It looks like this Internet thing will be around for a while.  After e-commerce comes e-government. Using the world wide web to make government information and services more accessible has become a popular theme among politicians and government administrators. There are e-government proposals at the state and federal levels. They have advocates in both major parties, and no real opposition. Moving government information to the web can be seen as a real extension of service to the public. It can usually also represent savings in printing and distribution costs, and even in processing costs. For example, having taxpayers key in their own numbers means that an IRS employee doesn’t have to key in those same numbers from a handwritten form. The IRS and state tax agencies are making a major effort to encourage electronic filing. Many application forms can be downloaded from the web, and some can even be submitted electronically. Not only do the agencies save money, but most users are happy that they can transact their business with the government without leaving their home or being placed on hold for a long period of time.

While the public generally likes to be able to access government resources online, it faces an old problem in a new form. It is often difficult for a member of the public to decide which agency or subagency to go to for a particular service or piece of information. As I was learning about government information, my mentor, Mary Lou Stursa, told me that it was always the fourth person you talked to who had the information you needed. The first person would transfer you to another department, and the person you talked to there would transfer you to another division, and that person would transfer you to a person in another unit, who would transfer you to the person at the next desk who had the information you needed in a folder in his "to do" basket.

Turf battles long past have led to configurations of authority and oversight whose logic can elude most of us. Does it make sense that the National Marine Fisheries Service is part of the Department of Commerce, while the Fish and Wildlife Service is part of the Department of the Interior?  Even worse, the National Marine Fisheries Service is not even visible from the Department of Commerce homepage, since it is too low in the hierarchy.  It is a unit of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This pizza label carries a little notice saying that the pizza was produced under USDA inspection. That is because it was a pepperoni pizza. The USDA Food Safety Inspection Service has jurisdiction over--not all processed food, as its name implies--but meat, poultry, and egg products. The Food and Drug Administration has jurisdiction over other processed foods. However, the FSIS has jurisdiction over "combination" products that contain at least 2% of meat or poultry. Therefore, the production of frozen pepperoni pizzas falls under USDA jurisdiction, while the production of frozen mushroom pizzas falls under FDA jurisdiction. Here is a bottle of a dietary supplement that contains ginseng and B-complex vitamins. The companies that package it can’t make explicit health claims, but they can hint around at why you might want to take it. The language they can use on the product label is regulated by the FDA. The language they can use in advertising the same product in print falls under Federal Trade Commission jurisdiction.  I'm not sure what happens if you put ginseng on a pepperoni pizza, but I have a sinking feeling that it might involve the Coast Guard.

Outside our window, we have a navigable waterway, the Mississippi River.  Who takes care of navigable waterways?  The Navy?  No--the Army Corps of Engineers.

Of course, most people would turn to their favorite search engine to find, for example, how many campsites there are in the Chequamegon National Forest, and how to reserve one. This sometimes works, but not reliably. A great deal of information from the government is in PDF format or hidden in searchable databases accessible from a webpage, and therefore are part of the "invisible web" or "deep web" not reachable by most search engines' spiders.

Some agencies have been pushed into collaborating on gateways to information topics they all have an interest in. For example, the FDA, the EPA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and several USDA agencies  have collaborated on www.Foodsafety.gov, a gateway to federal food safety information regardless of its origin.

The idea of a gateway or portal to all government information and services is very appealing. However, there has been a perception that government alone can’t act as fast and effectively as private enterprise in dealing with new technologies and new ways of doing government "business." The federal government recently established FirstGov.gov as a public-private partnership. Some entrepreneurs have tried to provide value-added government information finding services. Their main function is to be an intermediary between the public and government for specific purposes, such as bill-paying.  There are several models and approaches now being used.

