The project partnership includes 11 European cities, and it is characterized by shared interests and complementary knowledge and experiences in developing local eGovernment actions. Furthermore, all partners are committed to encouraging citizens' participation in decion-making through technology-based public services.
The Baltic Institute of Finland as the Lead Partner has strong experience in developing international joint activities for the city of Tampere with other European cities in enhancing information society actions.
The Baltic Institute of Finland takes responsibility of the project management and coordination as described in the project Application Form, approved by the Interreg III C North Secretariat.
The city of Turku is leading the component 2 in the project with ambitious development goals of a city administration eManagement system. The city of Turku is developing an Electronic Management System for city administration to respond the challenge of eGovernment as part of the on-going development work on the “paperless office” concept. The objectives of the Electronic Management System development work are defined as shorter and more cost-efficient administration processes, comprehensively automatic document forms, better accessibility and transparency of public administration, better participation of citizens in democratic decision-making through Internet and enhancement of sustainable development by reducing growth of use of paper.
In the framework of the project, an electronic administration desktop software for the city will be designed and piloted during the project duration. It will include, at least, application on creating and sending of documents, a follow-up system for processes, and methods to get information about decisions and documents. In addition, electronic signing and identification are important support services to be developed. The electronic administration desktop will be finalized and established by the end of the project. In the next phase during the project a specific citizens online desktop software compatible with the electronic administration desktop will be designed and piloted. Based on results of the pilot phase, a plan for utilization of the citizens online desktop will be prepared by the end of the project.
The city of Vaasa is participating in two thematic components in the project, component 2 and 3. In component 3 it is the responsible partner of the component.
In Component 2, concentrating on the Innovative eManagement System, the city of Vaasa will develop, pilot and fully implement electronic services in the document management system of the city both for civil servants and citizens with focus on smart card applications. By the end of the project, electronic identification and administrative processes both on PC and mobile base will be piloted and based on pilot results partly implemented for citizens and civil servants.
In Component 3, concentrating on Innovative Online Services for Citizens, the city of Vaasa will pilot and fully implement use of the second generation smart card including ID-card with security qualities. In addition, the pilot activities on access control in smart card applications for public services will be completed during the project. Pilot activities on integration with web- and mobile-services will be fully implemented by the end of the project. New smart card applications for the citizens will be piloted and based on pilot results both partly and fully implemented in the project.
The city of Tartu has extensive experience and development plans in the field of mobile applications for public services.
The City of Tartu participates in the component 3, Innovative Online Services for Citizens. In the framework of the project, the city of Tartu will pilot and fully implement 6-10 G2C “Government to Citizen” mobile-government services in different sectors of city government including the following:
1) m-Teacher pilot project to improve communication between teachers, parents and children,
2) m-Neigbourhood Watch, to use mobile services for asking citizens’ co-operation in catching criminals,
3) m-Library: use of mobile services for the city public library,
4) new mobile services in healthcare, elderly care and voluntary work co-ordination,
5) mobile based catastrophic alert system,
6) SMS-based information provision for sending quick government information to citizens and businesses,
7) improved city WAP and Java portals for convenient access to city services and information.
During the end of the project 2007, these services will be designed and piloted. Based on results of the pilot activities, the services will be fully implemented by the end of the project. All services are designed keeping quick and easy portability to other cities in mind.
Municipality of Bologna participates in the project components 2 and 4. In the framework of the project Bologna is planning three pilot activities on electronic management system of city administration, interactive procedures and document management and eParticipation. Bologna is participating in national eGovernment programme People, which aims at simplifying and improving relations among local public administrations by creating a multi-channel network system. In this project Bologna has a leading role in experimenting electronic payments. Bologna participates also in a national project “Pantarei” focusing on digital communication within organization and among governmental organisations, improving document flow and process management. In the framework of the eCitizen project, Bologna will organize a survey on best practice among the project partners and exploit the information in developing and piloting applications on interactive procedures and document management system to complement the on-going local and national activities.
Bologna participates in national eDemocracy project “Participa.net” which will produce a toolkit with integrated multi-channel tools. A Bologna Iperbole Civic Network is established to promote citizens participation in the local decision-making. In the framework of the project, Bologna will design and pilot a portal for eParticipation under the municipality web-site.
The city of Sheffield provides up-to-date knowledge and leading experience in developing eParticipation tools in the world.
