eMayor to aid inter-EU movement of people
The eMayor project was set-up in January 2004 to develop affordable and interoperable systems for small and medium sized government organisations (SMGOs) throughout Europe. The system has been completed and now tested, and will aid the fluid movement of people throughout Europe once implemented. The project team identified barriers to information transfer across the EU - usually centres not having the resources to develop eGovernment web services. The eMayor scheme is planned as a cost-effective solution. The testing phase took place with the help of one hundred testers from organisations such as universities and city administrations, as well as citizens. 'Our aim with eMayor was to bring e-government within the reach of smaller government organisations around the world,' project manager Pim Hengeveld from consultants Deloitte in the Netherlands told IST Results. 'Within the EU the issue of cross-border exchanges is becoming increasingly important.' The test phase was conducted throughout the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, France, Italy and Greece. The testing was brought under control by a '24-hour closed working environment based on Skype. Basically, the teams used continuous telephone conferencing - sometimes with video too,' said Mr Hengeveld. The next phase is to start a large-scale test, to be held across Germany, Poland, Italy and France. The platform is built on open-source code which the team hopes will ensure simplicity. 'We wanted the eMayor platform to be as simple as possible: 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 team not developed not the software, which is open source, but services that can use the platform. 'The business challenge is to get eMayor services running in different municipality departments,' he said. The system's only drawback has been legal ownership: each country has a different system. '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?' asks Mr Hengeveld. The team is compiling a comprehensive list of anomalies, which will eventually be published in a white paper. The two areas in which the project aims to make the biggest impact are the procurement and movement of people. Procurement could result in significant cost-savings, while for people, if information can be easily passed between municipalities, then this will cut bureaucracy and red-tape for EU citizens moving throughout Europe.
Countries
Netherlands