NEWSLETTER - Breaking Barriers to eGovernment - Overcoming obstacles to improving European public services

Welcome to the fourth edition of the newsletter of the "Breaking the Barriers to eGovernment" project, funded by the European Commission's e-Europe 2005 Modinis programme. In addition to the findings from the project's good-practice case studies and other activities, the newsletter contains news, information and resources. Our overall aim is to offer expert insights and practical advice on ways of overcoming obstacles to the growth of high-quality and innovative uses of eGovernment capabilities in Europe.

Case study of the month - The Dutch Digital Building Permit Office:

The Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment (in cooperation with nine local authorities) has decided to create a Digital Building Permit Office (DBPO) to develop a mutual service that enables building permit applicants to file their application electronically. Building applications will be submitted electronically, including drawings and calculations, all communications will be carried out electronically, and all information will be stored electronically. The use of ICT will also allow the legal time limit to be automatically controlled.

A pilot of this project has been successful, and the ultimate goal is an electronic application for an all encompassing "Spatial and Development Permit", which currently has a lot of different regulations with their own criteria, procedures, conditions, fees and supervisory authorities. The current system is a financial burden, and can lead to contradictory decisions, which are confusing and obscure for citizens and businesses.

One barrier that has already been removed is that of legal forms of communication among citizens, businesses, local authorities and central government. The January 2004 Electronic Administrative Communication Act was added to the General Administrative Law Act, allowing electronic communications when there is the mutual consent of all parties. However, the realization of a DBPO is only possible if several additional barriers are overcome.

These include:

• Legal competences - Additional clarity is needed with regard to where certain competences (such as the approval of a building permit) lie. Currently, it is not clear if this will be the DBPO, or local authorities.
• Intellectual property rights - It is not yet clear how to handle database protection and architect copyrights covering drawings in a database accessible to the public.
• Privacy - When designing DBPO's legal structure, privacy (especially the legal grounds to process personal data) must be taken into account.
• Liability - The government must minimize the risk of being held liable for the malfunctioning of the DBPO, or the violation of other rights and interests of parties involved in or using the DBPO. Other issues include the legal status of disclaimers, authentication, the obligation to keep records, and contractual relations between the public and private parties involved in the project.
• Financial risk - The initial costs to realize the DBPO are relatively high, and at the beginning project costs will be greater than the benefits received, creating a financial barrier to local authorities wanting to join the project.
• Technical risk - Technical risks concern the vast number of files to be dealt with and the enormous flow of data within the system. This could result in diminishing speed for the consultation of digital files, or an overloaded site becoming temporarily unavailable. Additionally, different information systems are technically difficult to merge, and may prove financially prohibitive.

The full case study in English is available here.

Additional information, in Dutch only, is available at:
http://www.egem.nl/projecten/digitaalbouwloket
and Here (pdf)

Recent project highlights

Presentation at a CIPFA-SOCITM Improvement through Technology Forum Seminar: IT and eGovernment services in 2010: What does the future hold?
Professor Bill Dutton spoke at this event in London on the 6th of December 2005. His presentation, entitled, 'Breaking Barriers to eGovernment: Building an e-Citizenscape in Britain,' provided an analysis of factors effecting eGovernment usage by citizens based on the Oxford Internet Surveys (OxIS) data in the UK, the World Internet Project and data from the Eurostat Community survey on ICT usage in households and individuals.
In recent years there has been an increasing emphasis on uptake and use of eGovernment by citizens and businesses, which (particularly for citizens) is generally low. Indeed, there have been various initiatives to address this issue; for example, aiming to provide "one stop shops" that will provide a seamless service for users to increase uptake. However, Professor Dutton demonstrated that there needs to be a greater focus on other aspects of citizens' use of the internet; from analysis of the data it is clear that there are a range of factors influencing citizen uptake of the internet and eGovernment services. These include: internet skills and experience, social economic status and concerns about privacy and data protection. An academic article will follow based on the presentation.

