BPN 1565 World Summit Award Winners 2011 Category 1

"WSA - Turning the United Nations Targets on the Information Society regarding Local Content into Global Action towards the 2015 Review !"


Category 1: e-Government & Institutions

1014 e-Annual Report Estonia
1015 my cpf – CPF Service Transformation Singapore
1020 Empowering India India
1028 Tunisian Industry Portal Tunisia
1038 DigiD Netherlands


e-Annual Report, Estonia, Mr. Margus Mägi
URL:  http://www.egov-estonia.eu/xbrl
Description: In Estonia, entrepreneurs can submit annual reports in XBRL format via the e-reporting environment of the e-Business Registry Company Registration Portal. About 99% of more than 120,000 companies registered in Estonia use the new reporting environment. The created uniform e-reporting environment makes the entry and submission of data significantly more convenient for companies, as there is one specific place, form and way for submitting all required data. Furthermore, this way companies do not have to submit data to the public authorities twice, as they all get reporting data from the central system and this in turn means less red tape. The processing of business data became significantly quicker and easier, as the data can be processed immediately and are accessible to all interested parties both in the private and public sectors. XBRL format used for submitting annual reports is among the candidates for the W3C XML standard. The reporting feature corresponds to the WCAG AAA level.

Mycpf – CPF Service Transformation, Singapore, Producer: Central Provident Fund Board Singapore
URL: http://cpf.gov.sg
Description: My cpf has revolutionised service delivery model of public service in Singapore. The closed engagement with the citizens, and innovative use of Infocomm Technology (IT), has resulted in a suite of retirement planning e-services customised according to the citizens’ life events, and accessible to all citizens regardless of their IT savviness. This "Different Strokes for Different Folks" approach serves the different retirement planning and IT maturity of citizens. To educate and empower an aging but increasingly sophisticated population to plan early for a secure retirement, interactive retirement planning tools and content are presented from their perspective. My cpf also caters to citizens at opposite extremes of IT savviness. For the IT savvy citizens, they can use new mobile and media channels. For the less IT savvy citizens, creative use of biometric, wireless and conventional e-services, often together with human touch,
ensures that they too can "Bridge the Digital Divide".

Empowering India, India, Liberty Institute

URL: www.empoweringindia.org

Description: Empowering India seeks to empower citizens with easy access to information about political parties, candidates and electoral constituencies, at national and provincial levels. The basic premise is that information promotes transparency in the democratic process, and allows citizens to hold their political leaders more accountable. A more responsive political process encourages citizens to actively participate in the largest democratic exercise in the world. Consequently, the primary focus of Empowering India is the citizen, who can actually contribute to making democracy meaningful, not just in form, but in substance. Currently, the website has detailed election results since 1977. It has also captured the background information filed by thousands of candidates who have contested elections at national and provincial levels since 2003. The information is provided in an easy to compare manner at the appropriate constituency level and also available for various analytical purposes.

Tunisian Industry Portal, Tunisia, Agency for the Promotion of Industry and Innovation
URL: http://www.tunisieindustrie.nat.tn/
Description: The portal includes all the information you need to know about setting up a company, from the initial concept through strategic positioning studies for the various sectors, business plan and the role of support structures. It also gives a thorough review of financing possibilities, well as tax and financial incentives for new businesses, formalities for announcing your undertaking, and the legal steps for setting up a company and others services like (Overview of Tunisian industry- API products- A dynamic Industrial Data Base Enterprises Virtual Exhibition- on–line project declaration- Legal constitution of company on line – Enterprises incubators). 

DigiD, Netherlands, Logius
URL: http://www.digid.nl/
Description: DigiD has been developed for citizens and (representatives of) businesses as well as public administrations. All citizens with a citizen’s service number and a registration in a Dutch municipality can get a DigiD login code. All Dutch administrations offering e-government services can use DigiD. The only requirements are that an administration carries out a public task and is permitted by law to use the designated registration number (citizen’s service number).

BPN 1565

Top in broadband, but no e-voting (yet)

Today in The Netherlands there are elections for regional (provincial) councils. As these councils are the greatest unknown entities in government, less than have of the population who may vote, will vote. And most of the voters will deliver their vote against the background of the new Christian-socialist coalition, which started to govern last week.

The voters will go to the polling stations and vote there using the red pencil or registering their choice by voting machine. Having seen the introduction of voting machines over the last years, this election many voting districts in 35 municipalities have returned to the use of the pencil. A pressure group has demonstrated that the some voting machines are not secure, as they can be scanned from the outside. These machines have been tested, but did not pass the test.

It is not just a Dutch reliability problem. Also in the US there is a controversy about the reliability of voting machines. In fact it is reaching such proportions that the manufacturer Diebold Election Systems wants to sell its activity. Diebold produced some 150.000 machines, which were used in 34 states for the Senate elections in November 2006 last year.

Why should we bother about voting machines? Why not vote via Internet? In the Netherlands we have an experiment going of internet voting. It was used during the general elections last year, but only by Dutch voters abroad and on a voluntary basis. However the general introduction of internet voting has been stalled so far for fear of fraud.

