The survey of the official city websites, conducted by Rutgers University, ranked Dubai in the ninth position, along with Auckland, scoring 7.86 out of 20 points, against the average score of 2.85. The survey ranked Dubai 11th worldwide in the service delivery category, ahead of Dublin, Helsinki and Tokyo, according to the Madar Research Group. Dubai was the only city from the Arab world to make the top 20 list. Other Arab cities figuring in the Top 100 list were Amman, Manama, Riyadh, Cairo and Beirut.
The security and privacy section of the survey examined the availability and quality of privacy policies, and looked at issues related to authentication, encryption, digital signature, data management and use of cookies. According to the findings, only 17 cities showed that they identified the organizations collecting data on their websites and only 14 cities identified the kind of data being collected. Dubai was one of the 12 cities whose privacy policy identified both.
In service delivery, Dubai was ranked 11th worldwide, with a score of 8.25 out of 20 against the world average of 4.77. The report also cited Dubai as one of only 10 cities that have websites allowing citizens to pay 'fees' online.
The survey, which used 92 key indicators to evaluate websites under five core parameters gave weighted scoring of 20 points each, to add up to a total score of 100. Taking all parameters into account, Dubai was ranked 18th, ahead of Sydney and Jakarta. The top five cities in digital governance were Seoul, Hong Kong, Singapore, New York and Shanghai.
Dubai e-Government is a pioneering initiative in the region to provide online services across the spectrum of corporate and community life in the emirate. It also has a vision to integrate individually automated government departments under the single umbrella of the e-government initiative, thus empowering employees across lines of businesses and levels of government, besides facilitating the lives of citizens and customers of the government.
Quelle: Al Jazeera, 26.04.2004