We could call these sites "portals," but some people would restrict the term "portal" to a site that is personally customizable--like "myYahoo."  By this definition, a police chief could have a gateway to all government information on which he or she could put links to the FBI or Drug Enforcement Administration prominently on the password-protected personal homepage that he or she uses.  So we will use the term "gateway." One metaphor applied to these gateways is "one-stop shopping," which everybody likes. All government services are under one roof. Having a gateway means that you don't have to know which agency to go to, because the gateway will get you to the right office. Another metaphor is that of the information desk in the lobby. You go to the information desk and ask, "Where do I go to reserve a campsite in Chequamegon National Forest?" and the information person--now a directory or a search engine--will get you to the right place immediately.

The State of Wisconsin has just updated its homepage (www.Wisconsin.gov) to become more of a gateway to information and services than the old directory structure provided. We will hear more about that at Wisconsin Documents Day and at WLA. On the federal level, and at the "all-government" level, there have been several efforts to make government information more findable on the web--some public, some private, some hybrid, and some mutant.

This star-studded panel has decided to look at seven of these gateway sites, and evaluate them on their usefulness in finding government information. We devised a list of ten questions, and a scoring system, which is reflected on our handouts. We tried to be fair, but this is not a scientific study. The numbers are suggestive rather than precise.  Moreover the field is not static and these sites frequently "tweak" their search engines without notifying anyone.  So the evaluations may change from week to week.  However, we are experienced searchers and we wanted to share our evaluations, and maybe give some outlook for the future.

I will begin with two contenders from the private sector, which seem based on the equation "government equals traffic tickets."  One of them is now defunct, but I still think that it was interesting. I will follow with a more useful, though rather mysterious, site. The other panelists will evaluate other gateways.

GovWorks.com

GovWorks.com claimed to have created the "first-ever national, consumer-branded, direct online link to local government." Though it had links to government at other levels, the emphasis was on local governments. The main categories on the homepage were "LOOKUP," "PAY," "LEARN," and "PARTNER."

The pay section was the key. The CEO and founder, Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, was inspired when he found a two-year old unpaid parking ticket in a drawer as he was moving from his apartment. He had forgotten to pay it on time, and it had ballooned to over $500. He thought that if he could have paid the ticket online, he would have paid it on time. He would have been glad to pay a small premium for paying electronically, and thought that many other people would also be willing to pay a premium. His idea was that GovWorks.com would contract with local governments to accept online payments for tickets, taxes, permits, licenses, public utility bills, etc. GovWorks might charge the public a convenience fee, and they would sell advertising. There would be no cost to the local government. In addition, the GovWorks site would include a search engine for government sites ("LOOKUP") and a section devoted to instruction in civics ("LEARN"). This seemed like an idea whose time had come. He attracted a list of high-powered people for his board of directors, and got funding from some very savvy investors. Just weeks after launching the site, Isaza Tuzman was invited to a White House summit on the future of government in the Internet age.

There were problems. One was a multimillion dollar humorous ad campaign that made fun of government. This offended the very people that GovWorks was trying to sign contracts with.   Once, GovWorks put up a demonstration website for Alameda County, California, and forgot to double-check the spelling of  "Alameda."  At other times, they issued press releases bragging about contracts that had not actually been approved yet by the governing boards of the municipalities involved.

But for a while it seemed like a viable business.  People could become registered users, and use GovWorks to make payments to municipal governments. One of the stranger aspects of GovWorks was an incentive system. Registered users could gain points by buying from advertisers, etc. These points could be converted into money towards paying parking tickets and other local government bills. GovWorks went online in 1999 with links to about 3500 municipalities (out of about 80,000).  GovWorks was even involved in developing a national e-government site for Colombia.

This is all in the past tense. govWorks went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy and was sold at auction on February 1, 2001. The new owner of the payment system is a company called GovONE Solutions. It still maintains the site at www.GovWorks.com. Its corporate vision is "All payments for all governments," which seems pretty scary to me.  However, the search engine and other services available through the old GovWorks site are still for sale.

EzGov.com

EzGov.com started up a few days before govWorks, and is still here. Notice that the emphasis is also on paying fines and taxes. You can enter your zip code and see which agencies you can make online payments to. At present, a aresident of Madison, for example, can renew his or her motor vehicle registration with the Wisconsin DOT and make some federal payments. It is not clear whether EzGov actually is administering these payment systems or simply opening an agency-administered site in a separate frame.

