ABSTRACT
I. Introduction............................................................................................................ 546 II. Data sets.................................................................................................................. 546
A. URBIS .............................................................................................................. 547 B. Best of the web............................................................................................... 547 C. ICMA................................................................................................................ 548 D. Taubman center .............................................................................................. 548 E. Scavo ............................................................................................................... 548
III. Do U.S. cities have a website and how up to date is it?....................................... 548 IV. What is on the website? ......................................................................................... 549 V. Online transaction features .................................................................................... 554
VI. Conclusion.............................................................................................................. 555 References........................................................................................................................ 555
In 1975 and 1988 the National Science Foundation funded $1.9 million on studies of information technology (IT) in 42 U.S. cities (URBIS I and II). These are the most studied cities in regard 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 that represents an IT revolution, with broad ramifications for government and governance, has changed IT in the last 15 years, which is the Internet. This chapter focuses on the URBIS cities and explores their use of e-government, contrasting them with several other data sets: Government Technology magazine’s Best of the Web (2001, 2002) city winners, ICMA’s 2002 city/county survey, the 2002 municipal survey of Brown University’s Taubman Center, and Scavo’s 2002 survey of city/county websites in each state. Focus is on how up to date the websites are, on common features across websites, on the number of clicks on the home page, and on online transaction features.
