The foundations for governance in an information age are developing through the Web as it becomes the principal electronic public gateway into government organizations, and a key element in administrative structures and functioning.

Traditional measures of democracy fail to capture related changes in governance. Evaluating democracy by looking at election processes, patterns of participation, and legal access to vetoes and appeals does not address bureaucratic performance and accountability which may be associated with democracy. 

Openness, a key information technology-related attribute of public bureaucracies, presents an opportunity to perform such an evaluation. Measuring its spread and qualities is a novel way to measure the spread of administrative arrangements vital to democratic governance.

Web technologies do more than open up bureaucracies. They also change organizationsí information and authority structures. Public managers have little information to guide their developing electronic operations, or to alert them to the broader democratic consequences of their web-related choices.

Contributions

Before this project began, data suitable for rigorous hypothesis testing on such questions did not exist.  CyPRG conducts three main data-gathering activities to enable such analytic work: