Preliminary Conference Program at a Glance for dg.o 2006

Details for each session will be posted within the next few days.

posted by Unknown @ 8:53 AM 0 comments

Academic and Business Partnerships to Enhance Digital Government Research”

Keynote Speech Topic:"Academic and Business Partnerships to Enhance Digital Government Research”
Tuesday - May 23, 2006
Kimberly Nelson joined Microsoft Corporation in January, 2006 as Executive Director for eGovernment. In her newly created position, Ms. Nelson is helping develop Microsoft's e-government strategy. She is working with government CIOs and other leaders to establish long-term strategies for more efficient and cost-effective online services. Her role also includes extensive collaboration with Microsoft's vast partner ecosystem, working to drive solutions that will ensure the predictable delivery of improved online services while helping to reduce the cost, risk and deployment time associated with sophisticated e-government systems.Prior to joining Microsoft, Ms. Nelson spent 26 years in the public sector – 22 with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and four with the United States Environmental Protection Agency, where she served as the Assistant Administrator for Environmental Information and Chief Information Officer.Ms. Nelson was instrumental in expanding the Chief Information Officer’s role within the Environmental Protection Agency and oversaw the creation and implementation of several major initiatives including the National Environmental Information Exchange Network and EPA’s portal on that Network, the Central Data Exchange; the use of indicators to measure performance; and the implementation of the Agency’s enterprise architecture. She also served on the Federal CIO Council Executive Committee and as co-chair of the CIO Council’s Architecture and Infrastructure Committee.
During her state career, Ms Nelson worked in a number of staff positions in the Senate of Pennsylvania, the Public Utility Commission, and the Departments of Aging and Environmental Protection.
She was the first to hold the position of Chief Information Officer, in the Department of Environmental Protection and later served as Executive Deputy Secretary, the second highest position in the department.
Ms. Nelson graduated from Shippensburg University in 1978 with a Bachelor of Science in Secondary Education, Political Science, and from the University of Pennsylvania in 1987 with a Master of Public Administration.
She is married to Kevin Cadden and has two daughters – Kelsey, age sixteen, and Mackenzie, age fourteen.

posted by Unknown @ 8:50 AM 0 comments

A single sign-on approach to deliver e-government services,

Australian government agencies are working on a single sign-on approach to deliver e-government services, according to a newly released e-government strategy.
Special Minister of State, Gary Nairn, today released a paper titled 'Responsive Government - A New Service Agenda', which details how e-government services will be improved between now and 2010. The last e-government strategy document was issued in 2002.
E-government delivery had at times been "ad hoc" and "uncoordinated", Nairn said in the report.
However, the new strategy introduces a number of new initiatives to make online government services simpler for citizens.
Chief among these is the development of a single framework whereby individuals need only log in once to a government Web site to access e-government services provided by a range of agencies.
"Authentication and personal or business information will need to be provided only once through a simplified government sign-on, to access government information and services and for ongoing interactions, transactions and updates," the report said.
"It will be possible to group diverse transactions and complete them at the same time, without navigating the underlying structure and complexity of government.
"People will be able to interact with many areas of government without needing to understand exactly which agencies deliver which services."
The government would provide individual, personalised accounts to users via its australia.gov.au entry point, according to the document. This project was scheduled for completion in 2008-2010.
Australia.gov.au would be the main entry point for all government services. Many government Web sites would be reviewed and consolidated to achieve this streamlined approach, according to the report.
The approach was designed to eliminate the need for users to understand government structures to access services. The unified face of e-government would extend to non-government entities that deliver government services, the report said.
Government employees would also be involved in the redesign.
A separate identity management framework would be developed for public sector staff, and their contractors, for online account access.
At a more technical level, the government would look to standardise online platforms and systems, and share these across agencies where possible.
This would see more agencies working together and sharing data, according to the report.
"With collaboration will come responsibilities for agencies, such as vigilance in terms of data quality and the ongoing observance of agreed standards."
The report said some of the types of systems that could be integrated across agencies and shared were in: identity management, registration, reporting and accountability, information and content management, and payments.
A technology blueprint, due by 2008, would detail the technologies and business processes to be built for standard communications, as well as the standards to be met for the support of those technologies.

posted by Unknown @ 8:23 AM 0 comments

Center for Technology Management for Global Development

Edward A. Friedman
Stevens Institute Duties

• Director Center for Technology Management for Global Development of the Howe School of Technology Management and Professor of Technology Management.

posted by Unknown @ 9:46 AM 0 comments

Ministry sets up hotline for mosques maintenance

DOHA: The Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs has set up a new telephonic system to receive applications for maintenance of mosques.

This was announced at a press conference at the Ministry attended by Abdullah Al Medihiki, head of the maintenance section and Saeed Hadi Al Mirri, head of the information section at the Ministry.

The new system has been launched as a part of Qatar government's move towards total e-governance.

The Ministry's moves are being spearheaded by H E Faisal bin Abdulla Al Mahmoud, the Minister of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs.

The new system will enable the Ministry to know the location and ways to contact imams and muezzins.

They will be able to narrate their requirements towards maintenance through the dedicated line. Their needs will be recorded and a team duly dispatched to do the relevant work.

Training session have taken place on how to make use of the system and a booklet issued as well.

The Ministry receives between 100-120 applications a day for maintenance work, which may include repairing of microphones, sanitation and air-conditioning.

There are at last count, 1,300 mosques in Qatar.

posted by Unknown @ 2:52 AM 0 comments

Bahrain's e-government revolution gaining pace

MANAMA: Bahrain's e-government revolution is gaining momentum and PricewaterhouseCoopers was commissioned to implement a long-term strategy.
The Bahrain-based firm won the contract via the Tenders' Board, beating other internationally-renowned competitors.
"The technical appraisal committee recommended the firm for its competence in developing e-government strategies and managing advanced executive programmes," said Cabinet Affairs Minister and Central Informatics and Organisation head Shaikh Ahmed bin Ateyatalla Al Khalifa.
He was speaking following a meeting of the High ICT and Telecommuni-cations Committee.
Deputy Premier for Ministry Committees' Affairs Shaikh Mohammed bin Mubarak Al Khalifa chairs the panel, which includes nine other ministers.
Under the deal, Pricewaterhouse-Coppers will map out a long-term strategy, overhaul governmental procedures and assess the current e-infrastructure.
The firm has also been commissioned to conduct a comprehensive survey on the best ways to boost electronic services.
Work is also set to start soon on designing an electronic gate as part of a medium-term track. The e-gate would provide three basic services: process traffic fines, renew expired driving licences and register job-seekers.
So far 1,370 government services have been surveyed.
Those benefiting individuals have got the lion's share with 50pc, compared with 26pc for private sector companies and 20pc for other government departments.
The same survey shortlisted 31 top priority services benefiting individuals, generating up to 50pc of overall government taxes. A total of 26 top priority services benefiting the private sector have also been surveyed.
The e-government project will be implement via a four-pronged strategy.
Under the first phase, all information will be released on government websites with procedural clarifications.
The second phase would make it possible to process all applications via government websites. Citizens would also be able to print application forms provided on the websites and later submit them in person or via the post.
Under the third phase, all government transactions would be e-processed, via the Internet, mobile phones or any other e-outlet.
The fourth stage will see all government departments unified through the e-gate.

