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The purpose of this paper is to develop a domain model for online community building and collaboration in e‐government and policy modelling.

The authors followed a structured approach including five distinct steps: define the domain to be investigated; collect domain knowledge from both existing online community building and collaboration platforms and domain experts; analyse the gathered knowledge; develop and evaluate the domain model.

A domain model was developed for community building and collaboration in eGovernment and policy modelling, including the domain definition, the domain lexicon and the conceptual models modelling its basic entities and functions of the domain. In particular, the UML class diagram was used for modelling the domain entities and the UML use cases diagram for modelling the domain functions.

A literature search revealed a lack of domain models for online community building and collaboration, not only in e‐government and policy modelling but also in general. The proposed model provides a better understanding of the domain. It can also be used in the development of relevant platforms, leading to the reduction of software development costs and delivery time, as well as the improvement of software quality and reliability, by minimising domain analysis errors.

In this paper, the aim is to develop a framework for evaluating the web sites of public authorities. The proposed framework consists of four axes: two for assessing the general characteristics and content of the web sites (namely general characteristics and e‐content); and two for assessing specific functionalities addressing their governmental character (namely e‐services and e‐participation).

The proposed framework is gradually built through a critical analysis of the two relevant domains, web site evaluation and e‐government. The methodology used in the case study includes the construction of an appropriate questionnaire for assessing the framework metrics. The practical use of the framework is demonstrated by means of a case study, namely evaluating the web sites of Greek public authorities at local and regional level.

The proposed framework presents a more holistic approach to e‐government web site evaluation, while the case study provides some interesting results with regards to the shortcomings of Greek public authority web sites.

The proposed framework could be further enhanced by incorporating an evaluation of the demand site of e‐government. Moreover, a more thorough approach with regard to privacy would have to include metrics to be answered directly by IT security personnel.

The proposed framework can be used for evaluating the web sites of public authorities in a more comprehensive way. As an example, the case study reveals significant results of practical importance by indicating overall progress, aspects that are under‐developed, etc.

This paper provides a novel framework to e‐government web site evaluation that also considers e‐government services and e‐participation. We anticipate that it will be of interest to both researchers and practitioners alike.