The Effectiveness of e-Governance Experiences in the Knowledge Society

The Knowledge Society is a space for the talent, intelligence, imagination and creativity of humankind. It is characterised by deterritorialisation, interdependences between the factors, the interconnection between the actors involved in the decision making processes and the importance of the human factor, particularly with regards to learning and education. E-governance is defined as the use of ICTs in the design of public policies and, more generally, as the use of ICTs in public decision making related to the governance of society (Moreno-Jimenez, 2009). In the context of the Knowledge Society, e-governance approaches should be oriented towards the conjoint construction of a better world, as outlined, for example, in official documentation on governmental strategy(2). Collaborative participatory models, tools and platforms are needed to allow the integration of the skills and opinions of all the actors involved in the resolution process to formulate public policies (Moreno-Jimenez et al., 2012; Wimmer et al., 2012). The instruments should be designed to educate (intelligence and learning), promote relations with others (communication and coexistence), improve society (quality of life and cohesion) and construct the future (evolution) in a world of increasing complexity, using the collective intelligence of the people to engage members of democratic environments in policy decision making. The assessment of e-governance experiences usually (Wimmer and Bicking, 2013) deals with the evaluation of efficiency (doing things correctly) or efficacy (achieving goals), but unfortunately, there are very few cases in which this assessment has analysed the most important of these aspects: effectiveness (doing the right things). This paper presents a framework with a set of criteria, subcriteria and indicators for evaluating the impact of e-participation experiences and collaborative democracy models in the context of the Knowledge Society and New Public Governance. The authors further present a methodology for evaluating the effectiveness (added public value) of these experiences in the Knowledge Society. The framework is currently being applied to a real-life experience of e-governance, based on the cognitive democracy known as e-Cognocracy (Moreno-Jimenez, 2003a, 2006), which was implemented in the municipality of Cadrete (Zaragoza), Spain, and it will also be applied to the set of e-participation experiences included in the Momentum project. Future studies will holistically integrate the impact of efficiency, efficacy and effectiveness.