Community portals through communitization

Abstract

Governments wishing to achieve high citizen adoption from electronic services need to provide solutions that are not only technically accessible, but usable and engaging to large numbers of people. Citizen diversity makes this a real challenge. Designing the best user experience for diverse users will require alternative designs on potentially different devices. The cost of doing this may prove prohibitive. One answer is to leverage "the third sector" i.e. voluntary organizations, special interest groups, communities and business related support organizations. Third sector organizations traditionally provide support to disadvantaged and potentially excluded groups and provide a way for government to increase social inclusion and reach a wider audience. To support the delivery of government information and services through multiple providers including but not restricted to the originating government version, this paper proposes to introduce the concept of "Communitization". The principle behind "Communitization" is to enable an interface to be adapted to suit the wants and needs of a community. For government this would provide a way to reach a broader set of citizens with a more tailored set of solutions without incurring any incremental cost. The benefit to citizens would be a custom design, tailored to their needs and integrated into sites they already use. Copyright 2003 ACM.