What is Emancipatory Discourse

E-government and t-government programs too often see government as service provider and citizens as customers. T-government should view government and citizens as one decision-making entity. This chapter (1) critiques the citizen-as-consumer perspective as a cause of citizen alienation, (2) contributes a theoretical model based on citizen participation to guide development of t-government systems to act as social decision support systems, (3) highlights examples of e-government systems that encourage citizen participation, (4) sketches one possible t-government implementation of the model, and (5) addresses challenges the model and systems based on it may face.