Open Source Software for Virtual Town-Halls

Becker J, Niehaves B, Falk T, Algermissen L, Delfmann P

Abstract
On the one hand, public administrations are confronted with growing demands from the citizens’ and businesses’ perspective. On the other hand, in many cases we can identify stagnation or decrease of financial resources available (section 1). This leads to a performance gap, which can also be found in the field of virtual town halls: public administrations’ websites, at current state, mainly provide informational and communicational services. Fully transactional services provide potential for real value added as well as cost reduction, but are seldom at the moment. Thus, we can identify a lacking financial support for virtual town halls; though virtual town-halls are a major factor for citizens’ and businesses’ perception of eGovernment service quality (section 1). Open Source Software (OSS) is in most cases free of cost and a valuable alternative to proprietary software products (section 2).Conceptual requirements specifications can help to support the development process of open source software applications for virtual town-halls we show how such OSS for virtual town-halls is applied in practice and what experiences have been made (section 3).