Australia rated 6th in global egovernment study

Brookings University recently released its report Improving Technology Utilization in Electronic Government around the World, 2008 (link to PDF).

This ranks the government websites of 198 nations, reviewing 6-10 sites in each nation.

Australia ranked 6th, behind South Korea, Taiwan, the US, Singapore and Canada, up from 8th position last year.

As a benchmark this is great - it's better than our Olympic ranking (on substantially less funds per website than we spend on medal winning athletes), and substantially better than our global population ranking of around 50th.

However this study compares governments against other governments, rather than with citizen expectations.

While I do use other governments' initiatives to stimulate my thinking, I'm more interested in what our citizens want.

I also regularly refer to AGIMO's fantastic work on the use of government services online, and the 2006 e-Government Strategy, Responsive Government. There was also the (now superceded) Guide to Minimum Web Site Standards.

However none of these provide a citizen-centric view of what government sites need to provide that can be used to provide numerical ratings for each government site.

I'd love to have such a ranking available as I used to have in the private sector - using Global Reviews - to provide guidance as to what our citizens want, and the relative importance of different functionality. This would greatly assist my team and I'm sure other online groups, to prioritise online developments inline with citizen desires.

Has anyone seen a study in Australia or elsewhere on the community's expectations of how citizens should be able to engage government online?