Kristina Williams
"Designing with Empathy"
"Designing with Empathy"
I was lucky enough to be assigned to a sponsored project for my capstone. I have the pleasure of working with the city of Bloomington, Indiana's Mayor's office for my capstone. The mayor of Bloomington ran on a transparency platform. As such, he wanted my team and I to work on the transparency initiative. The mayor's representative Devta Kidd gave us the design brief which laid out what they wanted us to do. Their goals for the capstone were as follows:
So that leaves us with the question: What is government transparency? This is the first question that will need to be answered by the different stakeholders for us to meet our first goal.
I first looked at the Kim and Lee's (2012) E-Participation, Transparency, and Trust in Local Government. Their study was conducted in South Korea. As such, I think this study is good for looking at the potential of E-Participation increasing transparency, but I must refrain from generalizing their findings to the Bloomington community because of possible confounds based in culture.
Their study resulted in the model below. This model shows the relationship between the constituent's trust in their local government and the E-Participation taken up by the citizens.
Their results indicated that there is a positive relationship between satisfaction with the quality of government responsiveness and e-participants' perceptions that they can influence government decision making (Kim & Lee 2012). They did not demonstrate a direct link between e-participant's satisfaction with government responsiveness and perceptions of government transparency.
Instead, perceived government transparency mediated the e-participants' influence and trust with the government. This study clearly indicates that transparency between the government and their constituents is needed in order to build more trust in the government. This study also indicates the creating a platform of direct feedback from constituents can help bolster that trust.
Government transparency's definition is slowly coming into focus. For the South Korean community from the study, government transparency is the ability for citizens to see the impact of their opinions on the government's decision making. This definition can be utilized as I move forward and seeing how other people and communities definitions differ. Ultimately, this definition is not complete for the Bloomington community and will be evolving as I move forward.