Public Services News Ministerial eGovernment Conference Ministerial eGovernment Conference
- 14/09/2007
In the scope of the Portuguese Presidency of the European Union, the 4th Ministerial eGovernment Conference, organised by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, AMA – Agency for Administrative Modernisation (site in Portuguese), and Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC), in conjunction with the European Commission, will be held from 19th to 21st September 2007 in Lisbon.
This conference will be dedicated to the topic of “Reaping the Benefits of eGovernment” and will broach the following four main themes:
- Better Public Services for Growth and Employment
- Participation and Transparency
- Social Impact and Cohesion
- Efficient and Efficacious Government
The agenda will also deal with various aspects of eGovernment, such as: the regional and local dimension, the role of Web 2.0, convenience and safety, cutting red tape, multichannel service provision, impact on the internal market, public eProcurement, getting citizens involved and transparency.
The conference will be attended by ministers from different European Union countries, including the Minister of the Presidency and the Minister of Science, Technology and Higher Education from Portugal, and the Vice-President of the European Commission and the Commissioner for Administrative Affairs, Siim Kallas.
Ministers from non-European Union countries will also attend the event, such as the Minister for the Economy, Growth and Competitiveness from Cape Verde, the Minister for Administration and Government Reform from Norway and the Minister for Information, Communication and Arts from the Republic of Singapore. Multilateral organisations, such as the United Nations and the OECD, will also be represented, as will some of the world’s most prominent companies working in this field, along with non-governmental organisations.
Of note is the video intervention by Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web in 1989, while he was working at CERN – European Organisation for Nuclear Research, and the current Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Senior Research Scientist at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
An Informal Meeting of Ministers of the European Union will be held the day before the Conference to assess the Ministerial Declaration, which has been prepared by representatives of the Member States and the European Commission under Portuguese coordination, and which would later be approved unanimously at the aforementioned Informal Ministers’ Meeting.
The events running parallel to the 4th Ministerial eGovernment Conference include an exhibition of 52 eGovernment best practices projects, which were selected via a competition launched by the European Commission on 2nd April 2007, which received entries from 311 projects and which will culminate in a final awards ceremony at the Conference itself (“i2010 Awards for Innovation in eGovernment”), and the following workshops:
- eGovernment Research, Technology and Development towards Services, Participation and Transparency, Social Impact and Cohesion;
- The Role of Normalisation;
- eGovernment: Benefits for All;
- eInfrastructure benefits for eGov, eHealth, eLearning.
The Lisbon Ministerial eGovernment Conference is the fourth in a series of conferences that started with the Brussels Conference on 29th – 30th November 2001 and continued with the Como Conference on 7th – 8th July 2003 and the Manchester Conference on 24th – 25th November 2005.