posted by Unknown @ 7:20 AM 0 comments

DM's E-government initiative examined at Map Middle East

He was speaking at the Plenary Session of the Map Middle East 2006, on the third day of the conference, which will conclude on Wednesday. In his paper on Dubai Municipality's E-government," Lootah said the Municipality has so far achieved more than 1.6 million online transactions and collected over Dhs14 million through e-payments. "We now offer 381 Online Services and we have over 17,000 registered business users," he said. Talking about the achievements so far, Lootah said the Municipality has re-engineered, developed and deployed the bilingual DM portal, which has a directory of services providing useful information on 50 services. He said the portal offers 93 informational services and 238 transactional services with an average of 17,000 transactions per week. "DM portal offers engineering services for contractors and contractors, laboratory testing services, services for food traders and food handlers, public services such as parking fines payment, etc. It has a secure online registration service, online payment facility through credit cards and e-Dirham Card. Besides the portal has also introduced email and SMS as customer communication channels and launched free e-Service Training programme for external customers," said Lootah. He said Dubai Municipality believes in giving quick and easy access to accurate information 24X7 to all its customers. "Efficient resolution of complaints and faster processing of the transactions with the government have been the first step to improving customer services," said Lootah, adding that customer service has always been a priority with Dubai Municipality. He said Dubai e-Governance has adopted a four step implementation approach involving Strategy, Process, People and Technology, thus sustaining a model for e-government in the years to come by revamping the setup with new strategies and new upcoming geospatial technologies. Lootah said the ongoing projects include provision of online planning permits, building permits and environmental approvals for industrial projects, waste management services and many more. The second paper of the day called 'Technology for a more secure world' was presented by Preetha Pulusani, President of the SG&I Division of Intergraph Corporation, USA. She said security applications used to prevent crises today are much more than traditional GIS and provide a more comprehensive, information-rich geospatial environment that are bringing together emergency and incident management with sensor, alarm and video surveillance technologies to provide a complete COP. "Increasing security concerns from manmade and natural disasters throughout the world continue to pose challenges to predict, prepare, respond and recover from these events. Today, a system has to be responsive and adaptable and further be able to anticipate intelligent adversaries," said Pulusani. She said in a crisis situation, responders must have an entire overview, a Common Operating Picture (COP), to access and respond quickly to an emergency. The third day's third paper called "Land Management and Cadastre" was presented by Gottfried Konecny, Emeritus Professor with the University of Hannover, Germany. In his paper Konecny said that in many parts of the World land, which is a limited, non renewable resource, is overutilized and degraded by urbanization and industrialization. "The prerequisite to land management is to create legal security for occupation of land, and to create investment opportunities under legal rights. This is an economic incentive permitting urban and rural land reforms, as endorsed by the UNCED process," he said. "The first task is to create a legal basis for the different legal types of land (state owned, private, communal and open access). Based upon the created laws the technical solution is the establishment of a cadastral system, in which the current rights are geolocated, described and continuously maintained," said Konecny. Styli Camateros, Vice President, Bentley Geospatial presented the fourth paper of the day called, "Advancing Geospatial Technology in Infrastructure." He said infrastructure is the cornerstone of economic development and because of its long lifecycle is particularly difficult to manage. "Current use of Geospatial technology in Infrastructure falls short in critical areas such as precision, 3D, integration of planning, analysis, design, and facilities management, and integration of data required for lifecycle management of the asset but that is not conducive to being stored in a database," said Camateros. He said concepts such as Federated Data Management will be explored as avenues to advance GIS for infrastructure. Eng. Muhamad Al Rajhi, General Director of Surveying and Mapping Directorate, Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, who delivered his speech in the keynote session on GIS in the Middle East, talked about Geo information in Saudi Arabia. In the same session, Brigadier Khalifa Al Romaithi, Director of Military Survey Department, UAE, gave a brief idea about the Abu Dhabi Emirate Geoportal (GeoADE).

posted by Unknown @ 7:19 AM 0 comments

Municipality to put 90% of services online

Municipality to put 90% of services online
(Gulf News Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)Dubai: Dubai Municipality is on the way to offering 90 per cent of its services online by 2007 to benefit customers and help save time and resources.The civic body has also started reviewing its online service strategy to increase the number of clients, said Hussain Lootah, Acting Director-General of the Municipality."We have entered phase four of the e-Government initiative and are having a total revamp of e-government IT infrastructure," he said.StrategyLootah said the municipality hoped to reach its target of having 90 per cent of its services online and at least 50 per cent online transactions by 2007."We are reviewing our strategy through 2007 as per the vision of His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai," he said.As part of its fourth phase, the Municipality yesterday announced the launch of a new set of online services as part of its e-Government initiative, taking the total number of online services it provides to 381.The new services include some 42 services related to the Building Licensing Section of the civic body's Building Department in such fields as obtaining permission for amendments to existing buildings and licences for excavation work.He said there would be no manual services once all the 101 services of the building department were available online by the end of this year."Our aim is to have maximum online clients so that we can improve customer service, improve our processes and reduce costs by saving time, money and effort," said Saleh.Help at handDubai Municipality will provide training to those using the e-services being offered."The focus will be on educating both the end-users and municipality staff to encourage more people to use online services," said Abdul Hakim Malek, Director, Information Technology Department.The site, www.dm.gov.ae, offers a total of 381 services.

posted by Unknown @ 5:07 AM 0 comments

Governments Go Online -- Without Windows

"Developing countries can't afford to buy Windows-based software. The basic Windows operating system costs a year and half salary for the average Vietnamese citizen," said Mike Reed, director of the United Nations University International Institute for Software Technology.

Electronic governance promises to cut corruption and improve transparency, and open source software offers a way to break South Asia's technological dependence on industrialized countries, experts say.

Open source software such as Linux is non-proprietary, less complex, more efficient and freely available to anyone -- unlike Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows operating system, says Mike Reed, director of the United Nations University International Institute for Software Technology (UNU-IIST), based in Macau, China.

Market Domination

"Linux is now the fastest-growing software and powers eight of the 10 fastest supercomputers in the world," Reed said.

Open source software like Linux is embedded in many types of electronic devices, like mobile phones and cameras. Open source is also starting to cut into the near complete domination of the personal computer market by the Windows operating system, he said.

"Developing countries can't afford to buy Windows-based software. The basic Windows operating system costs a year and half salary for the average Vietnamese citizen," he noted.

That's led to rampant theft or illegal copying of Microsoft software. However, such software cannot be modified or customized to meet local needs. Companies and governments have no other choice than to commission expensive custom programming from California's Silicon Valley.

Open source, on the other hand, is easy to customize and not particularly difficult to learn, says Reed.

Although Linux has been around for more than 10 years, only a few developing countries like Brazil have a significant number of home-grown open source programmers. Without local programmers, setting up electronic governance -- use of computer technology by governments to improve public access to information and services -- becomes very expensive and difficult.

Access to computers is one major problem in the developing world, and so is the lack of local programming projects so that programmers can learn, says Reed.

Reducing Corruption

Vietnam is one exception. A few years ago, Vietnam launched an ambitious effort to modernize, developing its own version of Linux called Vietkeylinux, partnering with the computer chip manufacturer Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) and moving to electronic governance (e-governance).

"Vietnam has more things online than the U.S. government," Reed said.

Isolated Vietnamese villages now have public computer kiosks where citizens can conduct business with the government online, such as registering for birth certificates.

"That reduces mid- to low-level government corruption, because it's easier to keep track of paperwork and everything is visible and public," he said.

Government services are easier and cheaper to provide electronically. Plus, such an electronic/information infrastructure and expertise in these areas is crucial for a country like Vietnam to successfully participate in the global economy.

South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore are successful examples of countries with low levels of corruption and high levels of economic activity that other Asian countries are hoping to emulate, Reed said.

The information revolution has been slow in reaching two-thirds of the world, according to Darrell West, an e-governance researcher at the Center for Public Policy at Brown University in Providence, R.I.

"Many countries don't have the money, and some don't see the benefits or have the desire to make the public sector open and transparent," West told IPS.

Major Motivator

In an exhaustive survey of the e-governance capabilities of 191 countries, West found that it is practically nonexistent in most African countries, as well as those in the Middle East. While money is the main problem in the former, the latter are dominated by "rich monarchical governments that have a very different view of public service and are not interested in e-governance," he said.

Although e-governance can reduce "street-level corruption," the biggest motivator for most countries is to improve their economic development and boost their trade capacity, he said.

In the long term, West is optimistic. "Countries are beginning to see the benefits and the cost reductions of e-governance," he said. However, launching such initiatives isn't easy and requires technical expertise, financing and political leadership, Reed added.

It required a major two-year effort in the UNU home base of Macau, on the coast of China. Among the most difficult parts of moving to e-governance is getting government departments to open up, share their information and cooperate with each other, he said.

"It used to require permissions and licenses from 10 different agencies to start a business in Macau. Now, there is just one online form," the researcher explained, and it took a strong leadership that insisted government officials make it happen.

The impoverished country of Nepal was on the verge of achieving a good level of e-governance until the current political strife erupted a year ago. Nepal's high level of literacy and good mathematical education made it possible to develop Nepalese programmers who, with UNU training and US$2 million in outside funding, built an open source e-governance infrastructure.

Government Resource

E-governance in Nepal is effectively on hold now, said Reed.

This month, India announced an extremely ambitious national e-governance plan to computerize data in public sector banks, insurance companies and tax departments, create national citizen databases, put passports, visas and immigration information and data online, and much more. The two-year effort is expected to cost $1.5 billion.

To assist these e-governance attempts and to help other countries get started, the UNU has established an interactive information clearinghouse on the Internet that it calls UneGov.net.

In addition to having instructional how-to materials online, the portal will make available software and research papers, as well as contact information for others who have or are setting up e-governance in their own countries.

The World Bank is among funding agencies being approached. Already, Vietnam is sharing some of its experience with Nigeria, Reed said.

"People love to share their success stories," he concluded.

posted by Unknown @ 9:34 AM 1 comments

Dubai Municipality launches new e-Services

Khalid Mohammed Salih, Director of Building Department.

