2001), but this effort remained largely outside of the mainstream use of BEV.
BEV remained in service until 2015. Its take-down notice recognizes the fate of many early “digital city” and community network services, that commercial providers ultimately won the day: “This transition recognizes the success of BEV in that many of the services that it has provided in a speculative, experimental context are now widely available from a variety of providers” (from the BEV Transition Announcement, http://www.bev.net/transition-announcement).
While early digital cities often made attempts to render their interfaces graphically, none went quite as far in this direction as Helsinki, Finland (Linturi, Koivunen, and Sulkanen, 1999) and Kyoto, Japan (Ishida and Isbister, 2000; Ishida, 2002). In these cases, attempts were made to create a digital urban experience using a virtual city environment in which government services, shopping opportunities, and interaction were enabled via avatars. Digital City Kyoto originated from NTT and Kyoto University in 1998. The concept was to create a virtual space that was isomorphic to the real city. The researchers imagined a three-layer architecture consisting of an information layer, interface layer, and interaction layer. In anticipation of the smart city concept, Digital City Kyoto was envisioned to have sensors and monitors on physical objects that would aggregate data and represent it in a visualization of real urban space. This information layer relied heavily on GIS data and address information to situate the user in a realistic visual depiction of the city. The interface layer generated 2D and 3D representations of space using real images. Finally, the interaction layer was intended to employ chat software for interactions among people through their avatars and chatbots for directing tours and helping in wayfinding.
2.2 E-GOVERNMENT PORTALS
In parallel with the digital cities movement, researchers and practitioners from the areas of political science and public policy have engaged in efforts to develop portals to local and national government services. Researchers began to explore the idea that governments and citizens could interact electronically almost at the birth of the internet (for example, see Braman, 1995; Stenberg, Ayres, and Kettinger, 1983). In general, their concerns were not with the formation of communities or necessarily citizen deliberation, but rather the opening of channels between government and citizens for information dissemination and transaction, productivity and cost impacts, the legal and bureaucratic issues involved in information sharing, matters of transparency and privacy, standards, relations among levels of government, intergovernmental (and even international) boundaries, and the lines between public and private interests in information management. Much of the literature on e-government was (and is) published in the information science literature and, more recently, government- and policy-related journals and conferences (Belanger and Carter, 2012). According to Grönlund and Horan (2005), the information systems field has dominated in conducting research and developing theory in the area of e-government systems (cf. Andersen and Henriksen, 2005; Grönlund, 2004).
Proponents of e-government systems argued from the beginning that they might bring fundamental changes to how government works. Fountain (2002) predicted that information technology in government would bring positive changes to social, economic, and political aspects of government. While adoption of new e-government systems has been consistent and widespread, positive impacts have been seen mostly in productivity and efficiency gains rather than in fundamental practices. In a significant overview of the adoption of information technologies in government, Kraemer and King (2006) concluded the following:
• “[T]echnology [is] useful in some cases of administrative reform, but only in cases where expectations for reform are already well-established. IT application does not cause reform.”
• “IT application has brought relatively little change to organization structures, and seems to reinforce existing structures.”
• “[T]he primary beneficiaries [of information technology] have been functions favored by the dominant political-administrative coalitions in public administrations, and not those of technical elites, middle managers, clerical staff, or ordinary citizens.”
• “Government managers have a good sense of the potential uses of IT in their own interests, and in cases where their interests coincide with government interests, they push IT application aggressively.”
In other words, the adoption of information technologies has been largely non-transformational.
Analysis and benchmarking of government portals (Rorissa, Demissie, and Pardo, 2011) and websites often distinguish between several levels of service, roughly as follows.
• Information dissemination from government to citizens (G2C).
• Rudimentary two-way communication between government and citizens such as e-mail (G2C and C2G).
• Online transaction processing, e.g., licensing, permitting, payments. In later stages voting and rulemaking (participation in legislation).
• Citizen engagement in highly interactive and collaborative endeavors in support of civic, governmental, and political activities (C2C, sometimes referred to as “government 2.0”).
• Collaborative, open government (includes leveraging of citizen-generated data and crowdsourcing of civic solutions both in collaboration with, and independent of, government).
Bimber (2000) argued at the beginning of the century for abandonment of ideas like “cyber-democracy” or “e-government,” which imply that a new of civic participation is emerging from use of the internet and other information technologies:
“Analysis of civic engagement might well proceed, I believe, by modeling a civic landscape that is growing increasingly information rich and communication intensive, rather than one that is permeated by one technology or another. Technologies change and evolve over time, of course, but the trend toward lower and lower marginal costs of information and communication will likely continue for the foreseeable future. If information technology is a cause, its proximate effect is to create societies that are in many ways more information rich and communication intensive, societies where the marginal cost of information and communication is very low. The question, then, becomes one of understanding the ultimate effects that follow from those new informational circumstances” (Bimber, 2000, p. 331).
Bimber argues that instead of considering the internet to be revolutionary, we should consider it to be one in a long series of changes (albeit, a dramatic change) in the history of information management (Castells, 1996), and that research should focus on how organizations and individuals adapt their practices accordingly. Bimber’s argument is that we should view changes in civic engagement in the era of the internet as an evolutionary adaptation to dramatic shifts in the global information ecology.
A significant feature of the internet, according to Bimber (2000), is the reduction in “information cost,” or the reduction in resources required to produce and disseminate information broadly and swiftly. He predicted many outcomes with regard to political and civic participation, including:
• greater fragmentation and pluralism in the structure of civic engagement as information efforts become more specialized and focused;
• replacing of large political organizations that persist through multiple events (e.g., political parties) with more flexible, special-issue, and temporary ad-hoc groups;
• a rise in smaller political parties and reduction in the power of big parties;
• more rapid cycling of the political agenda and acceleration of the pace of the public agenda;
• a “deinstitutionalization”
