Time, Space, and Documents - Principles for e-Government Regulation

The paper compares three different approaches to a fundamental legal issue in e-government: the definition of the exact time when a communication is received by an agency. The three approaches, which are all found in existing legislation, are termed spatial analogies, availability, and retrieval. These approaches are shown to fail to provide sufficient guidance to systems designers. Ultimately they put fundamental governmental principles at risk, and may unintentionally change the power relationship between citizens and government. The author offers an alternative avenue of approach, based on the concept of functional equivalence, and arrives at general recommendations for design of government information systems and for regulation of such systems.