Building the next generation of digital government infrastructures

Digital government infrastructures provide generic functionalities that are used by large numbers of users. Typically, they have no central authority, are governed by networks and contain both emerging and purposefully designed parts. Their use varies over time, and a large number of individuals use them for different purposes. The basic digital government infrastructure has evolved over time and the development towards the next generation of digital government infrastructure (NGI) is under development. In this introduction, we discuss aspects of infrastructure development and this special issue contains papers contributing to the development of the NGI in various fields including customs, crisis management, legislation and regulation, providing a number of possible functions and services that may become part of the NGI. We argue that policy-makers should view the NGI from a complex-adaptive systems (CAS) view and that the next generation of infrastructures will provide not only technological services, including connectivity and security. but also shared information and knowledge in various fields, thus making it easier to participate, translate legislation and manage collaboration between public and private parties and in this way advancing digital government. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.