The project within which this paper was co-authored focuses on the domain of e-government and is a deliberate attempt by the involved partners to cultivate and expand local and regional spaces for situated innovation, design and development of public services and ICT use in the public sector. Our starting point is e-government understood as co-construction. The project is currently being funded by the Innovative Actions within ERDF, the European Regional Development unding. The partners of the e-overnment arena are public service providers, ICT providers and researchers from a number of different disciplines. In this paper, we focus on communication networks and accountability. Are communication networks enablers or disablers for e-government services, and how can they be held accountable to their users? To what extent might we need to help each other unpack ‘black boxes’ and exchange them for ‘glass boxes’ in communicating with users and across disciplinary boundaries? Using metaphors and models from telecommunications, software engineering, informatics, business administration and human work science, and inspired by the Scandinavian tradition of Participatory Design, we attempt to establish a common basis to explore the evolving technologies and practices in e-government.