The contents of this issue have been selected from amongst the best papers presented at the 4th European Conference on e‑Government held in Dublin in June 2004. As specialist conferences go, this was a large event with over 100 papers and authors from over 30 countries. Many more submissions had to be turned away for lack of room in the timetable.

As conference chair, I only managed to make it to a small number of sessions, but everything I heard was of a high standard – not something I can say of every conference paper I have sat through in my time! Choosing the papers to appear in the Journal was not easy and all the papers worthy of publication will not fit in one issue. We will therefore be publishing further papers from the conference in future editions including a future issue which will contain a selection of country specific contributions.

The first of the papers in this edition, by John Borras, is on the vexed question of standards in e‑government. I am old enough to remember the early days of open systems where there were as many proprietary operating systems as there were brands of motor car. Today the benefits of open systems are taken for granted. We need to tread the same path in public administration and government. There is wealth of useful information in this paper which anybody working in these fields should read and note.

Tom Butler et al’s paper is a rich contribution at several levels. It not only brings together the two fields of knowledge management and government/administration, but does so in the context of an action research project. Good action research can be hard to find and this is a rare example of how to do it properly. The Portable Knowledge Asset Development System (pKADS) is a downloadable tool built around the concept of knowledge assets. This paper described both a neat piece of research as well as a useful addition to the open source software family.

Toni Carbo and James Williams explore the problems of measuring the performance of digital government. The authors look underneath the surface of e‑Government metrics to the complexities of measuring real impact and achievement including complex questions not just of measurement itself, but of ethical and political issues. This paper is unusual in that much of it describes a project that is about to start, nonetheless what makes it of interest is the contextualisation of this project. In laying out their stall, Carbo and Williams raise issues that need more discussion than they have received up to now.

Jyoti Choudrie et al look at performance metric from a different perspective. Rather than being just another web site evaluation, this uses at tool called WebXact to look at problems with system accessibility – particularly for users with a disability. The authors chose a number of government portals from amongst those assessed as world leaders (Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, Finland and Australia) to investigate and the results are informative. Many of the sites had problems and the research suggests that governments at the leading edge have some distance to travel to get some of the basics right. What then, might one infer about the lower ranked?

The somewhat unfashionable subject of methodologies is the topic of Lee Eddowes contribution. While there has been a battle between the hard and soft schools for many years, methodologies have come under particular attack in recent years, Claudio Ciborra is one of their most vociferous critics. Nonetheless, they are still popular although some of the older approaches such as SSADM and Prince 2 are arguably not that effective for development of e‑Government projects. Eddowes examines a number of more recent developments using several examples and concludes that some of the problems with e‑Government are not about failures of methodologies or tools, but are more due to a lack of clarity of direction in government thinking.

Andy Ellis looks at e‑Government through the lens of new institution economics (NIE). NIE is about the relationship between the firm and the market and incorporates concepts from transaction economics, agency theory and other fields. Ellis presents an integrative model which he applies to two areas of government – education and bidding for e‑Government contracts. The study of the economics of e‑Government is in its embryonic stage and this paper is a useful contribution which challenges the reader to think about issues from a novel perspective.

Paul Foley examines a problem that has become an important political and social question as e‑Government spreads, the problem of social exclusion. This is an example of what might be called good, solid, old fashioned research, i.e. getting out and talking to the excluded as opposed to sitting at one’s desk and counting broadband connections and web hits. The study is rich in interesting findings about how the disadvantaged actually use technology when it is made available to them. The findings are illuminating.