Previous page: Designing the machinery of citizenry
There are many policy questions around identity management: how to identify and authenticate citizens online while also protecting their privacy, he says. And there are practical considerations. "In Ontario, the technology is available to authenticate citizens with PKI, but it would be expensive to do that for 12 million people."
The public sector is working through these issues at all levels, individually and collectively, notes Cunningham. An inter-jurisdictional task force with representation from all levels of government, the business community and other stakeholders has been formed to develop a common approach.
"This goes to the heart of service delivery as well; identity management would allow people to sign on once to access services at all three levels of government. That's informing how one would look at extending it into government decision-making."
In the United States, governments are proceeding cautiously in this space, suggests Paul Henry, a vice-president at Secure Computing Inc., a San Jose, Calif.-based security provider.
"There's such a rift between Democrats and Republicans today. Online mechanisms to increase citizen involvement are perceived as dangerous in this politically polarized environment."
Henry says there are many concerns around the risk of people manipulating online technology for their political purposes.
Identity management is important but difficult to enforce in such a large population, he adds. "You can't hand a token to every citizen. There are other methods of tracing back to an IP address, but a good hacker can spoof that, or run a botnet to cast votes."
There are policy risks as well, says Henry. Even moderated online groups can become biased if the moderator decides to express his political will. "Postings can become one-sided to support the moderator's own agenda."
As in Canada, a policy that's acceptable to all concerned needs to be hammered out in the U.S., he says. There's a clear separation between policy and technology in these discussions.
"CIOs tend to stick to their technology domain; policy is normally driven down to them. Ironically, even in something like URL filtering, the CIO would not determine the specific categories to filter. That would be dictated by policy. He would simply be responsible for configuring [technology] to adhere to [policy]."
This separation is not so rigid in Canada, says Cunningham. "What I see is a blurring of policy and technology, as these go hand in hand. These problems can't be solved solely in the policy realm without some understanding of the technology options available to enable them."
And while the Canadian government is also proceeding cautiously, the political climate is different. "I don't know that we have the same zeal here as we see in the U.S.," he says. "Yes, we must be careful, but we have a different political environment and system here, and it will temper some of that."
From theory to practice in Windsor
Some Canadian municipalities are exploring ways to increase citizen engagement. The City of Windsor is working in several areas to get more input, says Harry Turnbull, executive director of IT.
"We're starting to get more engagement than in the past with our strategic planning process," he says. After gathering feedback from a community leaders' forum and a wider public process for citizens, the results are summarized and brought back to the leaders' group for validation, he explains.
City Council then considers all this information to determine the priorities for the next four years. "It appears successful in giving Council a clear mandate, its marching orders, for the next term," says Turnbull, who is also president of the Municipal Information Systems Association (MISA) of Ontario.
Next page: Digital methods for citizen engagement
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