The development of e-government in the Netherlands shows two different worlds. The large national organisations implement Electronic Service Delivery (ESD) fairly successfully, while municipalities are slow to adopt ESD. This is a pity, since municipalities account for over 70% of the public services. They are expected to implement ESD on their own although they lack the necessary resources and distributed development is inefficient. In this paper we address the role of municipalities in the real and virtual world and argue that development of electronic (local) public services may be organized on a larger scale, depending on the type of service in question.