One of the co-founders died in an apartment fire in January, 2001, but reports at that time indicating that the company was healthy financially. It had recently changed its name from 'EzGov.com' to EzGov, in order to distance itself from the shakeout in the dot-com industry.  Its board of directors includes both Jack Kemp and Mario Cuomo, which shows that it is politically neutral to some extent.

EzGov's FAQ indicates that it is shifting from charging convenience fees to the citizen to charging government agencies a fee, on the grounds that electronic payments save money for the agencies. (I might add that the city of Madison recently contracted with M&I bank for the electronic payment of parking tickets, with the city absorbing the cost.)

The EzGov Citizen Information Center is not ezgov's home page.  The www.EzGov.com site is devoted to corporate information. Among its other enterprises, EzGov will help states and municipalities set up e-government sites.  To use the site, you need to go to the Citizen Information Center.

Note the ezExperts link near the bottom.  It is not clear to me how you get to submit a question to one of the experts.  There is space for a question at the bottom of the page, but that is just a copy of the Ask Uncle Sam search block.  So there are experts answering questions, but we don't know from whom.

EzGov calls its searching function Ask Uncle Sam, and that implies that you can search federal information.  Note that there is no HELP function.  Ironically you can only get guidance on how to format a search by entering one with no results. I tried the search "gdp Croatia" and got a notice that no results were found, and that notice included some "Search Tips."  I found these tips unhelpful.  The first one was "Check your syntax."  The word "syntax" was a live link, which led to a "Not Found" notice, which at least let me know that the search engine was Ultraseek. None of this helps you formulate a query.

Results for our test questions were odd.  One thing I noticed about this search engine is that there appear to be no stopwords. When looking for the "Developmental Disabilities Bill of Rights," I got many hits on the word "of."  Also, since EzGov has contact information on federal and state legislators, the same search brought up page after page of contact information on legislators named "Bill."

Many of the links retrieved on the sample searches were to pages provided by EzGov as contact information to politicians or as brief guides to local government.  For example, when searching for the recovery plan for the Florida manatee, I found guides to the government of each Florida county.  Also the searches retrieved EzGov press releases, often because of the presence of words like "of."

Ironically, the most helpful thing that the EzGov search engine did was to bring me into FirstGov.gov.  So, a search in EzGov.com is actually a search in FirstGov.gov, though with several intervening layers.  So when I searched for the FDA's position on bioengineered foods, I got a listing of agencies with the Department of Health and Human Services.  Using our scoring system, and being generous enough to include what are actually searches within FirstGov.gov, I give the EzGov search engine 8 points.  Whatever else EzGov can do, it is not a reliable search engine for government information.

SearchGov

Another private enterprise site is SearchGov.com at www.SearchGov.com. This site does have a "Search Tips" block at the bottom of the page.  What it doesn't have is any kind of "Who Were Are" or "About SearchGov" information.  In fact, it's a rather mysterious site, since it doesn't collect fees or have advertising or seem to show any kind of interest in sometime making enough money to support itself.  Besides the search block, the SearchGov homepage has links to agency sites, but these are usually identified only by abbreviation, which means that a lay person would be lost.  It also has links to the Library of Congress' guides to state government sites.

General web searches have turned up the information that it is part of a company called MaxBot.com.  MaxBot also runs SearchMil, SearchEdu, and SearchEbooks.  A press release dated January 14, 2000, announces the launching of SearchEdu, and makes reference to SearchGov, so SearchGov presumably has been in operation for at least a year.  The press release also said that SearchEdu use popularity ranking, page caching, and a results list that shows the search terms in context, and SeachGov seems to have the same characteristics.  There must be some differences, but SearchGov seems to have much in common with Google.

The search engine worked well, especially when the search included distinctive words, like "Florida manatee." The grants question took me right to "GrantsNet," which I hadn’t known about. It was helpful at times to use quote marks to identify phrases. Using our scoring system, I gave it a final score of 80, which is quite respectable.

Now Stephanie will give her evaluation of three other search engines.