ICTlogy

Held at the IN3 headquarters in Castelldefels, Spain, on Friday March 9th, 2007, this open workshop of the MODINIS project, Breaking Barriers to eGovernment, will focus on ways in which innovation can be and has been achieved in eGovernment to improve governance in the information age. How can the widespread diffusion of the Internet and Web enable governments to transform not only the delivery of public services but also approaches to governance? The project has already identified 7 key categories of barriers to the development of eGovernment across Europe. This workshop turns attention to approaches for overcoming these barriers to stimulate innovation. These approaches span at least four key categories: legislative, technological, citizen-centric and organizational solutions.

Here come my notes for the second part of the workshop.

NOTE: concepts in quotation marks that follow refer to the seven key categories of barriers that can block or constrain progress on eGovernment as stated in the Breaking Barriers to e-Government project.

Innovation in eGovernment: The Use of Geo-information
Sjaak Nouwt, Tilburg Institute for Law Technology and Society (TILT), University of Tilburg, The Netherlands

Geo-information: where amb I, what is nearby, how can I go to… Those questions can be answered by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) — fed with professional data for a more professional use — and Location Based Services (LBS) — for a more personal use.

Examples of delivering e-Government via SMS (to specific locations or specifically located people): group SMS messages, SMS bomb, SMS-Cell Broadcast, SMS consultation, SMS prize draw, SMS Alert.

Technologies used to generate location information: Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), mobile communication networks (GSM, UMTS), biometrics, Machine Readable Travel Documents (MRTD, such as the electronic passport), Automated Teller Machines (ATM), Global Positioning System (GPS) or Galileo, optical object recognition.

Legal aspects: privacy law (protection of personal data, processing of location data, retention of traffic data), criminal law and criminal procedure, government information law, employment law, electronic commerce.

Organizational aspects (of sending SMS): inform others (“poor coordination”), choose appropriate topics (“lack of trust”), quick responds (“workplace and organizational inflexibility”), staf skills (“leadership failures”, “poor coordination”), resources (“financial inhibitors”), publicity.

Social aspects: digital divide (“digital divides and choices”), involvement of citizens, make citizens important (“lack of trust”), improve social safety, surveillance.

Online Job Search in the EU: The potential of Web 2.0
Rebecca Eynon, Oxford Internet Institute (OII), University of Oxford, UK

Features of online job search: for job seekers, easy to find vacancies with additional guidance, with facilities to post CVs; for employers, facility to publish and manage job vacancies.

We do have stats about job search pages use, but they are not segregated and cannot know if people use public or commercial sites and if they use it to search or to apply for a job. On the other hand, while the use of those sites among the “employed+unemployed” category is more or less the same between countries (ranging from 20 to 30%), among the “unemployed” category the range varies a lot and goes from 40 to almost 90%, depending on countries.

Barriers to e-Government: Major competition from the private sector (“poor coordination”), public sites tend to be unimaginative and need to innovate (“workplace and organizational inflexibility”), costs of providing online search (“financial inhibitors”)

Potential solutions: co-operation with private sector, encouragement from central eGovernment

Web 2.0 applications are in general absent from e-Government, a major cause of public sector falling behind the private sector.

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