The new services include some 42 services related to the Building Licensing Section of the civic body's Building Department in such fields as obtaining permissions for amendments to the existing buildings, licenses for excavation works, and various other licenses.

This was announced in a press conference Sunday by Hussein Nasser Lootah, Acting Director General of Dubai Municipality. Also present were Khalid Mohammed Salih, Director of Building Dept., and AbdulHakim Malik, Director of Information Technology Department.

Lootah said the e-Government initiative is a strategic objective of Dubai Municipality. 'Our aim is to have maximum online clients so that we can improve customer service, improve our processes, and reduce costs by saving time, money and efforts. Now, as we are in Phase Four of the e-Government initiative, we are having a total revamp of the e-government IT infrastructure and are reviewing our e-government strategy through 2007,' he said.


He noted that the focus is now on integration initiatives and establishing new delivery channels such as mobile devices and integrating all delivery channels.

He added that the municipality's redesigned portal has now registered more than 1.8 million online transactions.

Khalid Mohammed Saleh, Director of Building Department, said the department now offers a total of 47 online services with regard to issuance of building permits to consultancy offices. The new services launched today include services for building owners and décor companies in addition to three services for Engineering Supervision Section.

"This will take the total number of online services, provided by the Building Department, to 57 services. In the upcoming phase, 44 more services will be added to this list in the fields of building licensing, engineering supervision and inspection, taking the total number of online services of the department to 101 services," Saleh said.

The new online services include those related to obtaining licenses for making amendments in an existing building, licenses for excavation or foundation works, changing consultant before issuance of a building license, cancelling licensing transaction, extending validity of approved designs, renewing building license, license for painting works, license for maintenance works, license for temporary fencing, reimbursing deposits, minor amendments, license for decoration works, and license for demolition of buildings.

Saleh said the new online services were developed following a thorough assessment of similar services offered worldwide as well as taking the comments and suggestions of the end-users into consideration before designing the services.

Abdul Hakim Malik, Director of Information Technology Department, said the municipality's e-Government initiative is aiming to transform 90 per cent of its services to electronic services by the end of the current year.

"As part of the ongoing development process for the e-Government initiative, we have already introduced the SMS service for some sectors. In the upcoming phase, more services will be added to this. Also, the focus will be placed on educating both the end-users and staff of DM on e-Services," Malik said.

The DM portal offers a total of 381 electronic services including 238 transactional services, 50 interactive services and 93 informational services in the fields of engineering, environment, planning, public health, finance. There are a total of 16,779 registered business users from 6461 companies and nearly 5000 public users.

In the coming few weeks, the civic body will launch 14 new electronic services for the Customer Coordination Centre, seven services for the Contracts and Purchasing Department, four services for Drainage and Irrigation Department, 21 services for Planning and Survey Department and 57 services for the Building Dept.

posted by Unknown @ 9:29 AM 0 comments

Casablanca parie sur les SIG

L’avenir de développement des systèmes d’information géographique (SIG) au Maroc dépend de l’émulation entre les régions et la mutualisation des initiatives entre les différents organismes publics.
En effet, la Wilaya de Casablanca a pris l’initiative de rendre public aujourd’hui, 23 mars, au Technopark de Casablanca, son plan de mutualisation et développement des projets SIG déployés au niveau de la région.

« Le fer de lance de cette nouvelle stratégie est la création d’une division SIG au niveau de l’Agence urbaine de Casablanca rattachée à la direction générale », révèle le gouverneur et secrétaire général de Casablanca, Mouâd Jamai.
Ce renforcement organisationnel du service cartographique actuel, sera accompagnée par un audit de l’architecture actuelle du SIG de l’Agence urbaine pour permettre d’établir une politique efficiente de mutualisation des différents projets déjà réalisés ou en cours de déploiement.


« La mutualisation est un choix inéluctable pour Casablanca d’autant plus qu’actuellement, plusieurs organismes disposent déjà d’applications SIG en matière de gestion du patrimoine, de la circulation, de l’adressage et le jalonnage des rues de Casablanca», martèle le maire de la ville, Mohamed Sajid.
D’ailleurs, c’est à la future entité « division SIG » de l’Agence qu’incombera la lourde tâche de fédérer les projets existants et les futurs chantiers liés à la thématique des systèmes d’information géographique. La division comme point focal sera ainsi amené à s’atteler d’urgence à la définition du mode de collecte, de mise à jour et d’exploitation des données.
Parallèlement, cette nouvelle stratégie volontariste sera appuyée par une démarche administrative d’information de tous les acteurs régionaux (utilisateurs et producteurs de données) via l’envoi d’une circulaire les informant de la mise en place d’une nouvelle division au niveau de l’Agence urbaine de Casablanca.S’agissant de la démocratisation de l’accès aux différents projets SIG au profit du grand public et les professionnels, le secrétaire général de la ville de Casablanca, M. Jamai a promis la mise en ligne prochainement sur le portail www.casablanca.ma d’une partie des informations dont dispose les services de la Wilaya sur les secteurs d’aménagement, les districts urbains, les activités commerciales, les réseaux de transports collectifs et les stations de taxi et de feux de circulation.
EHTP : formation de 20 géomaticiens par an !
La mise en place d’une stratégie volontariste de développement dans les SIG bute aujourd’hui sur la rareté de ressources humaines. A titre indicatif, l’Ecole Hassania des Travaux Publics (EHTP) forme annuellement, à travers sa filière SIG, créée en 1998 en partenariat avec l’Ecole nationale des sciences géographiques en France, environ 20 ingénieurs.Pis encore, actuellement, aucune formation de techniciens de SIG n’est dispensée par aucun centre de formation professionnelle au Royaume.
A rappeler que le marché marocain enregistre une forte croissance de la demande sur les profils qualifiés dans les SIG notamment de la part des sociétés telles que Geomatic, Cadtech, Geoconseil et Global navigation…
Pour en savoir plus

posted by Unknown @ 5:23 AM 0 comments

Panel formed to ensure prompt delivery of services to citizens

Panel formed to ensure prompt delivery of services to citizens
(Wam)

21 March 2006

ABU DHABI — His Highness Shaikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, yesterday ordered the setting up of a ministerial committee, which will ensure prompt delivery of services to citizens visiting various ministeries and other government departments in the country.

The decision was announced yesterday during a federal cabinet meeting which was held under the chairmanship of Shaikh Mohammed and attended by deputies Prime Minister Shaikh Sultan bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Shaikh Hamdan bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

The cabinet approved the state budget bill for the current fiscal year for presentation to the President for endorsement.

The ministerial committee will be set up under Shaikh Mansour bin Zayed, Minister of Presidential Affairs.

The move came in the wake of complaints of dely by some ministries and government departments in delivering services to the citizens.

Yesterday’s cabinet meeting also approved a memorandum by Shaikh Hamdan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, Ministry of Public Works, in favour of appointing a new board of directors for Shaikh Zayed Housing programme, under the chairmanship of the Minister and membership of Jabr Al Suwaidi, Khalfan Harib, Mubarak Al Shamsi, Hamid Al Abdouli, Hamad bin Ghileitah, Sultan Al Kharji, Mohammed Saeed Al Dhanhani, Abdul Aziz Al Za’abi, and Dr Tariq Al Tayer. The meeting examined the 2004 closing accounts for Shaikh Zayed Housing Programme. Another memorandum which received the cabinet nod was by the Ministry of Finance and Industry.

The memorandum calls for improving cash management system, decentralisation of procurement, contracting and payment procedures, and empowering the ministries to undertake processing of transactions pertaining to their own personnel.

It also approved another memorandum by Shaikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, in favour of amending Article 40 of Federal Law No. 4 for 1976 on the by-laws of the UAE University.

Under the amendment, the remunerations of the university’s faculty and staff will be fixed according to the university’s regulations in force, thus eliminating the need for referring such matters to the cabinet.

The cabinet also acted favourably on Economy Minister Shaikha Lubna Al Qasimi’s memorandum calling for the electronic system currently in use at Dubai Department of Economic Development (DED) to be applied in all the emirates.

The cabinet instructed Dubai e-government to put this order into effect, in coordination with the Ministry of Economy and DED.

The cabinet agreed to transfer to the Ministry of Economy all the powers and functions related to intellectual property rights which used to be exercised by the Ministries of Finance and Industry and Information and Culture.

The cabinet examined a memorandum by Minister of Presidential Affairs Shaikh Mansour bin Zayed in favour of amending Federal Law No. 1 for 1972, on the functions of the ministries and powers of the ministers. It also agreed to bring the General Authority of Information and E-government, in the Ministry of Finance and Industry, under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Governmental Development.

