Most people dread taking a trip down to their local authorities, no matter whether they need to renew their passport, file for social security or pay that parking ticket. Waiting in line for possibly hours and filling out stacks of paperwork puts most people off. Wouldn’t life be a lot easier if you could do most of these things online? Most definitely! But more importantly e-government can do more than just saving trees and your nerves, it can also change governments for the better.

When government agencies want to offer their services online, there are obviously some hurdles to overcome. One of them is tight government budget (especially but not exclusively in developing countries), the other is the need to train government employees that often have little or no technical knowledge in the upkeep of the site. This is where Joomla development comes in.

Joomla makes it easy to train relatively unskilled employees to maintain websites. Since Joomla is open source, already tight government budgets are not strained beyond capacity. Joomla is versatile enough to build anything from a complex state government info database to a small community site.

So now all our stuff is online and we can stay home, sit on the couch and watch TV. Correct! But while you lounge, keep in mind that you have not only won more free time but also more freedom. Government agencies that are able to move their services online are able to offer them to a wider audience. Also, the interactive nature encourages communication and participation of citizens in their government. The open government movement has benefited largely from online government services that make an increasing number of documents not only officially available to the public, but actually offer a convenient way for citizens to access them.

There are plenty of examples of Joomla-based sites that do exactly this. See some examples here, here and here. A nice overview of government sites build in Joomla from all over the world can be found here.

Now that you’ve seen a couple of examples from developed countries, notions of open government can be especially beneficiary for countries that are establishing or improving democratic processes. Freedom of information and participation have the power to undermine arbitrary acts of administration and corruption and having the opportunity to enter the internet age can be a crucial step for developing governments. Let’s hope that more pages like this one from East Timor, this one from Afghanistan or this one from China will be created using Joomla development.