Article published: Breaking Barriers to eGovernment
The project team have published an article presenting an overview of the project with a special feature on Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) as a legal barrier to eGovernment. The article, entitled, "Breaking Barriers to eGovernment," has been published in volume 3 of the European Review of Political Technologies (ERPT). To read this article and others from this volume of ERPT on Intellectual Property Rights and eGovernment Interoperability in Europe please see: http://www.politech-institute.org/review.asp?rev=7&vol_id=3.

Other relevant activites:

Since the last newsletter, there have been several relevant developments with regard to eGovernment in the international / European community:

• World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) – The Second Phase of the WSIS took place from 16-18 November 2005, in Tunis.  Additional information is available at: http://www.itu.int/wsis/
• Manchester Conference – The Ministerial eGovernment Conference took place on 24-25 November in Manchester and was co-organised by the UK Presidency and the European Commission. The Ministerial eGovernment Conference resulted in a strong impetus to bring forward the European eGovernment agenda towards 2010.  Additional information is available at: http://www.egov2005conference.gov.uk/
• Gov3 Benchmarking tool – In the 4th quarter of 2005, Gov3 published a new Benchmarking tool, which provides governments with an extensive range of tools to track how their country's digital performance compares with regional and global benchmarks.  An online "digital dashboard" allows users to see how their country rates against key benchmarks, in terms of its digital performance and the factors that drive that performance.  Available at: www.gov3.net 

For Your Diary

Good Practice Framework Workshop on eGovernment, to be held in Berlin, Germany 31 January 2006:http://www.egov-goodpractice.org/event_details.php?&eventid=72

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The 6th Dutch National eGovernment Conference, to be held in March 2006: http://www.eGovernmentcongres.nl/

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The workshop 'eGovernment – The Way Ahead' takes place within ICTTA'06 (International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies: from Theory to Applications), April 24-28, 2006, Omayyad Palace, Damascus, Syria. For details of this and other workshops please see http://www.iwv.jku.at

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The 6th European Conference on eGovernment, will be held at Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany, April 27-28, 2006.  The conference will focus on applications of eGovernment, e-voting, e-democracy, measuring / economics of government and innovative organisational change. Further details of the conference can be obtained from the conference website at: http://www.academic-conferences.org/eceg/eceg2006/eceg06-home.htm

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The First International Conference on Legal, Security and Privacy Issues in IT will be held in Hotel Elysee, Hamburg, Germany from April 30-May 2, 2006. The conference will focus on all legal issues related to IT/ Internet including IPR. All the accepted papers for presentation will be published in Complex Book Series 2006 and other international law journals such as the Computer Law & Security Report (Oxford-Elsevier). Further information about the LSPI Conference is available at: http://www.kierkegaard.co.uk/

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The 7th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research is a forum for the presentation and discussion of interdisciplinary research on digital government. Interested participants are invited to submit research papers, system demonstrations, posters, and proposals for tutorials and workshops for dg.o2006 which will take place in San Diego, California, May 21-24, 2006.  Please see http://www.dgrc.org/dgo2006/ for more details.

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The date of the EGOV 06 Conference (within DEXA) is September 4-8, 2006 in Krakow, Poland. Please see http://www.dexa.org/drupal/?q=node for more details.

Get involved!

If you would like to get involved here are a few ways how:

EC Project knowledge keeps improving
This project keeps improving and evolving. Find our continuously updated website and newsletter here. If you would like to contribute articles or web directory items, please contact mailto:rebecca.eynon@oii.ox.ac.uk

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We are collecting case studies about European examples of barriers to eGovernment. To submit a case study please go to the inventory on our project website.

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This newsletter is published under contract with the European Commission, eGovernment Unit, DG Information Society and Media. It may be copied, distributed and used for educational purposes. The views expressed may not in any circumstances be regarded as stating an official position of the European Commission. Neither the European Commission nor any person acting on its behalf is responsible for the use that might be made of the information provided.