contains a perception module, which captures the
user interactions, a SOAP client for loading the
rules, and an action module, responsible for making
the change in the system according to a plan of
action drawn from the Norms. Finally there is a
storage module of the events generated by users (for
future reference) and modules for storage of
Inferences, Norms and creation of action plans. Sites
like the Transparency Portal (in Portuguese “Portal
da Transparência – http: // www.
portaldatransparencia. gov. br) does not require
registration, making inferences based on previous
experiences difficult.
Bruna Burr (2010) believes that one way to
encourage the participation of citizens in the
political movement is through conversations related
to areas of public interest. She defines a process as
"a sequence of inter-dependent actions that consume
one or more resources to convert inputs into
outputs", and the discussions around the process.
The work focuses on the first levels of democratic
participation (where the initial levels represent the
population's access to information and the upper
levels represent the very public participation in
decision making, as a direct democracy). Based on
the responses, the services offered can then be
improved.
Anne Veenstra and Arre Zuurmond (2009)
reinforce the idea that e-government is not just
offering services online but should include
personalized services to citizens. Accordingly,
departments of one or more organizations should
cooperate to offer services as a unique view to
citizens, no matter which number of departments
would be involved. Consultants, government
officials and specialized sites were used as sources
to identify the relationship between variables related
to the factors of organizational change (eg, aligning
IT to business, vertical or horizontal organization,
internal/external management, non-duplication of
activities, technology deployment and systems,
among others) and quality of service offered. The
results showed that yes, there is a relationship
between some factors of organizational change and
quality of service, and the factors related to
information technology in large part impact the
measures of the quality of service.
3 ACCESSIBILITY AND
USABILITY
e-Government aims at the development of
applications with good usability and accessibility,
here understood as the requirement that applications
can easily be accessed and understood by the entire
population. Whereas accessibility allows
information to be obtained even by those with
special needs, a good usability ensures that the path
to obtain the information will be found in an
objective and easy way. Usability testing should be
made to identify the interface more suitable,
especially when considering the needs of different
users.
Accessibility is a requirement in applications
developed by the Brazilian Government since
December 2004 and a standard called Accessibility
Model for Electronic Government (e-MAG, in
Portuguese “Modelo de Acessibilidade de Governo
Eletrônico”) (DGE, 2005) is the reference to be
followed. The current version 2.0 was released in
December 2005 and is based on Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standard.
Usability, in turn, does not have a legal obligation in
Brazil. However, it involves fundamental principles
such as effectiveness and efficiency in information
search, satisfaction of use, frequency of errors and
memories of previous experience (DHHS, 2010).
Accessibility is still a keyword to W3C, which in its
specification for HyperText Markup Language
(HTML) 5 (W3C, 2009) mentions the creation of
accessible pages as part of its scope.
Accessible applications and appropriate usability
lead to a greater participation in government by all
and make communication with authorities about
local issues easier. An example is the site
"FixMyStreet" (MySociety.Org, 2010), in which
citizens of Great Britain report problems about
cleaning and lighting, among others. Electronic
Government challenges to the population also exist:
the site "Apps for Democracy" (iStrategyLabs,
2010) stimulates a contest with prizes for the
identification and resolution of the main types of
problems that can be treated by ICTs.
4 TRANSPARENCY PORTAL IN
BRAZIL
In Brazil, the General Control Agency (In
Portuguese, “Controladoria-Geral da União”)
released in November 2004 a Transparency Portal
website in order to expose all the expenses of the
executive branch of the Brazilian government in one
place. The initiative intended to strengthen the
defense of the public heritage and to increase the
transparency of public management, roles performed
by this agency, through the so called "Popular
ICEIS 2011 - 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems
246