.  How would one expect the poor to help change their status in life if they don't have access to the means to make that happen?  And then ask yourself, is denying people something that is necessary to their survival ethical?  Now ask yourself, what would the Founding Fathers have said?

It is not all bad news.  At least the government recognizes there is a problem.  In video below, President Obama talks about the digital divide and what our country is doing to curb the problem:


So here we are again, the chief of our agency, and we have the Information Technology Department ready to go!  We have our legal team ready to go!  We have written directives and policies for our employees so they are ready to go!  The web page is up and running, we have some really cool tech on it, and when we finally go live…nothing…crickets and tumbleweeds.  The page works fine, but our traffic is zip, zilch, nil, nada, zero!  We say to ourselves, how did this happen?  Everything was "ready to go!"  Finally, in a moment of clarity, it hits us.  The people who are most likely to use our services, don't have access to it.  Therefore, we can have synchronous two-way communication between us and our citizens, we can have some awesome 3-D geospatial technology, we can even stream real time calls for service so people know what's going on.  However, without the ability to access it, the technology is no good.  Worse yet, if we know or should have known that these technological advancements don't exist, but the citizens need it to gain access to us, that too is unethical.  So to my fellow bloggers, don't fall into the digital divide trap.  Let's close it.  Talk to your city/county commission.  Talk to your citizens and know what they need.  Make sure what you plan to put out is compatible with their accessibility.  It'll make our job so much easier.  Next week will be my final blog in this series and it will complete my e-Governance course for Troy University.  Thank you for reading.  Until next week.