Better public service through new use of IT research and technologies to create IT based collaboration between citizens and the public sector

Three Danish municipalities and three IT companies are working together with the Alexandra Institute and researches from Aarhus and Aalborg University on a new type of public IT services. These services will utilize the latest Web 2.0 technologies to bring the citizens and the public sector closer together.

The eGov+ project explores e-governance services and infrastructure. The focus is on efficient, and democratic e-services through Web 2.0 technology at the interface between citizens and public administration. The project works with visualization of decision processes and workflows, adaptive documents and services, processes and methods of design, and management.

The pivotal idea of the project is to examine how citizens may be supported in achieving as much as possible on their own and in cooperation with other citizens, and how collaboration between citizens and municipal services may be enhanced. Furthermore the project looks at the development, implementation and everyday management of such eGovernment services and infrastructures.

Methodologically the project works through a combination of grounded approaches to the understanding of organizational and use issues and participatory design-oriented approaches to design, involving caseworkers as well as citizens. Participant observation and interviews are combined with workshops involving citizens and caseworkers. Technology is developed through iterative prototyping to give future users access to hands-on experience, while making it possible to work with alternatives as opposed to just one solution. When applied in a research setting, prototypes are also used to capture and probe research hypotheses.

http://egovplus.dk/

The work in the research project IT Security for Citizens (ITSCI) aims at better and more usable security. This is expected to result in technology that is easy to use for citizens with a limited knowledge of IT and computers, yet is more secure than systems typically in use today.

Better Security

The project aims to solve two basic problems: first, existing hard- and softwareproducts often do not communicate security in a way that ordinary users can understand and relate to. This can degrade security because users take security-related decisions based on incomplete or wrong information.

Second, security-related solutions such as digital signature systems or netbank systems are often tied to one particular computer, and thus mobility and flexibility suffer. Also, this type of solution can often be broken by a sufficiently severe attack on only a single machine.

http://itsci.borgernesitsikkerhed.dk/