"Improving Access to Government through Better Use of the Web" review comments

 Dear eGOV IG,

Some high level comments to "Improving Access to Government through Better Use of the Web":

* I don't think the language this document is using is the right one for a guideline produced by a standardization body.

* Abstract: "governments and their citizenry" sounds like Her Royal Highness the Queen and Her subjects. That is not the right terminology for a standard. Also this phrase ommits the fact that a government page may be accessed by a citizen of another country for various reasons like e.g. aspiring a new job in a new country. So there is no need for any distinction between so to say citizenries. I assume that some government pages must be universally accessible whereas some pages are accessible by providing e.g. social security number. 

* The end of the first sentence in the abstract is not clear on "departments and divisions". It probably refers to the earlier part of the sentence explaining parts of government bodies. So the whole sentence should be simplified to say that eGovernment should serve the purpose of communication with the people, communication between gifferent structures within a government and for communication between governments of different countries.

* I started reading and editing the Introduction but then gave up reading it alltogether. Again the language is wrong. Don't say "so called Web 2.0" or "wild wild web". This document is not a place to judge technologies or make jokes.

* The Introduction is too long and does not serve the purpose of introducing the document. It  is more of a prologue. The Introduction should be reduced to several paragraphs that concentrate on the scope of the document, what issues it tries to address rather than giving a history of WWW development.

* Background subsection of the Intruduction seems to explain the scope of work of the eGovernment working group. If this is important message to deliver as part of this guideline,  why not to isolate it as a separate section and may be change the title to "Scope of Egovernment WG work". However if deliverables of eGovernment group are well exposed in the document, this Background section should go alltogether. 

Best regards,
Anna Zhuang

Received on Monday, 30 March 2009 09:23:53 UTC