How do you stay up-to-date with what’s going on in the eGovernment world? Where do you go if you have a rapacious appetite for news about eGov?
Go surfing
As for dedicated, journalistic eGov news services, there aren’t a lot. But there are some:
- KableNet.com – “What’s happening in e-government and information-age public services”. UK-centric.
- lgcnet.com – e.gov.uk – e-government news from local government (if you can live with the poor usability/design)
- FCW.com brings US-centric news from Federal Computer Week.
- GCN.com brings US-centric news from Government Computer News.
- GovExec.com‘s Technology section brings daily US-news.
- GovTech.net – daily updates
I am sure there are more services out there (do let me know). But there is a lot to plough through. On the internet, however, there is almost always someone out there who has already themselves done some ploughing and harvesting, and offers their findings to others. So is the case for e-government:
- QuickLinks – weekly updated by Richard Swetenham.
- Lexis Nexis – weekly updated
- HillWatch.com – “News, opinion & research on E-Politics, E-Advocacy, Digital Democracy and Electronic Service Delivery in Government”.
- PoliticsOnline.com
- eGovLinks.com
Had enough already? Wait, there’s more. Much more …
- The new Goggle News Search is cool. Try a search for e-government. And try the same on Alta Vista News.
- There is of course also Moreover, the news portal, which sometimes gives good results for either eGovernment or e-government.
- … on a side note: when searching for news, the hyphen (-) sometimes constitutes a problem. Although probably not done so deliberately, Moreover used to ignore the hyphen and thus presented all results for “government”, which were of course useless (I know people today say “there no such thing as e-government – there’s just government”, but that’s another story …).
The real issue is not a lack of news. It’s finding the news you need, the stuff that’s important to you.
“Spend your time acting on information not looking for it”
That is the motto for eGovMonitor, which informs us that they have “the most powerful knowledge service on eGovernment and public sector information and communication technology markets.” I wonder how much it costs? Someone who often claims to be the ultimately most powerful knowledge provider, Gartner, is expensive. Ridicously expensive. The pricing structure these guys uses rules out most organisations. Having said that, their website actually do offer lots of good material for everyone. But it is incredibly annoying having to pay $5000 to read a report …
