2016•04•18     Geneva

The annual World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Forum represents the world’s largest annual gathering of the “ICT for development” community, co-organized by ITU, UNESCO, UNDP and UNCTAD. The Forum will once again be attended by UNU-EGOV.

Tomasz Janowski, the head of UNU-EGOV will serve as a high-level track facilitator of the WSIS Forum, and a contributor to the UNESCO Session on “SDG 16: Promoting Peaceful and Inclusive [Knowledge] Societies” taking place on Wednesday 4 May 2016.

UNU-EGOV will also organize a workshop on “ICT-Based Cost and Burden Reduction in Public Administration and Service Delivery” on Thursday 5 May 2016. The primary objective of the workshop is to discuss and identify potential solutions to three key questions:

• How can administrative burden reduction be facilitated in diverse service areas and settings without transferring the burden from the public sector to the end user?
• How are ICT-enabled cost-savings realized within the public sector without generating additional costs and burdens on the end user?
• What are the key challenges and tradeoffs, e.g. political, legal, organizational, capacities, resistance to change, lack of vision, fragmentation, etc. for ICT-enabled cost and burden reduction within the public sector?

The workshop is part of the UNU-EGOV’s ongoing research projects on Electronic Governance for Administrative Burden Reduction and Electronic Governance for Context-Specific Public Service Delivery. The workshop will be chaired by Tomasz Janowski, and include presentations and discussions with the audience by Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen (UNU-EGOV Academic Fellow, and Tallinn University of Technology Ragnar Nurkse School of Innovation and Governance, formerly head of section within the Danish Agency for Digitization), Kenneth Bagarukayo (UNU-EGOV Government Fellow and Commissioner, Information Management Services, Ministry of Information and Communications Technology, Uganda), and one more speaker.