I guess that I would love to live in Estonia for this democratic duty. Estonia has become the first country in the world to allow voters nationwide to vote over the internet for the 4 March 2007 parliamentary election. No less than 27,000 Estonians casted their ballot via the internet during the three-day online voting period which began on Monday 26 February 2007. About 80 percent of Estonian voters already have the necessary electronic ID cards to enable them to vote in this way; they confirm their choice with an e-signature, which requires a separate card reader for the computer. The online voting system was tested in nationwide municipal elections in October 2005, when about 10,000 Estonians voted online.

Oh well, it is time for me to get my shoes on and walk to the polling station to cast my ballot; at least we have a voting machine in Almere, so we are more progressive than Amsterdam as they have to use the red pencil in the polling stations. We might claim the world’s top position with regard to broadband, but forget about e-democracy.

Blog Posting Number: 685

Tags: e-voting, e-democracy, voting machinese-voting, e-democracy, voting machines

New journalism and new citizenship

Yesterday Marc Chavannes held his inaugural lecture at the University of Groningen. He accepted the position of professor Journalism, especially the news gathering, - selection and -presentation. His inaugural lecture was about new journalism and new citizenship.

Marc Chavannes studied law in Leiden and journalism at Columbia University in New York. He joined NRC Handelsblad and held positions as political editor and assistant editor-in-chief. He was correspondent for the newspaper in London, Paris and Washington. He wrote books about France and the USA and was awarded Journalism awards, amongst others for the American elections for president in 2004. Chavannes writes a weekly political column for NRC Handelsblad.

I met Marc when he was a correspondent for the NRC Handelsblad in London. I was stationed in London for VNU. I launched in 1984 for VNU a daily electronic newsletter for the computer industry, IDB Online, the Industry Daily Bulletin Online. It was the first daily newsletter in Europe. Shortly after the European launch, we were able to link the daily newsletter through the gateway of NewsNet. Marc and I had a lunch and talked about the newsletter; later on he wrote an article using the metaphor of the Worldmagazine.

I am pretty sure that Marc at that time was not online and sent his articles to the newspaper by fax. It is interesting to see, that he is now involved in the new reality of iMedia as a professor. In his inaugural lecture he indicated that traditional media are loosing their grip on the audience. Radio and television are loosing audiences gradually. Newspapers feel the competition of internet in news and advertisements. Journalists will have to get used to exercise their trade on a virtual market square. The media will have to speed up in order to keep up their appearance.

The new form of journalism is the weblog. They serve the need speed, associative directness, sometimes even passion, which gets smothered in the routine of the form of printed newspapers. But Marc poses in his inaugural lecture the question whether democracy gets the better part of this? Since the beginning of the nineties the worldwide web would free the citizen. Everyone can know everything; everyone can continuously vote about public policies. Yet reality is more unmanageable.

However from research it is clear that European citizens, who get politically active, use internet more. Especially when they get involved with elections and actions in the field of social policies, embrace e-democracy. iMedia become indispensable in this process. Journalism and citizenship will get closer to each other in the internet era.

I wish Marc success in teaching journalism at the University of Groningen.

Blog Posting Number: 657

Tags: e-democracy, journalism

Connected by broadband, slow in applications (6)

E-Government is also a subject in the context of broadband. What can broadband contribute to e-Government? The Netherlands was in the forefront of e-Government years ago. The Internal Revenue Service has made great progress. But that is relatively easy as most of the correspondence is through forms. But communication with town hall is often either impossible or fragmented. And of course there are the famous myths about e-Government: you can apply for a passport through internet; try it. You will have to go to the town hall at least twice, if not more.
At the Meeting of Minds the themes for e-Government were ambitious. The Dutch government is loosing its contact with its citizen, if the service level will not be upscaled to 24/7 and virtual contact. The heart of the Netherlands delta between Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht is loosing its function as a national economic motor, eventually to be downsized in comparison to other European areas. There is a growing need for regional television, using digital TV, web TV or interactive TV. The level of service and provisions in rural villages and municipal disadvantaged areas takes on dramatic shape.






At the meeting officials were present of one of those rural villages, the municipality Aa en Hunze. The municipality has set up a project, Digitale Brink, which can be translated into English as the Digital Commons, the place where villagers meet.

The project is intended to upgrade the service level to the situation when the village still had a baker, butcher, grocer and a post office as well as primary and secondary schools. Also then the level of health care was intense. Now many of those shops have closed and factories have moved away. The schools have been merger in learning factories. And the level of health care has been downgraded.

With broadband the municipality wants to improve the level again and upgrade it to the urban levels. So the municipality will start a virtual counter for municipal affairs. The services will not be limited to just filling in forms and returning them to the civil servants. However they will also be able to ‘skype’ with or without a webcam with the citizen in order to deal directly with problems, requests and applications. The second area is health care. Here 80 care clients will experiment with television with webcam. Eventually 300 clients should be linked for health care issues, contact with medics and social contacts. The third area comprises the two schools in the municipality. They have to be more integrated with the community. Besides, after school activities should be better coordinated.

The project will take the shape of a public-private partnership, where the municipality and province will work side by side with private enterprise. ICT companies are very important in this project. But as one of the potential company representatives said: the technology is there, we can write the applications, but we will have to talk how we want to realise the goals.

Tags: e-democracy, broadband