Sheffield is leading the component 4 in the project. Sheffield’s contribution to the portfolio of good practices for all partners to benefit from will be to develop applications, which allow the benefits of smart cards to be enhanced by helping integration with web-services. eCitizen does not stand in isolation and this work will be ongoing alongside numerous other initiatives in order to maximise benefit and to bring out synergies. A key aspect of eParticipation is to allow all citizens to be able to identify themselves and authenticate themselves for services for which they are entitled to and have online signatures. Sheffield will choose examples of applications to put online, which will be easily replicable elsewhere, whilst developing a model process for registration and authentication of citizens.
By the end of the project it would be anticipated that there would be no barriers to the utilisation of smart cards issued by one partner city for use in accessing services offered in another city, which would enable much closer co-operation and the increased potential to build upon this early initiative. Most of these background support technologies are well established, but still not taken up widely. The work within this project will be in assembling the different available components before choosing the applications, which will be developed and tested within this project. This choice is better made within the project to ensure that no artificial barriers are being created to replication and that the value of choosing a “quick win” application be realised, with the application itself increasing participation and increasing the opportunities a citizen has from interacting online with the administration. A real application, capable of being scaled up will be developed and implemented, utilising additional resources from elsewhere if deemed necessary. Innovation will be around the extent the application can be simplified for the end-user encouraging further eParticipation. Thus, Sheffield’s activities will be designed, tested and partly implemented partly using project finances and fully implemented utilising other resources.
The Information Society IS Fyn is leading the component 5 in which all the project partners are involved. In addition, the IS Fyn is participating in the component 3. The main actors behind the IS FYN, the County of Fyn, the City of Odense and the Business Development Center of Fyn have great experience in the field of eGovernment. Information Society development activities and efforts have been taking place for several years at the regional level, at the municipal level and at the institutional level in the Funen region. The City of Odense has constantly developed and improved the web-related services for the citizens with a special focus on the eDemocracy aspects. The County of Fyn has paid a special attention to the health telematics area, this area being the major duty for the county administration. At the moment efforts are been taken in the county administration as well as in the municipalities to speed up the transition to digital communication, document exchange and handling. In line with this the introduction of the digital signature is now in progress. In University and Business schools much experience has already been established and exploited in the eLearning field. Just recently a special centre called Knowledge Lab, focusing on knowledge management and digital competence, has been established in the South Denmark University. And eBusiness for the SMEs has been on the agenda for the last 2 years in the Business Support Organisations in the City of Odense and at the regional level.
The establishment of IS FYN is seen as a part of this information society development process going on. In order to support and qualify this on-going development the IS FYN has initiated an overall eFyn strategy and action plan (a regional information society development strategy) calling upon all relevant parties in the society to deliver input on targets and strategic actions within the following main action lines: eGovernment, eDemocracy, eLearning, eBusiness, eHealth, eTourism, Regional Web-Portal and Broadband.
In the framework of the component 5 “Awareness Raising on eGovernment Actions”, the IS Fyn is leading the design and piloting of new and innovative methods and tools of promoting local eGovernment actions. The pilot campaigns on public awareness raising will be designed and implemented in the project partner cities and the results of the pilot activities will be analysed and
NOTE: Vilnius dropped out of eCitizen in March 2007, due to the city's changed strategies and focus areas in eGovernment issues
Vilnius City Municipality is participating in the project component 2. Vilnius aims to become one of the most modern cities in the Central and Eastern Europe with high-developed knowledge economy that ensures long-term progress of the whole country. Information society and e-services are indispensable attributes of the knowledge economy. Municipality sees the project of eCitizen one of the actions that could bring the city closer towards the goal. Main objective for Vilnius is to develop and improve of electronic services for citizens and businesses. It concerns not only modernization of municipal services, but also the improvement of services and even creation new ones. Vilnius is planning to create integrated information control system covering financial, documents, human resources, various database control systems. All existing databases and information units will be integrated into a general system. In the framework of this project, applications on electronic management system will be designed and piloted and established. In addition, an application for integrated information management system will be designed and piloted.
