Currently e‑Government initiatives have a highly fragmented nature and are hardly coordinated. An architectural approach aimed at reusing components as shared services can support government agencies in the implementation of their e‑Government initiatives. In this paper we describe research aimed at identifying and prioritising the importance of generic services that can be shared among public agencies. Generic shared services are identified and prioritised by technical experts and government representatives using a group support system session. This has resulted in an action plan to implement the services and use them as part of future e‑Government projects.

This paper provides an overview of the work currently being undertaken at an international level by the OASIS e‑Government Technical Committee on developing ICT standards for interoperability to support the work of putting government services on‑line. The work of the committee is on‑going and this paper provides a snapshot of current progress as at the date of this paper and assumes a certain level of awareness on the part of the reader of the new set of Internet technologies.

This paper reports on the development of an innovative Open Source Software solution called the Portable Knowledge Asset Development System (pKADS). pKADS is a desktop‑based knowledge management system whose purpose is to promote knowledge sharing in government and non‑government organisations, which the United Nations views a being pivotal to the inclusion of developing nations in the knowledge society. The institutional context for the development of this system is delineated, as are the system's conceptual and technical architectures. The paper concludes with suggestions for the application of pKADS and its implications in shaping subsequent e‑Government initiatives.

e‑Government puts demands on government organisations which may require new management frameworks. This paper presents interim findings from a doctoral research study exploring how a framework based on the New Institutional Economics leads to greater understanding and new insights. This paper, which outlines the theory and shows how it has been applied as a practical business tool in an e‑government context, updates the paper presented at the 2004 European Conference on e‑Government.

This paper reports a study which reviewed the literature and explored the approaches adopted by a small sample of local government bodies engaged in implementing e‑Government. The findings suggest that the e‑Government implementation process underway in the UK does not embody the principles of widening democracy and increasing social inclusion. The empirical data reveal limited citizen engagement the design, development or implementation process. The paper discusses the potential contribution to be made by adopting a sociotechnical systems approach in which citizens engage with IT professionals and informationservice providers to identify needs, to test options and to achieve shared goals of e‑Government.

This paper proposes the use of Business Process Re‑engineering (BPR) methods and analysis tools to address the issues arising in the implementation of electronic voting. We consider the electoral process as one which has to be re‑designed in order to effectively accommodate e‑Voting technology. We identify the key areas of e‑Voting where the use of BPR can provide beneficial results.

This paper explores three main areas, firstly, website accessibility guidelines; secondly, website accessibility tools and finally the implication of human factors in the process of implementing successful e‑Government websites. It investigates the issues that make a website accessible and explores the importance placed on web usability and accessibility with respect to e‑Government websites. It briefly examines accessibility guidelines, evaluation methods and analysis tools. It then evaluates the web accessibility of e‑Government websites of Saudi Arabia and Oman by adapting the 'W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines'. Finally, it presents recommendations for improvement of e‑Government website accessibility.

The study presented in the paper is focused on empirical analysis of the present state of e‑Government development in Slovenian municipalities, which derives from the survey conducted in the second part of 2003. It comprises a quantitative and qualitative analysis of websites, a public servants questionnaire and a real case test of municipalities e‑mail responsiveness. Some results are also compared to the results of our past measurements and similar studies in other countries, although the latter is hardly to do, due to different organisation structures, duties and competences of local government bodies in different countries.