en.europa-eu-audience

Assessing the Use of Government On-Line (Canada)

Version française

Canada is recognized as a world leader in e-government, as indicated by consistently high ratings in various international surveys and benchmarking studies. For example, Canada has been ranked in the top ten and often in the top two countries with respect to e-government assessments (Government of Canada 2006).

Extract:

“It is clear that a multi-channel approach is important to maintain, and that the more traditional ways of connecting with government continue to be offered. A large proportion of adults, while connected to the Internet, were not using the Internet as a means to connect with government services, while one-third of adults were not online at all.”

Survey, english version : http://www.statcan.ca/cgi-bin/downpub/listpub.cgi?catno=56F0004MIE2007015

It would be great to get the same kind of survey about EU websites

eGovernment: 16 european Awards

Version française

"It is through two initiatives - the European eGovernment Awards and the portal ePractice.eu - that the European Commission highlights the best practices of Member States, in terms of online government.

Out of 54 initiatives among the most avant-gardist and growth carriers that qualified  for the Awards finals, the Commission  identified sixteen which are featured in a book called" Meet, Share and Learn": Selected Papers From 16 European: eGovernment Awards 2007 Finalists.
Published in September 2007, this book presents initiatives in four broad categories:

• Best service for the growth of the economy and employment,
• Participation and transparency,
• Impact and social cohesion and
• Efficient administration.

Among the sixteen cases described, two stand out by their originality, one aimed at business and the other at citizens. "

Source : http://www.msg.gouv.qc.ca/fr/connaissances/e-veille/2007/octobre.asp#article2

Bulletin d'information e-Veille: Octobre 2007. Services gouvernementaux de la province du Québec

Legal document research : a new way to pre-indexation

Version française

from Legal-ServiceDoc Info by Stephane Cottin: « Approche alternative de la recherche juridique face à la montée de l'accès libre : la pré-indexation »

Ian Gallacher thinks that text based search within Open Access resources to law cant’t be efficient. A solution could be semi-automated pre-indexing of legal documents, with the help of mind-mapping tools based on crossreferencing between documents, but also by other legal researchers or locations in the framework of social networks.

Wiki : Public Consultation for Social Networks

Version française

European Network and information Security Agency (“ENISA”), published on a wiki an interesting document regarding security and privacy questions for Social Networks ( like FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter …) and asked for comments on this paper.

This paper is part of a series of position papers on emerging risks. The aim is to raise awareness among policy-makers and providers of the threats Social Networking (see a list of this kind of sites) poses to users and providers and what can be done to address these threats. We hope that by following our recommendations, Social Networking can become a safer environment for users and that large-scale security problems which also affect network-providers and governments can be reduced.

Now that the report has been published, we want to invite public comments to get feedback on our recommendations and to start a dialogue on Social Networking Security. To view all comments so far click on the discussion tab above.

Please leave your comments on this paper by clicking the link below or by email to …. . When posting to this email address, please mention whether you are happy for your comments to be made public (e.g. via this wiki) and what name or affiliation you would like us to give. Comments submitted on this wiki will be attributed to the username you insert.

As far as I know, that the first time an official organisation which belongs to .europa.eu domain uses such a Wiki tool (which is very notorious with Wikipedia , the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet. Over 7 million articles in over 200 languages, and still growing.)

Wikipedia developped MediaWiki is a free software wiki package originally written for Wikipedia. It is now used by several other projects of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and by many other wikis, including this very website, the home of MediaWiki.

ENISA, Public consultation SN uses also MediaWiki.

 

Agora of the civil society: a first step (1)

Version française

“The European Parliament (EP) convoked the Citizen Agora to allow the Civil Society to make its voice on the the future of Europe  heard".  

This event took place on Nov 8 and 9^th, 2007 in Brussels

It was organised by EP in close cooperation with European Economic and Social Committee (EESC). To prepare the debates, an online forum (www.europarl.europa.eu/agora ) was available with five “threads” introduced by proposed discussion documents.

Here are  assessments:

• Out went grandiose rhetoric, in came pragmatism
• Online participation before the meeting was limited perhaps due to technical reasons and lack of time
• Nevertheless more than 400 NGOs’ representantives, from all over Europe took part.

In a future second “post” entitled “Agora: possible futures and ICT”, we will give more information on ways to improve the cooperation between EU institutions, with the help of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) tools

Consolidated Treaty of Lisbon ?

Version française 

Source: Friday, 16 November 2007 by Ralf Grahn http://Grahnlaw.blogspot.com

http://grahnlaw.blogspot.com/2007/11/consolidated-treaty-of-lisbon.html

Extract

“Lisbon Treaty decrypted in 2009?”, one of my blog posts on the unwillingness of EU institutions and governments to publish consolidated (amalgamated) versions of the new and existing treaties, received a comment from Anonymous, who pointed me towards the Irish Institute of European Affairs (IIEA), which has published a draft of the Consolidated version of the Treaties amended by the Treaty of Lisbon. The consolidated version, in English, has been compiled by Peadar ó Broin.

Using small font and spacing this compilation manages to keep paper consumption at a reasonable level.

For a free download, go to: http://www.iiea.com

Students, teachers, researchers, journalists, politicians and officials at the EU, national, regional and local level, as well as interested citizens have been given a handy tool.

With French, Spanish (mentioned earlier) and English versions of the Reform Treaty already accomplished there are only 20 more language versions to publish in order to have all the official languages of the European Union represented.

Are there versions I have not noticed yet? Is the work in progress somewhere?

A Survey in the USA : the legal librarians like their work but are dissatisfied with the Information provider sources

Version française

On 13/11/2007 by http://www.precisement.org/blog/ 

On Law.com : an article very well documented. It deals with legal American documentalists and the US legal publishing market , pricing policies of the major publishers and ways used by our American colleagues to cope with excessive cost .

However, we really feel it is as if it is dealing with us French legal librarians. Because it is a fact: we moved to the other side: we were librarians, we have become in recent years : researchers-follow-up masters-trainers-buyers.

European i2010 initiative on e-inclusion "No one left behind in the information society"

Version française

On 15 November 2007, by Stephane Cottin, http://www.servicedoc.info/

A very detailed report (“impact assessment”) published by the Commission (DG Information Society) and cited on europarl ( European Parliament website, The Legislative Observatory – an excellent way to follow the legislative process-)

A directory of documents on eGovernment, eInclusion and eHealth since beginning 2007

e-Practice-eu : References, updated 2007-11-15

version française

Source : http://www.epractice.eu/library

Download e-Practice-eu_eGOV_studies-20071107_to_20061231.rtf

 

e-Citizen Charter v.2.2 and EU websites

Version française

Abstract

What can citizens expect when eGovernment is finally implemented? The Dutch e-Citizen Charter provides the answer. This charter consists of quality standards that define the digital relationship between citizens and government (in the field of information exchange, service delivery and political participation). These standards are formulated as rights to which citizens are entitled, and matching obligations on the part of government bodies. The charter allows citizens to call their government to account for the quality of online contacts. The government can use the charter to examine the external quality of eGovernment. The charter is an instrument used to stimulate eGovernment.

Translations and summaries of e-Citizen Charter 2.2

English version of the workbook : Download e-Citizen_charter_workbook_ecc_english.pdf

(Languages available: Full Charter: DE, DK, EN, FR, NL, PT Summary: DE, DK, FR, GR, PT, SI)