Week in Global eGov

It looks like I will be speaking at the Government Innovation Forum in Mexico City next week on the topic of digital government and government innovation. In doing so, I will have the opportunity to learn a little about egov in Mexico which I'm already somewhat familiar with. I spent a year in Guadalajara in 1988-89 learning about the Mexican government and some of the challenges that they faced at that time. I also took a few classes at the Universidad de Guadalajara on public administration.

Some of the most important egov websites in Mexico:

• Mexico (national portal)
  
• Distrito Federal (Mexico City)
• Guadalajara
• Jalisco
• Nuevo Leon - the portal was down each time that I tried to access, even though I could get to some agency sites.
• Monterrey

I really like how this site portrays a very specific message to the citizens from their government: Construye Guadalajara .

In this interesting online service, the city government of Guadalajara, invites citizens to join as "monitores ciudadanos" or citizen monitors.

Here's a very interesting video about fighting corruption in government, supported by the Secretaria de la Funcion Publica.

Interesting to note that Foresee Results is doing the same kind of website surveys for Mexico that they are doing for the U.S. government.

In some ways, egovernment sites in Mexico are like those I am familiar with in the Orient, particularly in their use of bright colors and the use of buttons and banners. They make fairly good use of multimedia and are particularly good at presenting a message or vision. They have basic online services, generally not a lot and not quite as effective as, perhaps, they could be, but at least they have them. There are some, like this Mazatlan site, that are a little too cluttered. Even states like Oaxaca make better use of video than some of the websites that the Brookings rated near the top. Overall, Darrell West's study rated Mexico 20th, just below Tonga and above Cyprus. I can tell you, without a doubt, that Mexico's egovernment present is ahead of Tonga, and that's not a knock on Tonga.