End-User Development for E-government Website Content Creation

E-government websites are currently becoming more and more huge and complex. They provide citizens with several kinds of information, including services for online task payment or front office reservation. The creation and maintenance of such websites often require a distributed approach: the content publication task is transferred from software developers to personnel of the various organization departments (here called the publishers). To this end, a Content Management System (CMS) is usually adopted. However, CMSs do not generally satisfy all requirements and needs that emerge in this application domain. Therefore, the adoption of End-User Development (EUD) techniques, tailored to the publishers’ culture, background and skills, represents a possible solution to CMSs’ current limitations. In this paper, after discussing the context and the existing problems, we describe an approach to extending CMSs with EUD techniques. The approach will be discussed with reference to the creation and maintenance of the website of an existing government agency.