A meta-design approach to the development of e-government services

This paper describes a meta-design approach to the development of online services for citizens of a government agency. The goal is to transfer the development of government-to-citizen services from professional software developers to administrative employees, without forcing employees to acquire any programming skills. The approach encompasses two main phases. The first phase analyzes the different perspectives of the stakeholders involved in service creation and usage -- employees, citizens, software developers and human-computer interaction specialists -- in order to derive a meta-model of e-government services. The latter applies the meta-model to design and develop an end-user development environment that properly supports employees in creating an instance of the service meta-model, which is then automatically interpreted to generate the service pages for citizens. A pilot application of the proposed approach is illustrated with reference to a specific class of e-government services offered by the Brescia Municipality, even though the approach is general enough to be applied to different kinds of e-government services and application domains. The results of the evaluation with a group of municipality employees provide initial feedback from the government field and show how to proceed along this research direction.