Scope and objectives

European city administrations are as a rule undergoing far-reaching and comprehensive transformations in their governance and processes.This implies improving participation and consultation of citizens towards local governments as well as ensuring that citizens have easy access to local government information, services and decision-making procedures.

As a key factor for efficiency, transparency and accountability of local governance in Europe is provision of online high-quality services delivered in the most effective and secure way to citizens. Development of local eGovernment systems provides the city administrations with a powerful tool for stimulating citizens’ involvement and participation in democratic decision-making and community empowerment. Interregional cooperation between cities sharing these challenges enables them to fully exploit latest outcomes of the the Information Society and overcome the challenge of eCitizen.

Activities

Project activities are focused to facilitate development and piloting of innovative and advanced outputs including eManagement systems for city administrations, online public services for citizens with web-based and mobile applications as well as new eParticipation services with interactive consultative applications. As a cross-cutting issue, awareness of citizens on eGovernment actions is raised through implementation of information distribution strategies and local campaigns as well as publishing studies and reports on eGovernment actions in Europe and key results of the project components. Capacities and knowledge of local policy-makers, officials and experts on design and management of local eGovernment actions will be enhanced through extensive training and consultancies. A follow-up strategy to ensure sustainability of the project results will be developed.

Project partners

eCitizen project is an outcome of cooperation between European cities sharing similar challenges in promoting information society development in regional level following principles of the EU eEurope program and local eGovernment initiatives. The cooperation between the partner cities was established as an outcome of the eCities Forum meetings in 2003 and 2004 in the framework of the Telecities European network. The partner cities are actively collaborating also bilaterally as well as through the Union of Baltic Cities (UBC) and it's Commission on Information Society.

The Baltic Institute of Finland acts as the Lead Partner in the project. The project partners consist of cities of Tampere,Turku and Vaasa from Finland, city of Tartu from Estonia, cities of Vilnius and Kaunas from Lithuania, IS Fyn representing city of Odense and county of Fyn from Denmark, city of Sheffield from UK, cities of Bologna and Trento from Italy and city of St. Petersburg from Russia.

Project duration

eCitizen is a three-year project, lasting from January 2005 till December 2007.