Implicating Human Values for designing a Digital Government Collaborative Platform for Environmental Issues: A Value Sensitive Design Approach

Abstract

Digital technology is instrumental in designing e-government services to achieve environmental sustainability. This study aims to implicate essential human values for designing a Digital Government Collaborative Platform (DGCP), which seeks to enhance the collaboration between citizens and government officers to address environmental issues in Sri Lanka. The study adopts a value sensitive design (VSD) approach to identify human values to conceptualize the design. The results reveal 15 human values shared by citizens and officers of environmental authorities: transparency, safety, universal usability, feedback, authenticity, fairness, representativeness, accountability, legitimacy, informed consent, autonomy, awareness, human welfare, attitude, and trust. In addition to the identified human values, four system feature categories have been proposed from interviews. Thus, the study advances knowledge in designing an e-government system for collaboration between citizens and government officers, especially in tackling environmental problems in developing countries. Further, the study contributes knowledge to VSD for digital collaboration for improving environmental sustainability.