Government 2.0 in Korea

Abstract

This chapter looks at the various e-participation tools and services of e-government in South Korea. Korea has recently become a test bed for many information technology tools, particularly in the e-government and e-democracy domains. Many of the e-government evaluation indexes, including those of the UN and Brown University, rank the municipal and national e-government sites of Korea very high on the list. First, this chapter highlights a variety of e-government services available in Korea such as e-ombudsman (Shin-moon-go), the Korean Public Information Disclosure System (Open Government), Civil proposal services in e-rulemaking processes, and Call & Change (110 Service), which can be compared to those of other countries. The second part of this chapter focuses on citizen participation or e-participation, which is termed ‘Gov 2.0’, reflecting the concept of web 2.0. Characteristics of Gov 2.0 will be illustrated and then dimensions of possible evaluation measures will be discussed. Some illuminating cases will be introduced to investigate how policy recommendations and proposals from the people transform into actual policy changes. This chapter, thus, will discuss the challenges to implementing and evaluating Gov 2.0 services as well as present recommendations.