It also agreed to the UAE hosting the 13th meeting of the GCC Ministers of Culture and the 23rd meeting of the GCC Cultural Committee. After reviewing several memoranda by the ministers, Shaikh Mohammed ordered that gifts presented to the UAE guests should be of local produce, so as to reflect the country’s heritage and motivate citizens to further improve their products.

posted by Unknown @ 8:43 AM 1 comments

Dubai to have PC assembling plant

[Via Virtually Islamic http://virtuallyislamic.blogspot.com/]
DUBAI — Fujitsu Siemens Computers, has partnered with PWC Logistics to open a state-of-the-art assembly plant in Dubai as part of its strategic investment plan in the UAE for the coming three years.
The assembly facility, which involves Dh7.5 million shared investment from both sides, will open next month and is expected to assemble around 100,000 PCs a year. This agreement, which is unique to the region, enables Fujitsu Siemens Computers to deliver complete end-to-end solutions to customers throughout the Middle East.
According to Habib Bouchrara, vice-president, Middle East, Africa and Turkey, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, the next step of the plan, which is expected to be announced in a month’ time, will involve more investment.
He told Khaleej Times yesterday: “Demand for PCs is growing in the Middle East region, with the total PC market increasing at a rate of 20 per cent annually, business computers— 35 per cent and laptops — 40 per cent. In three years’ time we will at least double our production.”
The partnership with PWC Logistics enables Fujitsu Siemens Computers to deliver PCs to the region within an average time of five to eight days — nearly 50 per cent faster than the present industry standard. The components will be sent from Germany and other parts of the world to Dubai, where the PCs will be assembled locally.
“This landmark deal for Fujitsu Siemens Computers means that we can significantly shorten our product order life cycle, thanks in part to PWC Logistics’ integrated end-to-end logistics solution and to our complete assembly facility here in the UAE,” said Bernd Bischoff, president and ceo, Fujitsu Siemens Computers.
Located in PWC Logistics’ Jebel Ali Free Zone facility, the new 1,500 square metre assembly plant, which is directly modelled on the company’s ultra-modern German production facility in Augsburg, is a sizeable investment in the Middle East and highlights the company’s continuing commitment to its region-wide customers.
“This is a major step for Fujitsu Siemens Computers as it demonstrates the importance we place upon the Middle East market, which is growing at an average rate of 51 per cent for our company. This assembly plant helps to support our facilities in Germany, and will ensure that the extremely high levels of quality will be mirrored in this plant,” he added.
This announcement comes hard on the heels of Fujitsu Siemens Computers posting record revenue of 6.7 billion euros for 2005, with the Middle East and Africa proving to be the fastest growing region for the IT giant.PWC Logistics will be responsible for the shipping throughput for Fujitsu Siemens Computers, which includes the delivery of all components from Germany and the transportation of finished products throughout the Middle East.

posted by Unknown @ 12:59 AM 0 comments

A very informative website on European eGov

Service Overview Want to find out what IST Results really is? This brief overview outlines what is on offer
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Benefits for Users What's in it for me? Glad you asked. The advantages of the IST Results service are many; each target group can benefit differently as you can see.
Benefits for IST Projects Are you involved in an IST project? Find out how IST Results can help you promote your project's achievements, news and events.
Editorial Strategy Want to know what drives the service editorially? Broadly, to bring more news to its varied audiences concerning the results of the many research projects financed by the IST programme.

posted by Unknown @ 12:51 AM 0 comments

E-government initiatives to cross borders

A new platform to help small and medium-sized government organisations (SMGOs) implement e-government strategies – with the emphasis on cross-border cooperation – has been created and tested by a pan-European team.
With people, goods, and now services, able to move freely within the Member States of the European Union, it’s perhaps surprising how exchanging information across borders can still present such a barrier. Yet even in border regions, cities geographically close to each other, but belonging to different Member States, can take weeks, or even months, to swap data on companies or individuals. And, as Pim Hengeveld, Project Manager of the IST project eMayor behind the work explains, many municipalities simply lack the resources to develop the kind of e-government services that would make such transfers quick, easy – and, of course, secure.
“Our aim with eMayor was to bring e-government within the reach of smaller government organisations around the world,” says Hengeveld. “Within the European Union the issue of cross-border exchanges is becoming increasingly important.” This calls for solutions for interoperable and secure services which take into account the organisational features and the requirements of small governmental organisations such as municipalities.
Since its beginnings in 2004, eMayor has developed a prototype platform, and had completed testing by the end of 2005. The test phase, involving 100 testers, from city administrators to citizens, underlined the cooperation between universities, companies, and municipalities that is key to eMayor’s success. Now the project management team at Deloitte in The Netherlands is preparing for a large-scale field trial that will target cities in border regions of Germany, Poland, Italy and France.
“We had a dream team of developers from the beginning,” says Hengeveld. These developers were based in a number of countries: Greece, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland and The Netherlands. While this could have been a logistical nightmare, the eMayor teams made it work: “We had a 24-hour closed working environment based on Skype,” says Hengeveld. “Basically, the teams used continuous telephone conferencing – sometimes with video too.”
This way, the partners put together a platform based on open standards. “We’ve based everything on the universally accepted, tried-and-tested standards of the W3C: so, XML, WSDL, XACML, plus PKI, and also XForms – local government organisations naturally need to use a lot of forms,” explains Hengeveld. “We wanted the eMayor platform to be as simple as possible: simple to implement, simple to connect to, simple to implement security technologies such as digital identity cards, and above all, simple to use. Our overall architecture allows for all the known e-government applications of the future, and is designed to be easy to use by a wide range of potential users.” The interface is therefore deliberately simple, and at the moment four languages are enabled: English, German, Italian and Spanish.
Furthermore, eMayor has already been tested in five European countries, and in December, successful trials were finalised involving the cities Aachen, Seville, Sienna and Bolzano. End-to-end security was also a major issue: “From passwords up to smartcards, we have ensured communication will be citizen to civil servant – not only computer to computer,” says Hengeveld.
One area that still requires development concerns the legal framework: “The issue is not privacy, but ownership,” he explains. “This varies in different countries – in Germany, data on citizens is owned by the municipality; in Belgium, however, it belongs to the King. So then the question is, on what basis can Belgium and Germany exchange this data?” But eMayor is already tackling the problem. “We are approaching university experts in law, to come up with a white paper to identify the issues and hurdles that need solving to make cross-border e-government a reality,” says Hengeveld.
“The eMayor platform is easy to use, easy to adapt to different municipalities, and it does what it set out to do,” he adds. “Now the coming field trials will show eMayor’s business viability.” The business model is not in licensing the software, since eMayor is based on Open Source, but in developing services that use the platform. “The business challenge is to get eMayor services running in different municipality departments,” says Hengeveld.
The prospects for developing such services look promising.
Other areas where eMayor can be used include preventing fraud (a problem in border areas), and cross-border policing – where there is already a legal basis for exchanging information. Another important area for the future looks to be e-procurement; this offers great savings, but will need safeguards in the form of access to all available legal information about companies. Again, eMayor can provide the answers. “On an individual level, it will also make life easier for people moving cities within the European Union,” adds Hengeveld. “In general, eMayor will enhance mobility in Europe.”
Contact: Pim Hengeveld Deloitte Laan van Kronenburg 2 1183 AS Amstelveen The Netherlands Tel: +31-20-4547511 GSM: +31-652-048079 Email: PHengeveld@deloitte.nl
Source: Based on information from eMayor

posted by Unknown @ 12:41 AM 0 comments

Research Finds Government Spend on Mobile and Wireless to Rise by 2010

A new report from Juniper Research finds that the global market for mobile and wireless hardware, software and services in local government will grow exponentially from $802M in 2005 to $8.6B in 2010. Juniper's research and industry interview program show that independent wireless networks capable of interoperation with 2G and 3G systems are central to the mobile future for local government. WiFi has been widely used since 2002 for wireless broadband in local government networks but the much greater range and higher data-transfer speeds of WiMAX will drive its emergence as a wide-area broadband infrastructure solution for local authorities. The report's author, Dr Douglas Houston, writes, "802.16 technologies are set to have wide market impact over the next 5 years. Major operators worldwide including BT and AT&T have conducted WiMAX trials. Among their objectives has been the testing of 802.16 wireless networks' effectiveness in extending existing services to remote locations without wired infrastructures. The standard's ability to provide wireless broadband backbones is making it of considerable interest for government and education in developing countries." The report's findings include the following:
Local government mobile and wireless expenditure on systems software will rise from $0.12bn (2005) to $1.3B (2010), overtaking expenditure on systems hardware, which will stand at $1.1B by 2010.
Portable and handheld end-user telecommunications devices will form the largest component of overall local government expenditure on mobile and wireless systems will generate revenues of $3.4B by 2010.
Advances in memory capacity, display and input technology, and seamless interoperability will gradually raise the number of handheld devices acquired annually for local authority use to 10M by 2010, overtaking procurement of wireless laptops.A free whitepaper and further details of the study 'Mobile Local Government: Opportunities & Strategies for Wireless Technologies & Applications' are available at www.juniperresearch.com

posted by Unknown @ 4:20 AM 0 comments

eGovernment Research 'Falls Between Funding Areas'.

