Official information sources in the context of e-democracy

Horvat, Tamara. (2014). Official information sources in the context of e-democracy. PhD Thesis. Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu, Department of Information Science
Department of Information Science > Chair of social-humanistic informatics.
(Poslijediplomski doktorski studij informacijskih i komunikacijskih znanosti) [mentor Horvat, Aleksandra].

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Abstract

Every democratic society that uses information-communication technologies for enforcement of its institutions and processes is practicing electronic democracy or e-democracy. This paper deals with a segment of e-democracy focused on assuring and achieving the right of access to information aided with technologies. It starts from the facts that comprehensive information is a foundation and the first postulate of democratic processes and the right of access to information is one of the basic civil rights. In every democratic society, strong institutions and their inner processes depend on timeliness, completeness and accuracy of information. With the help of information-communication technologies, creation, processing and dissemination of information can be greatly facilitated. Ultimately this improves the awareness of interested public, facilitates the exchange of ideas on local, national and international level, raises the possibility to engage interested public in creating policies and decisions and allows better understanding of the political steps taken. It has been examined the extent to which e-democracy supports access to timely, free information and its contribution to raising public comprehension of democratic processes taking place in Croatian public authorities' information space. In order to better understand above mentioned issues, first chapters define and put into a relationship basic terms. The paper defines public authorities, official information sources and the right of access to information in terms of proactive disclosure. Putting these in the context, some unreasoning in legal framework was noticed as well as practice deficiencies resulting from failure to comply with the proposed standards. A non-compliance with standards and a lack of inventiveness in the use of tools while practicing e-democracy are widely present. Central part of the paper consists of research results. Conducted surveys and comparison of obtaining results confirmed the main thesis of the paper. The thesis states that public authorities of the Republic of Croatia do not use ICT sufficiently in order to bring official public information closer to citizens and other interested public and that there is no quality model for the organisation and dissemination of official public information from official sources of information. The surveys included state authorities from year 2006 till 2012. Their websites have been analyzed in order to define the level of their proactive disclosure of official information. The surveys were conducted at two levels, analyzing the presence of one-way and two-way communication between public authorities and interested public. Results partially confirmed given thesis on the level of one-way communication and have fully confirmed given thesis on the level of two-way communication. Conducted surveys pointed to gaps that hinder development of reliable and available information sources. The results are used for drafting the model which could assure reliable and long-term available sources of official information in terms of proactive disclosure. Model, proposed in the last part of the paper, represents the scheme with elements necessary to develop a stable and reliable system of official information.

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