| Project Summary |
QUALEG aims at enabling Local Governments to manage their policies in a transparent and trustable way. To do so, Local Governments should be able to measure the performance of services they offer, to assess the satisfaction of Citizens and to re-formulate policy orientations on such elements with the participation of Citizens. |
| Problem |
Considering that citizens participation in democratic processes
has been decreasing for years in European countries, new methods
and instruments are needed to re-establish the public action legitimacy
in citizens' mind. According to the concept of good governance
in political science, we have to consider that trust in the public
action, transparency of the policy lifecycle and civic participation
are closely correlated :
- Local governments should be able to assess the quality of services
they offer by monitoring performance of government processes, assessing
citizens' satisfaction;
- New government services should foster the participation of citizens,
politicians and civil servants to debate on policy orientations
and quality of associated services.
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| Aim |
To address this problem, QUALEG aims to :
1. Develop monitoring mechanisms for unified measurement of
performance of governmental services implemented as a combination
of Web Services and workflows (both based on legacy information systems
and eProcedures).
2. Introduce semantics in eGovernment Web Services and Workflows
in order to make them accessible by knowledge management tools.
3. Support the participation of Citizens in policy evaluation and
formulation and feed the debates with a Policy Evaluation Scorecard
that combines indicators relating to citizens' expectations, service
performance and citizens' satisfaction. This will enable conducting
well motivated debates linking policy orientations, policy action
plans and related government services. |
| Technical Approach |
To address the user problem and to reach its strategic objective,
the QUALEG Project will conduct research and will produce :
1 - A methodology for implementing a transparent and trustable
Policy Lifecycle :
- Methods to define a Policy Lifecycle and to define associated
indicators
- Methods to manage the change induced by this practice and by the
introduction of the associated technology
- Best Practices through 3 pilot cases conducted in France, Germany
and Poland
2 - An Innovative Software Solution enabling a Local Government
to manage its Policy Lifecycles :
- Integrating access to the Local Government back-office legacy
information systems and to its eGovernment services
- Generating indicators on the quality and performance of government
services
- Supporting debates between citizens, politicians and civil servants
- Extracting knowledge and policy recommendations from these debates
From a technological viewpoint, QUALEG will develop innovative
Open Source building blocks needed to build the solution
described above :
- A WSDL based workflow management system which brings together
the interoperability features of Web Services and the business process
design & enactment features of workflow management. It will
be used as a technological enabler to the definition of policy evaluation
scorecards.
- A semantics engine for Web services/Workflows coupled with
an Ontology management system. It will aim to jointly publish semantically
rich Web Services interacting with legacy applications and information
sources. The semantics meta-data will authorize a homogeneous access
to these information systems.
- A knowledge harvesting tool based on ontology driven pattern
matching. It will work on the pool of information constituted through
document-based (information sources and performance database) and
person-to-person (emails, chats, forums, …) knowledge management
infrastructure linking all actors.
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| Expected Results |
The results of the QUALEG Project will be :
1 - A"Policy Lifecycle Management" Software Solution
targeting local governments willing to reinforce local democracy
by involving citizens in policy evaluation and formulation and by
being transparent on quality of public municipal services.
Proposed as an Open Source solution, it will be the vector of commercial
services to local governments.
2 - A Methodology for "Policy Evaluation & Orientation
in the eGovernment era". It will emphasise transparency
and trustability.
Although this methodology might be used independently of the QUALEG
software solution by local governments, it should be seen as a guide
for all implementation projects.
3 - Innovative Technologies will have been developed as key
enabling blocks for the development of the "Policy Lifecycle
Management" software solution.
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| Co-ordinator contact details |
Associazione Impresa Politecnico
Via G. Colombo, 40 - 20133 Milano (Italy)
Alberto Savoldelli - +39 02 23992796
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| This project has been partially
funded by the European Commission under the IST initiative. The content
of this publication is the sole responsibility of the project partners
listed herein, and in no way represents the view of the European Commission
or its services. |
