E-Government: What’s on US Cities’ Web Pages.

In 1975 and 1988 the National Science Foundation funded $1.9 million studies of information technology in 42 US cities (URBIS I and II). These are the most studied cities in regards to IT or computer use and were intended to offer us a view of where cities would be moving in the future. But that future has become the past. Moreover, something has changed IT in the last fifteen years that represents an IT revolution in itself with broad ramifications for government and governance, which is the Internet. This chapter returns to the URBIS cities and explores their use of e-government with contrasts with several other data sets: Government Technology magazine's Best of the Web 2001 and 2002 city winners, ICMA's 2002 city/county survey, Brown University's Taubman Center's 2002 municipal survey, and Scavo's 2002 survey of city/county websites in each state. Focus is put on how up to date the websites are, common features across websites, number of clicks on home page, and online transaction features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]