A so-called “website quota” could be established to delete barely-used government sites in an effort to make public administration more efficient, officials said on Wednesday.

The tentative regulation will obligate the Ministry of Security and Administration to limit the number of government webpages to only those that follow a set of guidelines.

Security ministry officials will most likely scrap government sites that are relatively unused by citizens or prone to attacks from hackers. Other criteria used to evaluate a site’s usefulness will be the site’s approachability to the disabled and the webpage’s compatibility with multiple Internet browsers.

The plan was discussed at a video conference meeting among information technology officers from 45 government offices in Seoul, Sejong and Daejeon on Wednesday.

A need to decrease the government Internet system’s dependence on ActiveX, an online compatibility software created by Microsoft, was also a major point of the meeting.

“Because ActiveX is so widely used in online domains in Korea, users are sometimes forced to use Internet Explorer when accessing certain sites,” an official said.

Meeting participants also reviewed a proposal to set up an intra-government online cloud system to hold all official documents. 

(hj257@heraldcorp.com)