Send message to Authors

Short abstract:

This contribution focuses on the merits and limitations of e-government-related educational applications intended to support the substantive individual digital sovereignty of citizens. The analysis focuses on the particularities, power constellations, and responsibilities involved.

Long abstract:

We aim to contribute to a value-oriented development of e-government implementations that support individual digital sovereignty by contrasting citizens' expectations and public administration employees' perspectives on the matter. More specifically, we are interested in whether it is necessary, desirable and practically viable to transcend an educational approach in official public administration offerings and move towards supporting substantive individual digital sovereignty. We base our discussion on an interview study with citizens and an expert workshop with public administration employees that were part of a state-funded research project on the promotion of individual digital sovereignty via educational and prototypical interactive elements (games, quizzes and story-based content) as prospective offerings on, e.g., public administration websites. The discussion will focus on the extent to which educational applications can provide substantive assistance, what is needed beyond the proposed applications, and the responsibilities of public administration or political actors. By identifying demands on digital administrative services both from a citizen and administrative personnel perspective, we will also discuss how these can be met in a fair but also reasonable manner, considering possibly problematic power constellations, responsibility gaps as well as other potential limitations resulting from an overly economized perspective. More precisely, we will reflect on how e-government implementations, such as the “Zuständigkeitsfinder Schleswig-Holstein”, can be further developed as socio-technical interactions. Furthermore, it will be discussed where such technical artifacts are more of a hindrance, and where digitalization appears to be merely promoted for its own sake.