London's web site compares dismally vs other global cities says report :: PublicTechnology.net :: e-Government & public sector IT news + job vacancies:

A big study of 100 major worldwide city websites ranked Seoul, Hong Kong, Singapore, New York, and Shanghai as the top five cities, with London trailing in 55th place, and Dublin 17th.

London scored poorly on its web site www.london.gov.uk because it does not excel in any area, has distinctly poor usability, and just doesn't stack up to better designed sites. Looks like Ken should get his site re-designed having had a serious chin-wag with Jakob Nielsen or Jared Spool, those gurus of usability.

This survey (www.andromeda.rutgers.edu/~egovinst/Website was conducted jointly by the E-governance Institute of Rutgers University-Newark and the Global e-Policy e-Government Institute of Sungkyunkwan University, Korea, and was co-sponsored by the UN Division for Public Administration and Development Management, and the American Society for Public Administration. This is the first research effort to evaluate and rank city websites in municipalities throughout the world.

This survey examined the largest city in each of 98 countries with the highest percentage of Internet users, and Hong Kong SAR and Macao SAR were included. This research evaluated the official Web sites of each city in their native languages. Our instrument for evaluating municipal Web sites consists of 92 measures over five core areas: 1. Security and Privacy, 2. Usability, 3. Content, 4. Services, 5. Citizen Participation. Each measure was coded on a scale of four-points (0, 1, 2, 3) or a dichotomy of two-points (0, 3 or 0, 1). Then, an overall score for each municipality (on a 100-point scale) was derived by giving equal weight to each of the five categories.

Professor Marc Holzer, Chairman of the E-Governance Institute said, "This joint research was helpful for reducing cultural bias in our survey methodology. During the design of the 92 measures in our e-government index, we identified some terms which people in various cultures might not understand. So, we developed an index which was culture-neutral."

Each Web site was assessed by two independent evaluators between June and October 2003, and in cases where significant variation existed on the raw score between evaluators, websites were analysed a third time. Based on the evaluation of 100 cities, the top 10 cities are as follows;

Top 10 Cities in Digital Governance Worldwide
1 Seoul
2 Hong Kong
3 Singapore
4 New York
5 Shanghai
6 Rome
7 Auckland
8 Jerusalem
9 Tokyo
10 Toronto

New York City was ranked No. 1 worldwide in terms of content. Among the top 20 cities, three are from developing countries: Tallinn (Estonia) 14th, Dubai (United Arab Emirates) 18th, and Jakarta (Indonesia) 20th. This research identified a digital divide gap between developed and less developed countries. Although the average score for all cities is 28.10 out of 100, the average score in OECD countries is 36.34; however the average score in non-OECD countries is only 24.26. In addition, 67% of cities selected in Africa have not established official city websites, whereas only 3% in Europe have no city Web sites.

Sungkyunkwan University is holding an international conference to present best practices cases based on this survey and is giving a "World Cities Best Practices E-Government Award" to the top five cites on November 21 in Seoul.