eGovernment Services

From the list of 20 basic public services in Europe.

• Public Services for Citizens
  • Income taxes: declaration, notification of assessment
  • Personal documents (passport and driver's licence)
  • Certificates (birth, marriage): request and delivery
  • Announcement of moving (change of address)

• Public Services for Businesses
  • Social contribution for employees
  • Registration of a new company
  • Corporation tax: declaration, notification
  • Public Procurement

eGovernment Technical Implementation

Sophistication (and Examples)

1. Information: online info about public services
   • National Employment Office (Bulgaria)
2. Interaction: downloading of forms
   • National Portal (Greece)
3. Transaction: two-way interaction, i.e. processing of forms, incl. authentication
   • Road Transport System (Cyprus)
4. Transformation:case handling; decision and delivery (payment)
   • Passport Office (Malta)

Sources: European Commission 2007 benchmarking report prepared by Capgemini and OECD through The Economist

Removing the "e" from eGovernment

• Online services not just an alternative
• Becoming “the” public services
  • example: eInvoicing in Spain to save 15 Billion EUR in the first year alone! (1.5% GDP) [press release (in Spanish)]
• More important than ever to solve problems

eGovernment at W3C

New Activity to tackle issues in three main areas:

• Open Standards
• Participation and Transparency
• Data Integration

Open Standards: some issues

• example: get a purchase order
  • Click 2 javascript: links
  • Go through 3 pop-up windows
  • Finally, get to a URI like this:
  • https://www.example.com/PublicAccess/PA_POCheck.aspx?IdPurchase=YES&QS=ER4TEngVFRMXeBQSERIfHxQ=
• Hints
  • WCAG
  • Cool URIs don’t change (Tim Berners-Lee, 1998)

Open Standards: challenges

"application must be conformant with W3C standards"

• Best Practices
  • Suite of open standards to solve eGov Web-related issues
  • How to combine them

Participation and Transparency: issues for citizens

Participation and Transparency: issues for governments

• Example:
  • Fires in California (late 2007)

We can no longer afford to work at the speed of government. We have responsibilities to the public to move the information as quickly as possible … so that they can make key decisions.

Brian Humphrey y Ron Myers (LAFD)

Participation and Transparency: challenges

• How to improve accountablity while preserving privacy?
• How to improve granularity?
• How to identify provenance of data?
• How to compare the authoritative information the government has with that of users?
• How to integrate the information in terms of users' needs?

Data Integration: issues

• Information silos
• XML is not always enough

Data Integration: challenges

Goal: Linked Data (maximize data integration and re-use)

• Increase metadata
• Roadmap for transitioning from existing systems
• Don’t throw away, build on top
• Metadata use policies
• Trust-related challenges

eGovernment Activity at W3C

Improving access to government through better use of the Web

• Usage of Web Standards
• Transparency and Participation
• Seamless Integration of Data

Outcome:

• Creation of an interdisciplinary forum
• Identification and documentation of challenges and propose good practices to tackle them (Group Notes)

Just announced! (see press release)

Wait, why are we here?

(Photo Source: NY Times )

"We have 80% of mobile users, 23% of Internet users, all our eGov services were developed for computers cause we followed the leading eGov countries... we realized that was a wrong approach too late." Mobile Web for Social Development

Thanks

• José M. Alonso <josema@w3.org>
• Slides at: http://www.w3.org/2008/Talks/0604-Brazil-JA/
• eGovernment at W3C: http://www.w3.org/2007/eGov/