2017•06•19     Lisbon

UNU-EGOV attended the 17th European Conference on Digital Government (ECDG 2017), which took place in Lisbon, Portugal, between 12-13 June 2017.  The conference was hosted by the Portuguese Military Academy. This year, the conference’s organisation committee refocused the theme to look more broadly at the area of Digital Government. Two papers were presented at the conference: Modernization of Greek Public Sector: Results from eGovernment Law application and Next Steps by Demetrios Sarantis and Assessment of Federal Government Websites by Irfanullah Arfeen.

The first paper discusses the initiatives taken by the Greek government to implement the appropriate legal framework that will support the digitization of public sector’s operation. Such a legal framework copes with the challenges that arise from administrative, legal, institutional and technological factors. The paper briefly presents the Greek eGovernment legislative framework, explores the initial results after the enactment of the Greek eGovernment law and discusses next steps and possible challenges in the future.

The second paper investigates the arrangement of links in the Pakistani Federal Ministry of Science and Technology websites. 16 federal government websites were analysed. During the federal government websites development, several problems were found, such as weak innovation capacity and low technology intensity. On the other hand, citizens (users) are not satisfied with the federal government websites and suggested that federal government websites should be available in their national (Urdu) and provincial/local languages. In this way, less educated people (majority of Pakistan) can gain from online initiatives that empower them to make decisions based on what is in their best interest. It can be concluded that the decision about the type of link should be taken in relation to the number of links to be displayed. The use of cascading links in federal government websites is not recommended because cascading links may cause accessibility problems and they also require more ability from users than other types of links.

Demetrios Sarantis presenting (top left), Irfanullah Arfeen presenting (top right) and both with Hannah Thinyane from the United Nations University Institute on Computing and Society (UNU-CS), who also attended the event.