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Most of the EU-15 countries illustrate a gap between potential usage and actual usage of electronic public services. Using a model of four successive kinds of access to digital technologies a number of explanations are sought. They are tested in the case of current Dutch electronic governmental service usage. Motivational access indicates that there is a part of the Dutch population that doesn’t have sufficient motivation for using computers and the Internet. It also appears that even in the Netherlands, a top country regarding Internet and broadband connections, physical access cannot be taken for granted. Insufficient digital skills produce serious problems as well. But the most striking facts are found in the context of usage access. Here we have observed a lack of user orientation in Dutch e-government services. It appears that the Dutch government doesn’t know what citizens want, how they use ICT en what the consequences for citizens are.

In order to cope with the developments in the knowledge economy, many organisations are looking for ways to optimize knowledge exchange and cooperation within and outside the organization. One of the methods often used to stimulate these forms of social interaction is the Community of Practice (CoP). A community of practice is a social network where people in an organisational context come together around a common topic, passion or interest and regularly interact on- and offline with a focus on knowledge management, innovation, learning and social networking. For decades, many academics have studied the CoP forms, developments, their effects, and factors that influence them. This dissertation addresses in an exploratory manner, the developments of communities based on a data-driven approach. A new more reliable combination of methods and techniques is applied to data sources that describe and explain social behaviour in a CoP. Developments are described by distilling complex network patterns and visualizations from web-based social interaction data, while explaining these developments has been done by conducting a survey in four Dutch cases. These two different data sources were then merged to paint a reliable and valid picture of developments within the CoPs. The dissertation contributes to our expertise in building and maintaining CoPs and our understanding of the how and why of developments in these CoPs. In addition, first steps have been set towards the development of a Community Monitoring and Evaluation Methodology (CMEM) that is developed based on the combination of methods and techniques used in this dissertation to cope with the increasingly large datasets available in CoPs and online social environments in general. Based on these contributions, we go beyond the hype about CoPs in organisations and take a new step towards a more targeted development of CoPs.

There are laws and regulations in place requiring public sector bodies to adopt and implement international standards for web accessibility. Municipalities in the Netherlands have collectively adopted these standards. However, they often seem unable to fully implement web accessibility standards even if the law requires them to and they are actively pursuing it. Based on existing models, literature, questionnaires and extensive audits of the websites of participating municipalities, this dissertation identifies processes that support or resist implementation of the standards within the specific context of web accessibility for local government websites. Awareness of these processes is important for stakeholders willing to implement web accessibility standards. The result is a set of recommendations for local governments that help them identify processes that support or resist the actual implementation of web accessibility standards. This not only contributes to the accessibility of the web for people with disabilities, it may also be helpful for the implementation of other guidelines and (open) standards within local governments.