E-Government Research 'Falls Between Funding Areas'. E-government research across Europe has been losing out incompetition for European Commission research cash because it fallsbetween mainstream funding areas, according to an academic leading anew project to try to correct the problem."People are rejecting proposals because they do not fit into 'technical'or 'socio-economic' [categories].

E-government is multidisciplinary,"Maria Wimmer, professor of e-government at Koblenz-LandauUniversity in Germany, told E-Government Bulletin.Wimmer is leading 'eGovRTD2020'( http://www.egovrtd2020.org/ ), a commission-funded project to survey government IT managers,policymakers, academics and industry representatives on the predictedstate of e-government in 2020 in areas such as use of technology,communication with citizens and public sector organisational structure.

The next step, said Wimmer, will be to conduct a 'research gapanalysis' to discover which areas require new research, followed by a"roadmap for research" to be presented to the European Commissionnext year in the project's final report."Many countries lack funding for research in e-government," Wimmersaid. "Policies are short-sighted and do not look ahead to futuredevelopments and needs - we need to change minds; we need toimpact policymaking."The research team is drawn from institutions in Australia, France,Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Slovenia and the US.


What about eGovernment Research in the Arab world.
eGovernment researchers in the Arab world should wait for Godot.

posted by Unknown @ 4:00 AM 0 comments

eGovernment and Web 2.0

After reading this very interesing paper. I just think about eGovernment and the Web 2.0.
What a bright future will e-participation have?

© 2006 Bryan Alexander

EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 41, no. 2 (March/April 2006): 32–44.

Web 2.0: A New Wave
of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?

The term is audacious: Web 2.0. It assumes a certain interpretation of Web history, including enough progress in certain directions to trigger a succession. The label casts the reader back to Sir Tim Berners-Lee�s unleashing of the World Wide Web concept a little more than a decade ago, then asks: What forms of the Web have developed and become accepted enough that we can conceive of a transition to new ones?

Many people—including, or perhaps especially, supporters—critique the �Web 2.0� moniker for definitional reasons. Few can agree on even the general outlines of Web 2.0. It is about no single new development. Moreover, the term is often applied to a heterogeneous mix of relatively familiar and also very emergent technologies. The former may appear as very much �Web 1.0,� and the latter may be seen as too evanescent to be relied on for serious informatics work. Indeed, one leading exponent of this movement deems continuous improvement to be a hallmark of such projects, which makes pinning down their identities even more difficult.¹ Yet we can survey the ground traversed by Web 2.0 projects and discussions in order to reveal a diverse set of digital strategies with powerful implications for higher education.² Ultimately, the label �Web 2.0� is far less important than the concepts, projects, and practices included in its scope.

Concepts

Social software has emerged as a major component of the Web 2.0 movement. The idea dates as far back as the 1960s and JCR Licklider�s thoughts on using networked computing to connect people in order to boost their knowledge and their ability to learn. The Internet technologies of the subsequent generation have been profoundly social, as listservs, Usenet groups, discussion software, groupware, and Web-based communities have linked people around the world. During the past few years, a group of Web projects and services became perceived as especially connective, receiving the rubric of �social software�: blogs, wikis, trackback, podcasting, videoblogs, and enough social networking tools like MySpace and Facebook to give rise to an abbreviation mocking their very prevalence: YASN (Yet Another Social Network). Consider the differences between these and static or database-driven Web pages. Wikis are all about user modification; CNN�s front page is decisively not. It is true that blogs are Web pages, but their reverse-chronological structure implies a different rhetorical purpose than a Web page, which has no inherent timeliness. That altered rhetoric helped shape a different audience, the blogging public, with its emergent social practices of blogrolling, extensive hyperlinking, and discussion threads attached not to pages but to content chunks within them. Reading and searching this world is significantly different from searching the entire Web world. Still, social software does not indicate a sharp break with the old but, rather, the gradual emergence of a new type of practice.

These sections of the Web break away from the page metaphor. Rather than following the notion of the Web as book, they are predicated on microcontent. Blogs are about posts, not pages. Wikis are streams of conversation, revision, amendment, and truncation. Podcasts are shuttled between Web sites, RSS feeds, and diverse players. These content blocks can be saved, summarized, addressed, copied, quoted, and built into new projects. Browsers respond to this boom in microcontent with bookmarklets in toolbars, letting users fling something from one page into a Web service that yields up another page. AJAX-style pages feed content bits into pages without reloading them, like the frames of old but without such blatant seams. They combine the widely used, open XML standard with Java functions.³ Google Maps is a popular example of this, smoothly drawing directional information and satellite imagery down into a browser.

Like social software, microcontent has been around for a while. Banner ads, for example, are often imported by one site from another directory. Collaboratively designed Web pages sometimes aggregate content created by different teams over a staggered timeline. And if we consider e-mail messages, discussion-board posts, Usenet-hosted images, and text messages to be microcontent, then users have generated this material for decades. But Web 2.0 builds on this original microcontent drive, with users developing Web content, often collaboratively and often open to the world. Moreover, technical innovations suggest still further refinements in microcontent. Arnaud Leene outlines a series of characteristics, including variable licenses, feeds, Web APIs, and single identity.⁴

This openness is crucial to current Web 2.0 discussions. The flow of microcontent between domains, servers, and machines depends on two-way access. Web 2.0 can break on silos but thrive in shared services. Still, silos and shared services are not mutually exclusive. Amazon.com, for instance, lets users harvest ISBN numbers from its listings but does not allow access to a customer�s shopping cart. Some wiki platforms allow users to lock down pages from editing or restrict access to authorized users, as does the popular blog service LiveJournal. Yet openness remains a hallmark of this emergent movement, both ideologically and technologically.

Openness and microcontent combine into a larger conceptual strand of Web 2.0, one that sees users as playing more of a foundational role in information architecture. Drawing on the �wisdom of crowds� argument, Web 2.0 services respond more deeply to users than Web 1.0 services. A leading form of this is a controversial new form of metadata, the folksonomy. Whereas traditional metadata is usually hierarchical (topics nested within topics), structured (e.g., the fields within Dublin Core), and predetermined by content authorities, folksonomic metadata consists of words that users generate and attach to content. A historian photographs the Waterloo battlefield, uploads the result to Flickr or 23, and adds keywords meaningful to her: Napoleon, Wellington, Blucher, 1815. A literature scholar creates similar images but tags them according to his interests: Thackeray, Hugo, Clarke.

Why does this matter, and why do such projects not degenerate into multisubjective chaos? First, users actually use tags. Folksonomic services fill up with tags rapidly enough to make information professionals take notice. Second, Web 2.0 services tend to provide tools for helping users with their folksonomies. Tags can be arranged into concept maps called �tag clouds,� which allow revisualization of the way one considers one�s work.⁵ The social bookmarking innovator del.icio.us automatically reminds users of previously deployed tags, suggests some tags, and notes tags used by others. Third, people tend to tag socially. That is, they learn from other taggers and respond to other, published groups of tags, or �tagsets.�⁶ There are of course limitations to folksonomies, including the difficulty in scaling up tags from several to many users and the problem of quickly grasping contextual shifts between tagsets. But the rapid adoption and growth of folksonomies is noteworthy. Popularly created metadata is a rarity. Yet as of February 2006, tag-centric Flickr hosts 100 million images.⁷

Tag Cloud of a NITLE Blog Generated by http://tagcloud.com/,
October 2005

Taken together, this set of concepts informs a way of making, sharing, and consuming digital documents—a way that differs from what we have grown accustomed to. Implementations of these concepts are not uniform. Not all projects deemed �Web 2.0-ish� share all of these underpinnings. There are many different ways to understand microcontent, for example. Yet an awareness of the aggregate approaches of such projects can shed some light on emergent practices and lead us to generate rough categories for them.

