* You are viewing the archive for March, 2007

Access Glasgow, or creating a 21st Century City

Access Glasgow is the answer of the City to a demand  of high quality and responsive services at an affordable cost. A solid assumption behind this vision is that e-Government is a key force to radically improve government services for citizens.

Stakeholders of the project fall into five groups: ‘Citizens, or those who live in Glasgow; ‘Elected Members and Staff of the Council’; ‘Visitors’ who come to the City; ‘Businesses’ based in Glasgow or considering locating there;and ‘Partners’ from all sectors including Health,and Police.

Access Glasgow … Continue Reading

Webcameron, David Cameron’s website

David Cameron, one of the most prominent politicians in the UK and leader of the Conservative Party, already has his space on the Internet, called Webcameron.

The site includes several interesting features, among them videos; the ‘Open Blog’ where everybody can post; the ‘Guest Blog’, where relevant leaders from around the world are invited to contribute their thoughts; and the ‘Ask David’ where Mr. Cameron, at the … Continue Reading

Conference: ‘ EISCO 2007, i2010 Digital Local Agenda ‘

eisco logoThe European Information Society Conference EISCO 2007 will take place on 16-18 April, 2007 with the goal of promoting the Digital Local Agenda process in Europe.

Focus of the conference will be in five complementary areas: ‘Engaging Citizens – eParticipation’; ‘eCapacity Building’; ‘ICT infrastructure and wireless systems for eServices in Europe’s regions’; eGovernment interoperability and support of the networked enterprise’; and ‘the new generation of municipal services in a multi-channel environment’.

Featured speakers and participants include Ann Macintosh, Scientific Director of … Continue Reading

VoteMatch, a tool to test your political preferences

votematch logoVoteMatch is an online political test that allows users understand which party platform matches more closely to their own electoral preferences.

Originally developed by the Dutch Centre for Political Participation (IPP), the format has been used with great success in different elections in Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland in recent years.Goals of VoteMatch include presenting programmes to people in accesible ways and helping increase the visibility of political parties.

In this link you can try the tool … Continue Reading

MySpace launches a ‘space’ for US presidential candidates

myspace logoA new section dedicated to politics and politicians is now available at MySpace, one of the top social-networking websites.

Through this new feature, visitors have access to the MySpace web pages of several US presidential candidates, among them Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Barak Obama, Bill Richardson and Rudolph Giuliani. When clicking into those personal pages, users can review information about these politicians, read their blogs and watch different videos. They are also encouraged to contact the candidates and even add … Continue Reading

Interview with Vasilis Koulolias, Executive Director of Gov2U

Vasilis KouloliasIt is a privilege for eGovBlog to present this interview with Vasilis Koulolias. Vasilis is the Founder & Executive Director of Gov2U, a very well known non-profit and non-governmental organization based in Athens, Greece and focused on assisting legislative bodies become efficient and transparent institutions. We would like to thank him and his team for making this conversation possible.

eGB:  Gov2U believes that ICT offer vital opportunities for bringing about a fundamental change to the workings of traditional democractic systems. Do you … Continue Reading

Now ‘Categories’ on eGovBlog

egov blog logoIn order to make eGovBlog more friendly for our readers, we have just split up the content into categories. The ones we decided to include in this first stage are: ‘Events & Programs’;  ‘Interviews’; ‘Projects’; ‘Publications’; ‘Trends & Technologies’ and ‘eGovBlog’.

The categories we chose intend to cover in a comprehensive way … Continue Reading

Paper: ‘The Democratisation of Diplomacy: Negotiating with the Internet’

In this paper which is not very recent, Richard Grant makes a solid attempt to explain how the Internet, digital imagery and other Information and Communication Technologies are changing the environment in which diplomacy operates.

According to the author, three main factors have driven this transformation: ‘speed of application’, ‘increasing capacity’, and ‘shrinking costs’. The Internet has now effects in foreign policies as it does in every other area of government policy. Technology controls the way the information spreads around the globe. As a consequence, the interactions of governments are being affected by these developments in a significant way.

You can find … Continue Reading

YouChoose, a new feature from YouTube to link candidates with voters

youchoose logo youtubeYouTube, the famous video sharing website, has recently launched a new section called YouChoose’08 where voters and anyone else interested in politics can find videos from candidates. Videos from people like Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, Rudy Giuliani, John Edwards or John McCain can be found, all together. Viewers are encouraged to connect with the candidates, subscribe to their videos, send them messages and add comments.

It will be interesting to follow how this trend evolves, but it is clear … Continue Reading

The 9th EPRI Conference on ICT, 19-20 March in Lisbon

EPRI logoHosted by the Portuguese Parliament, and set to take place on 19-20 March 2007 in Lisbon, the EPRI Conference will concentrate on Information & Communication Technologies and its role in the democratic decision making process.

The focus will be on three themes: Perception of parliamentary web- based contents by the 21st century citizens; the use of web services and technologies by MP’s to get closer to the constituency, and the use of web services and technologies to rouse up the interest of … Continue Reading