Digital governance in municipalities worldwide

This document presents the findings of the worldwide survey of municipal digital governance 2007. The survey evaluates 86 large municipalities which have official websites and ranks them on a global scale based on their scores in the areas of:

• security, usability and content of websites
• the type of online services currently being offered
• citizen responses and participation through websites

The survey focuses on cities based on their population size and the total number of individuals using the Internet in the nation. The top 100 most wired nations were identified using data from the International Telecommunication Union.The largest city, by population in each of these 100 countries was then selected and used as a surrogate for all cities in the respective country. Of the 100 cities selected, 86 cities were found to have official municipal websites.

The main findings of the survey include

• the number of cities with official websites has increased to 86 per cent compared to 81 per cent in 2005
• Seoul, Hong Kong, Helsinki, Singapore and Madrid represent the cities with the highest evaluation scores.
• Seoul is the highest ranked city, and there has been a slight increase in the gap between first and second
• in Africa 50 percent of cities selected for the survey established websites, up from 29 percent in 2005.
• in Asia, the percentage of cities with websites increased from 78 per cent in 2005 to 89 in 2007.
• while 70 percent of the cities in North America have established websites, it was cent percent in the case of the cities selected in Europe, South America and Oceania.

The findings show that cities across the world, especially the non-OECD cities, are becoming more involved in offering government services online.

A promising finding in terms of citizen participation is the growing tendency among municipalities to publish performance measurement data on their websites. The number of websites providing data from citywide performance measurement systems has doubled globally in 2007.

The study concludes that although there has been an increase in e-governance performance throughout the world, continuous improvement should be the norm for every municipality.