Projects and Practices

Social bookmarking is one of the signature Web 2.0 categories, one that did not exist a few years ago and that is now represented by dozens of projects. The very strangeness of the term (what�s social about bookmarks?) summons up much of the Web 2.0 ethos. It was launched by the advent of Joshua Schacter�s del.icio.us (a cleverly spelled URL, using the rarely seen U.S. suffix)—an elegant, focused, and unassuming service for storing, describing, and sharing bookmarks. Users register and then personalize their bit of del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/) with a minimally designed page, including nothing beyond annotated URLs to Web pages. Each URL is accompanied by a line of text describing it, followed by one or more words for tags. A user does not have to be a single person: groups can create del.icio.us accounts. In addition to a person�s or group�s own bookmarks, any user can create an in-box for what someone else is bookmarking, by subscribing to the other person�s del.icio.us pages. Users can also subscribe to tags and receive a list of URLs tagged with a certain word on their del.icio.us page. Each annotated tag is dated, editable, and organized in reverse chronological order, blog-style. For example, a splendid Web site on French cooking appears thusly:

French cuisine resource
to food ... and 123 other people ... on 2005-11-27 ... edit / delete

Del.icio.us was one of the first popular folksonomic sites, based on the proliferation of these tags. Users were apparently delighted to tag the sites they found interesting, as a casual browse through the site reveals. Schacter�s site became influential in a short period of time. There is something immediately gratifying about adding a description to a site one is interested in, being able to do so beyond prose sentences, and not having to look to an authority for ontological assistance. Visitors to the del.icio.us site can examine which tags are the most prominent at a given time throughout the entire set of all del.icio.us pages, can search for sites by tags (what is tagged �Napoleon�?), or can look to see what tags users have attached to the same site. Having found another del.icio.us user, one can check what else the other user has chosen to bookmark and share, thereby learning from a potentially kindred spirit.⁸ This is classic social software—and a rare case of people connecting through shared metadata.

Following the success of del.icio.us, similar social bookmarking projects have appeared. By October 2005, the Wikipedia entry listed nearly forty. These are now too many to enumerate here, and it is likely that some will disappear in the common fate of competitive software.⁹ But we can note several for their innovative features. Shadows (http://www.shadows.com/) supports �Shadow pages� for bookmarked pages. There users can discuss, rather than simply tag, a site. RawSugar (http://www.rawsugar.com/) and several others expand user personalization. They can present a user�s picture, some background about the person, a feed of their interests, and so on, creating a broader base for bookmark publishing and sharing. This may extend the appeal of the practice to those who find the focus of del.icio.us too narrow. In this way too, a Web 2.0 project learns from others—here, blogs and social networking tools.

How can social bookmarking play a role in higher education? Pedagogical applications stem from their affordance of collaborative information discovery. For instance, researchers at all levels (students, faculty, staff) can quickly set up a social bookmarking page for their personal and/or professional inquiries. The Penntags project at the University of Pennsylvania (http://tags.library.upenn.edu/) and Harvard�s H2O (http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu/home.do) are examples. First, they act as an �outboard memory,� a location to store links that might be lost to time, scattered across different browser bookmark settings, or distributed in e-mails, printouts, and Web links. Second, finding people with related interests can magnify one�s work by learning from others or by leading to new collaborations. Third, the practice of user-created tagging can offer new perspectives on one�s research, as clusters of tags reveal patterns (or absences) not immediately visible by examining one of several URLs. Fourth, the ability to create multi-authored bookmark pages can be useful for team projects, as each member can upload resources discovered, no matter their location or timing. Tagging can then surface individual perspectives within the collective. Fifth, following a bookmark site gives insights into the owner�s (or owners�) research, which could play well in a classroom setting as an instructor tracks students� progress. Students, in turn, can learn from their professor�s discoveries.

This desire to discover, publish, and share appears far back in Internet history. The first e-mail listservs (SF-LOVERS, from Rutgers) and the discussion forum of Usenet (started in 1979 and now partially archived by Google¹⁰) served such a function, but in prose. Similarly, as Web services have evolved, projects have emerged that act as social writing platforms. After e-mail lists, discussion forums, groupware, documents edited and exchanged between individuals, and blogs, perhaps the writing application most thoroughly grounded in social interaction is the wiki. Wiki pages allow users to quickly edit their content from within the browser window.¹¹ They originally hit the Web in the late 1990s (another sign that Web 2.0 is emergent and historical, not a brand-new thing). Wikis have recently become popular in many venues, including business. The most visible wiki project is Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page), which allows users to edit each encyclopedia entry, thereby creating an open editing and review structure. There are many wiki applications that users can install and run from their own machines. Hosting services have recently grown: Socialtext (http://www.socialtext.com/) is one of the standouts. Users can set up accounts, then write and revise their collaborative work. Socialtext, along with some earlier wiki implementations, like TWiki (http://www.twiki.org/), supports blocking access to selected pages except by passwords, narrowing the pool of potential collaborators.

At a smaller level, other Web 2.0 services are aimed at somewhat more constrained yet still easily collaborative writing. They are very wiki-like but do not use that name. Writeboard, Writely, and JotSpotLive each let users rapidly create a Web page focused on an item of writing content, prominently visible in the browser. Writeboard (http://writeboard.com/) restricts editors to those invited, via e-mail, by the creator of a page. Writely (http://www.writely.com/) also closes access to those not allowed by the creator of a page but lets the creator export the resulting content in several formats, including HTML for a Web page and Word.¹² JotSpot Live (http://www.jotlive.com/) differs in aiming at groups that are editing multiple documents. It can display what documents other users within a team are working on and are responsible for, hearkening back to the earlier days of groupware. Taken together, these services are similar to wikis but offer several differences. Their appearance is very slick and professional. Their editing interfaces are smooth WYSIWYGs, cleaner and more recognizable than many wiki implementations. Furthermore, these services usually identify individual contributors, a feature that is generally not available in wikis (as recently seen in the Wikipedia Siegenthaler debacle). Some of the newer features—team displays, easy exporting—are valuable for various social requirements.

How do social writing platforms intersect with the world of higher education? They appear to be logistically useful tools for a variety of campus needs, from student group learning to faculty department work to staff collaborations. Pedagogically, one can imagine writing exercises based on these tools, building on the established body of collaborative composition practice. These services offer an alternative platform for peer editing, supporting the now-traditional elements of computer-mediated writing—asynchronous writing, groupwork for distributed members, and so on—but with a different, wiki-like spin.

If social writing platforms support people creating and editing each other�s content, a different group of Web 2.0 services explores that content from the outside, as it were. Blogging has become, in many ways, the signature item of social software, being a form of digital writing that has grown rapidly into an influential force in many venues, both on- and off-line. One reason for the popularity of blogs is the way they embody the read/write Web notion. Readers can push back on a blog post by commenting on it. These comments are then addressable, forming new microcontent. Web services have grown up around blog comments, most recently in the form of aggregation tools, such as coComment (http://www.cocomment.com/). CoComment lets users keep track of their comments across myriad sites, via a tiny bookmarklet and a single Web page. A second explanation for the popularity of blogs is the rise in Google searches of blog posts, based in part on the tendency of bloggers to link extensively and Google's use of links to rank results. But how does one search within the blogosphere? How can one query that slice of the Web in order to draw on its features—timeliness, microcontent, interactivity, personal commentary?

To answer this qustion, an array of blog and RSS search services have appeared, with individual tweaks and spins aimed at differentiating the experience based on user needs and information architecture. Feedster (http://feedster.com/) and Daypop (http://www.daypop.com/) let users search for content within blogs alone. They also let a query lump blogs together with selected news services. This enables a search for timely commentary, rather than popularly linked content, � la Google. Daypop offers a tag-like feature by identifying and ranking the most commonly used words in the blog or RSS world, generating an almost impressionistic keyword survey of blogospheric interest. Waypath (http://www.waypath.com/) searches blogs but returns fewer results, with those results more likely to be relevant. Waypath also generates �topic streams�—categories of posts, based on analysis of blog posts within a given time period. PubSub (http://www.pubsub.com/) searches blogs, but not immediately. Instead, PubSub saves a query, then applies it to posts as they occur after the query is created, reporting the results to the user by Web, RSS feed, or e-mail. BlogPulse (http://blogpulse.com/) adds still another twist, creating graphic visualizations of results in order to help users identify trends within blogospheric results. Recently, Google and Yahoo have thrown their much larger resources into this field. Yahoo! integrated blogs within its news search (http://news.search.yahoo.com/), and Google launched a standalone blog search (http://blogsearch.google.com/). Yahoo has also included a tagging aspect, called My Web, and has purchased several Web 2.0 projects, most notably Flickr and del.icio.us.

Technorati (http://technorati.com/) and IceRocket (http://icerocket.com/) head in the opposite direction of these sites, searching for who (usually a blogger) has recently linked to a specific item or site. Technorati is perhaps the most famous blog-search tool. Among other functions, it has emphasized tagging as part of search and discovery, recommending (and rewarding) users who add tags to their blog posts. Bloggers can register their site for free with Technorati; their posts will then be searchable by content and supplemental tags.

