More aware, more satisfied: the new 2.0 citizens

The growth of the potential of the Web has redefined the exchange of goods and services as well as the relations and provisions between local administrations and citizens, by favoring the empowerment of the latter, who show growing needs for access to qualified, customized and immediately usable information. The Journal of E-governance has recently published the early findings of a research study started by the Bocconi Department of Marketing in the new are of social marketing. The study represents a first evaluation of the maturity of the online presence of European public administrations, in reference to the capability of sites and portals to boost effective forms of citizens' empowerment. Also, by analyzing a concrete case, the study has investigated the impact of Web 2.0 strategies on citizens' trust and satisfaction.
As far as the first objective is concerned, a concise Citizen Web Empowerment Index – CWEI was calculated, by attributing scores to the institutional web sites of 42 selected municipal administrations in 20 European countries, found within the Major Cities of Europe network. For the evaluation the following were considered: the nature and type of available information; the presence of Web 2.0 elements and of services provided through mobile networks; the presence of e-consultation tools; the online transparency of decision-making processes and the emphasis on the role of the evaluations expressed by citizens (for instance by publishing online the various phases of major proceedings).
With respect to a theoretical maximum put at 100, the average of the sites samples is 37.8. While the information content has been by now well structured (74/100), more modest numbers emerge for the diffusion of e-consultation tools (32,4/100) and Web 2.0 elements (23,2/100). As for the transparency of decision making, the score is abysmal (8,3/100), revealing profound online immaturity of public administrations. The first Italian city in the ranking is Venice (score of 66), preceded by the Greek city of Trikala (87), site of a European innovation project, then Hamburg (83) and Vienna (79). In the City of Venice we looked into the georeferencing of complaints by citizens, with the obligation by the City of running it transparently on the Web. In this case the comparison between two groups of citizens (users and non-users of the service) has highlighted the fact that users have a higher level of satisfaction vis-à-vis the relations with the administration, and the fact that the complaints are actually heeded, more interest in other people's complaints and the length of the process to actually deal with them. As shown from the modest performance in terms of CWEI scores, local administration seem to have still not grasped the potential for administrative improvement, and haven't invested accordingly. The Italian situation is also critical because of widespread lack of wi-fi connectivity (uncoincidentally, Venice is the only Italian city that has a municipal wi-fi network) as well as the limits of mobile networks for data traffic.

However, perhaps the biggest constraint is the reluctance that many administrators have in accepting the high level of transparency via-à-vis citizens that the digital revolution makes inevitable.