eGovernment for Regional Development and Interregional Cooperation
The European regional policy, as formulated in the programming period 2000 – 2006, has a clear priority on Information Society (IS). All regions are able to contribute to IS. The recent trend in governmental services and public administration is the amplification of decentralization; for this reason eGovernment and IS have a special gravity at the local level. The task to establish an IS socially equal and spatially balanced, however, includes much more than developing the technical capacity in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), although the latter is the backbone for IS. For a long time the "hard" aspects of IS (i.e. technical infrastructure) were the top priority of many national and EU programmes and initiatives; this fact may explain to an extent why so many ICT projects and especially those dealing with eGovernment, fail in practice. By focusing on eGovernment for local / regional authorities, eGOVREGIO aims to build on and integrate pan-European, invaluable know-how and experience in the "soft" aspects of eGovernment, i.e. strategic planning and benchmarking, organizational change and acquisition of new skills. Additionally, as a demonstration action, eGOVREGIO aims to involve all participating regions in the joint development of vivid, pilot eGovernment platforms built on the needs of each area, utilizing thus the synergies and knowledge curves stemming from an interregional cooperation in which members find themselves at different stages of eGovernment sophistication and adoption.