Many of these services allow users to save their searches as RSS feeds to be returned to and examined in an RSS reader, such as Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/) or NetNewsWire (http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/). This subtle ability is neatly recursive in Web 2.0 terms, since it lets users create microcontent (RSS search terms) about microcontent (blog posts). Being merely text strings, such search feeds are shareable in all sorts of ways, so one can imagine collaborative research projects based on growing swarms of these feeds—social bookmarking plus social search.

However, when one speaks of each of these services searching blogs, the reality is somewhat more complex. Some, like Technorati, have created large databases of blogs, partly by spidering the Web, partly by relying on user submissions and for-pay subscriptions. Some, like Google�s blog search, query RSS feeds, which are produced by many blogs (but not all) and other sites that aren�t blogs. In other words, the boundaries around what is being searched are somewhat fuzzier than those in the already fuzzy world of Web search.¹³ One Web service is in fact based on tackling this problem from a different direction. Rollyo (http://rollyo.com/) lets a searcher choose up to ten Web sites to be searched, much like a whitelist restricts connections to a selected few. (A whitelist blocks all sites or users not on a list.) Users can publish and share their �searchrolls.�

Amid this flurry of Web services, what are the pedagogical possibilities? Like many computer-mediated techniques for teaching and learning, some of these possibilities start from pre-Web practices. For example, we have long taught and learned from news articles. Indeed, a popular metaphor for describing RSS reading is the clipping service of old. Since blogs, most social bookmarking tools, and other services are organized in reverse chronological order, their very architecture orients them, or at least their front pages, toward the present moment. Web 2.0 therefore supports queries for information and reflections on current events of all sorts. Given bloggers� propensity for linking, not to mention some services� ability to search links, blogs and other platforms readily lead the searcher to further sources. Students can search the blogosphere for political commentary, current cultural items, public developments in science, business news, and so on.

The ability to save and share a search, and in the case of PubSub, to literally search the future, lets students and faculty follow a search over time, perhaps across a span of weeks in a semester. As the live content changes, tools like Waypath�s topic stream, BlogPulse�s trend visualizations, or DayPop�s word generator let a student analyze how a story, topic, idea, or discussion changes over time. Furthermore, the social nature of these tools means that collaboration between classes, departments, campuses, or regions is easily supported. One could imagine faculty and students across the United States following, for example, the career of an Islamic feminist or the outcome of a genomic patent and discussing the issue through these and other Web 2.0 tools. Such a collaboration could, in turn, be discovered, followed, and perhaps joined by students and faculty around the world. Extending the image, one can imagine such a social research object becoming a learning object or an alternative to courseware.

Given the Web 2.0 ethos of sharing content across services, and the importance of social software, it is only logical that crossbreeds of news and social software have emerged. Blogdex (http://blogdex.net/), for example, charts the most popular Web pages as linked by a group of bloggers. These pages can be blogs, of course, as well as news stories, Web sites, images, PDF files, or different URLs for the same item. A glance at Blogdex offers a rough snapshot of what the blogosphere is tending to pay attention to. In that feature, it resembles Google�s Zeitgeist (http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html), an annual compendium of leading searches, broken down into various topics (technology, news, sports). A closer look at an individual Blogdex result reveals the blogs that link to a story. As we saw with del.icio.us, this publication of interest allows the user to follow up on commentary, to see why those links are there, and to learn about those doing the linking. Once again, this is a service that connects people through shared interest in information. A related Web service is Memeorandum (http://www.memeorandum.com/), the punningly named project that integrates news stories and blog responses. Memeorandum displays a series of topics and adds to each one both journalistic accounts and blogospheric opinion. It resembles the classic newspaper style of including news and op-ed pages within the same section, but it draws on thousands of sources, rather than a handful, and from far more diverse stances. Like Blogdex and Zeitgeist, Memeorandum—through the topics presented—offers a glimpse into the collective mind of many, many people at a given moment.

Whereas Memeorandum, Google News (http://news.google.com), and Blogdex automate their ranking of topics and stories, Digg (http://www.digg.com) opens the process to more active human intervention. Digg, devoted primarily to technology topics, accepts submissions of stories that users consider worthy of public attention. Users can then vote for, or �digg,� stories they like, and the site promotes the results accordingly. Digg draws on the recent experience of Wikinews (http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page), which also lets users drive topical choice. Unlike Digg, Wikinews and its great forebear, the South Korean OhmyNews (http://english.ohmynews.com/), consist largely of user-created news content.¹⁴ Such projects, taken together with Wikipedia, represent the acme of social software as information production and aggregation. Remember that these are exercises in microcontent: the bar to entry is lower for the average user. A user doesn�t have to author an entire site—just proffer a chunk of content.

The rich search possibilities opened up by these tools can further enhance the pedagogy of current events. A political science class could explore different views of a news story through traditional media using Google News, then from the world of blogs via Memeorandum. A history class could use Blogdex in an exercise in thinking about worldviews. There are also possibilities for a campus information environment. What would a student newspaper look like, for example, with a section based on the Digg approach or the OhmyNews structure? Thematizing these tools as objects for academic scrutiny, the operation and success of such projects is worthy of study in numerous disciplines, from communication to media studies, sociology to computer science.

The extensive growth of Web 2.0 projects has even more recently given rise to tools that make use of multiple services simultaneously. These meta-services and meta-projects are perhaps too nascent to describe in any narrower way and bear watching for emergent trends. SuprGlu (http://www.suprglu.com/) builds Web pages in which users� RSS feeds from multiple services are aggregated. For example, a professor might include the del.icio.us feeds from a research group and senior seminar alongside a series of blogs from colleagues around the world. At a meta-meta level, SuprGlu plans on letting users form RSS feeds from their many incoming streams. Gnosh (http://webtools.allegheny.edu/gnosh/), a related project, was created within higher education by tech leads at Allegheny and Vassar Colleges, stemming from a NITLE social software users group meeting. Gnosh searches multiple Web 2.0 and similar services while letting users store and share their queries. As with Rollyo, a student could build a group-of-search area. Unlike Rollyo, Gnosh queries a much broader content field. Users can visualize their results or the searches of others by tags or keywords.

Meta-services also exist on the non-search level. Plum (http://www.plum.com/), for instance, resembles a content management system. The Web 2.0 aspects include the types of content it supports (bookmarks, Flickr-style images, and so on) and the social emphasis on sharing content, then building networks around it. In contrast, Ning (http://www.ning.com/) offers tools for easier construction of Web 2.0 projects of all sorts. Finally, another meta-Web 2.0 project breaks the Web browser mold by redesigning the browser itself. Flock (http://flock.com) is still in early developmental stages (pre-beta as of this writing), but it offers a Web 2.0 way of browsing. Users can import their Flickr content into the browser frame as a sort of image-based toolbar, then post to del.icio.us or their blog from within the browser window.

Web 2.0 meta-services, like social software before them, are heading for the mobile, wireless world. For example, mobileGlu supports microcontent feeds for cell phones: �The service currently offers access to flickr, del.icio.us, RSS feeds and a handful of other content sources.�¹⁵

Rising Services or Churning Wave?

Clearly, such projects are in their early days, suggesting a certain amount of risk. The concepts, projects, and practices of Web 2.0 as a whole, insofar as we have surveyed them, are fluid and emergent. They are also so accessible as to be launched and interconnected at a pace rapid even by Web standards. At the same time, many services are hosted externally to academia. They are the creations of enthusiasts or business enterprises and do not necessarily embrace the culture of higher education. Local, campus hosting is attractive for many Web 2.0 projects, raising the classic problem of IT support. A related support issue involves microcontent. When will enough readers peruse Web sites through RSS and other microcontent readers to warrant resigning campus public electronic presentations? How will colleges and universities consider preserving such small pieces of intellectual work, especially as the works migrate across multiple, shifting, changing platforms?

A separate threat to this movement is the familiar one of copyright. Since these new Web services allow users to own, modify, and exchange data, it is probably inevitable that intellectual property holders will initiate lawsuits investigating perceived misappropriations.¹⁶ The amount of content in the Web 2.0 matrix is relatively small, so far, and largely user-generated. But in a time when headlines are being contested in some courts,¹⁷ microcontent may not be immune.¹⁸ Lawrence Lessig, J. D. Lasica, and others remind us that as tools get easier to use and practices become more widespread, it also becomes easier for average citizens to commit copyright violations.¹⁹

And these practices will continue to evolve. As we have seen through the rapid rise of podcasting, new forms of communication surface as technologies change. As with the growth of other electronic technologies (radio, television), new forms of storytelling through these new Web practices are likely to emerge. Storytelling by blog, for example, has already appeared, as has publishing novels through podcast. A subgenre of computer gaming, alternate reality games (ARGs), certainly contains much that we think of as Web 2.0: microcontent, social collaboration, sharing content across domains. What other narrative shapes will appear in the near future, for both fiction and nonfiction?