Kaunas City Municipality is participating in the project component 2. Kaunas is in the process of developing electronic management system for local administration integrating information databases and services. Kaunas is a partner in EU Phare financed eKaunas Region project together with the County and city of Tampere. As a pilot activity Kaunas will develop an information system (IS) on EU financed projects and activities managed by the city. The idea of the pilot project is to create Information System for registration, monitoring and public presentation of EU financed projects in Kaunas City. This Information System will be designed to improve projects administration and transparency in Kaunas City municipality involving citizens in this process. The system will be used for projects registration, monitoring and public presentation. The system will work in Kaunas city municipality Intranet with access for the responsible city employees and a separate server. A special link in Kaunas city municipality web-site will be created for public presentation with access for citizens. The system will be maintained in two languages (Lithuanian and English).
From one side the information system will include all project stages (from initial - application, until the final - the validation of expenditure and reimbursement) online. On the other hand, the citizens will be able to take a look at the projects through Kaunas city web-site, express their opinion and in a sense to participate in a decision-making process. In the framework of the project, the city is planning to organize training of municipality specialists for developing, implementing and monitoring systems of the integrated online applications to be included in the city Internet portal. The system is planned to be implemented in other municipalities in Lithuania as well.
The e-Government Development Plan of the Municipality of Trento for 2001-2010 is focused on the idea of implementing a single central office called “Integrated window for enterprises and citizens”. The tasks of the “Window office” include issuing certificates and documents needed by citizens and companies. The main objective of the Plan is to make procedures more efficient, improve transparency and availability of the city services, modernization, strengthening and qualification of the services addressed to the citizen and to the enterprises. Principal Action lines of the Management Plan 2004 aimed to develop new services for the users within the administration:
1. Development of a virtual help-desk aimed to collect requests, claims and needs concerning HW and SW.
2. Development of 3 new on-line administrative procedures addressed to citizens and internal departments, using the new free and open source technologies (Tomcat, html, servlet, jsp, jsdk, struts, tag libraries).
3. Implementation of new applications in Lotus Notes Programme, in order to rise its diffusion as standard model of workflow management.
4. Planning and design of programmes and DB related to salary payment.
5. Experimentation of a new method of workstation management.
6. Extension of the city areas covered by wireless services.
In the framework of the action lines and on-going activities of the e-Government Development Plan of the Municipality of Trento, and the municipality Administration will experiment advanced services, both in the information and in the procedures field during the project. Selected new services will be partly designed and piloted in the project. The key services to be piloted during the project include the following:
1) services including development of certified e-mail applications,
2) mobile application of SMS to inform citizens about events,
3) design of web-services.
The city administration of St. Petersburg is participating in the thematic component 3. The key on-going eGovernment activities in St. Petersburg are focused on piloting smart card for public services. This activity is on-going and implemented in cooperation with the Lead Partner, city of Tampere. The pilot phase of the smart card use will be implemented in 2005 and the pilot results will be reported by the end of the year. During the project the city of St. Petersburg will design with the city resources the next phase of the smart card development to include in total 25 public services in one multi-use dual interface smart card. The experiences of the project partners will be utilized in the process design and development work.
The city of Tampere, as the key initiator of the eCitizen cooperation and most of the project partnerships, is committed to strengthen information society development through local eGovernment actions. The key development goals of the city strategy include provision of efficient and easily accessible public online services as well as electronic management system within the city administration. Inclusion of citizens in the decision-making and provision of interaction opportunities online are considered as key tools for enhancing trust in local government, transparency and improved basis for policy-making.
The city of Tampere is involved in three thematic components (2, 3 and 4) of the project. In each of the component a pilot activity will be developed. The key pilot activities include the following:
1.Innovative citizen's smart card applications for public services will be developed with pilots on access control.
A multi-use dual interface smart card based on the present Travel Card at use on the City Buses will be developed and made available for all in Tampere region. The most important services to be included in the system comprise electronic purse, recharging via the Internet and library borrowing. Using the card for access control will be piloted during the project.
2. Portal for eParticipation will be developed and piloted
The eParticipation system at the website of the City of Tampere will be developed. In addition to the various municipal branches, research specialists will be involved in the definition work. The output will be a technically advanced website that facilitates interactive participation. The eParticipation site incorporates the entire sphere of operations of the municipal organisation and enables the citizens to participate in the process of municipal undertakings even in their preparatory phase.
3. An electronic document management system for city administration will be developed with pilot activities on interactive procedures
By the year 2007, the City of Tampere will introduce a resource planning system providing for a wider integration of applications and a simpler solution for customer interface. During the definition phase, consistent solutions for case management, customer management and storage of documents will be established. These will be implemented alongside the resource planning system, promoting a move towards the creation of electronic services based on basic information systems and document management.
|