Web 2.0�s lowered barrier to entry may influence a variety of cultural forms with powerful implications for education, from storytelling to classroom teaching to individual learning. It is much simpler to set up a del.icio.us tag for a topic one wants to pursue or to spin off a blog or blog departmental topic than it is to physically meet co-learners and experts in a classroom or even to track down a professor. Starting a wiki-level text entry is far easier than beginning an article or book. What new, natively digital textual forms are impending as small-scale production scales up? �Web 1.0� has already demonstrated immense powers for connecting learners, teachers, and materials. How much more broadly will this connective matrix grow under the impact of the openness, ease of entry, and social nature of Web 2.0?²⁰ How can higher education respond, when it offers a complex, contradictory mix of openness and restriction, public engagement and cloistering? How do we respond to the possibilities of what some call �E-learning 2.0,� based on environments, microcontent, and networking?²¹

The story of this wave of innovation, whether we call it Web 2.0 or something else, is itself emergent and uncertain. While business models appear around it and venture capital swarms in, the second annual Web 2.0 conference was held in October 2005 (http://www.web2con.com/). Most of these projects are bottom-up entities. A quick check of Emily Chang�s eHub list (http://www.emilychang.com/go/eHub/) shows an explosion of hundreds of Web 2.0 projects. Yet far larger players have entered the field, most notably Yahoo, which has been buying up many projects, including Flickr and del.icio.us. Microsoft is considering a massive extension of RSS. And Google has been producing its own projects, such as the Lens RSS reader and Google Maps. Meanwhile, academic implementations are bubbling up, like the social bookmarking and search projects noted earlier. This Web 2.0 movement (or movements) may not supplant �Web 1.0,� but it has clearly transformed a significant swath of our networked information ecology.

posted by Unknown @ 2:02 AM 0 comments

Arab eGovernment will benefit from the speed up global telecom infrastructures

ITU’s deputy secretary general presenting a memento to Dr Hessa al-Jaber, chairperson of ictQatar, organisers of the conference in the presence of Toure

Staff Reporter

THE World Telecommunica-tions Development Conference that ended yesterday gave a call to member nations of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to step up their pace towards the creation of a truly global information society so that it could help bring opportunities to all.

Giving the details of the eight-day long deliberations of the event, spread out in many plenary sessions, Hamadoun I Toure, telecommunications bureau director of the ITU said the Doha plan has identified six areas where there should be more attention from members, namely further building up of telecom infrastructure, focus on e-government, e-commerce, statistical data, a development programme for least developed countries (LDCs) and importance of human resources in telecommunications development.

“A strategic plan having a bearing on global, regional, and national issues have been put in the place to reduce the digital divide and this is how Doha conference was different from the three conferences held earlier,” said the ITU official.

The plan provides the tools as well as clear guidance for achieving universal access, he said. The action plan is built on the outcome of the World Summit on the Information Society held in November 2005 in Tunis as well as the experience of implementing ICT development plans adopted at previous meetings.

Elaborating the Doha plan from the prepared draft, Toure said the conference underlined the considerable efforts of the members themselves and by the catalytic inputs of their developing partners, including public, private and inter-governmental forums to implement previous action plans aimed at promoting universal access.

The ITU official called upon the members for facilitating conditions so that maximum benefits could be derived from the implementation of news services and applications.

“New and emerging technologies along with conducive environment and entrepreneurial approaches have the potential to bridge the gap between not only developed and developing countries, but also between urban, rural, and remote areas and between well-served and underserved areas within a country.

The ITU official said the Global Information Society should be responsive to the interests of all nations, especially developing countries, and in particular LDCs, countries with economies in transition and small island developing states (Sids). “Opportunities offered by new information and communication technologies (ICTs) should be fully exploited for fostering sustainable development, better quality of life and higher standards of living,” said Toure quoting the draft.

The draft specifically drew the attention of the member countries to the roles played by ICTs in alleviating poverty, creating jobs, in protecting the environment and in preventing and mitigating natural and other disasters.

Among the essential prerequisites to achieve the goals set by the Doha Action Plan were telecom reforms that could lead to greater participation of the private sector and competition, creation of an enabling environment to promote reasonable and affordable access to basic telecommunications for all for a stable and transparent framework for fair competition while protecting network integrity and the rights of users, operators and investors, policies and strategies for the development of telecommunications that reflect the trend towards multi-services using a common infrastructure platform. The plan also called for a leading role for ITU and development sector in co-ordinating the activities of all stakeholders engaged in the development of ICT and related services, and the development of strategies that can facilitate the use of ICTs in disaster prevention, preparedness and relief as well as the development and deployment of low-cost and user-friendly technologies for disaster risk reduction.

The regional initiatives consist of many innovative aspects, the draft states. Until now, the action plan focused only on programmes that represented the key building blocks for bringing cohesion among the activities arising from the different programmes.

Under this, while the Arab states initiatives centre on establishing ICT indicators and capacity building among others, the Americas outline priority areas in improving connectivity in rural, isolated and marginal urban areas, inter-connection of information networks for disaster prevention, improve spectrum management in the Caribbean and establishing a virtual web-based centre for excellence.

posted by Unknown @ 11:12 PM 0 comments

In China eGovernment via blogging. What about the Arab world?

Chinese politicians urged to set up blogs: China's lawmakers are being encouraged to set up and maintain blogs, or web logs. Delegates at the annual sessions of the National People's Congress (NPC) and National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) -- major political events in China -- can apply to start their own online journal, which will be hosted on the People's Daily website at blog.people.com.cn (available in Chinese). Although 5,000 deputies and committee members are eligible to post blogs, only eight have so far taken up the offer. "We hope such blogs will help the NPC deputies and CPPCC National Committee members to better communicate with the public," Tang Weihong, the manager of the blog site, told the People's Daily Online. "The public wants to know what the NPC deputies and CPPCC National Committee members are doing. Many deputies and members are also willing to tell the people about their work." The move is being seen as an effort by lawmakers to stay in touch with the electorate and to embrace a technology that is sweeping the country: it is estimated that around 16 million Chinese citizens have their own blog.

posted by Unknown @ 7:43 AM 0 comments

Stampede to e-services portal

Salem Al Shair, e-services director at Dubai eGovernment said the response reflected the awareness of residents and visitors of using the portal to get their work done.

Dubai eGovernment claimed the number of visitors to its portal shot up dramatically in 2005 — from 69,286 in January to 185,063 in December.

The 167% rise in visitors to the www.dubai.ae site is due to increased public awareness, according to Salem Al Shair, e-services director at Dubai eGovernment.

The latest figures claim that the number of visitors accessing Dubai eGovernment’s online services increased from a low average of 2,235 daily visitors in January to more than double at 5,969 by the end of the year.

In December Al Shair told IT Weekly that at the time just 20% of transactions were carried out online and blamed this on a combination of lack of public awareness and public mistrust in carrying out transactions online (see IT Weekly 31 December 2005 - 6 January 2006).

The government has a target of 2007 for putting 90% of government services online and for ensuring that 50% of all transactions are carried out online.

Speaking about the latest figures Al Shair said: “The response to our innovative portal from Dubai residents and visitors reflects their awareness of using the e-service to get their work done especially with an innovative, secure and transparent portal like www.dubai.ae.”

Between March 2005 and December 2005 the number of international visitors using the website increased three-fold from 13.28% to 47.74% — which meant over half of those visiting the site were doing so from outside the country. This, Dubai eGovernment claimed, was due to the Emirates’ tourism boom.

Overall, the number of new visitors accessing the site more than doubled during 2005 from 18,9959 in January to 48,365
in December 2005 while repeat visits tripled from 4,562 in
the first month of the year to 12,893 by the end of December.

“The marked increase in the number of people adopting e- services through the portal is an indication of the ever reducing gap between state-of-the-art infrastructure, quality of e-services and the expectations of the people using the services,” Al Shair said.

When interviewed last December, Al Shair said the government would be carrying out an evaluation exercise to reassess the quality of the services and how many people are
using them.

Of the different Dubai eGovernment services applying for medical certificates online has proved the most popular having clocked up over 307,000 applications out of a total of 1,357,066 transactions for all government services since it was launched in October 2001, as reported in AME Info in December.

Also 90% of applications of Certificates of Origin from the Chamber of Commerce take place online.

According to Al Shair, other successful online services include applications for health hygiene certificates for food and payments of traffic fines online.

Last December the UN released a report naming the UAE as one of the world’s top countries in terms of e-government readiness.

According to the e-Government Readiness Report, the UAE has moved from a ranking of 60 in terms of its e-government readiness in 2004 to a ranking of 42 in 2005.

posted by Unknown @ 1:00 AM 0 comments