UK: Scottish Parliament's e-petition system lined up for European award
The Holyrood e-petitions system allows members of the public to send in petitions to politicians online rather than using sheets of paper. It has now been nominated for a special award which recognises the best use of the internet by governments.
It is a finalist in the service use category of the eEurope Awards for eGovernment.
Ireland: Budget must include ICT in its plans
More than 90,000 people are employed in the ICT sector in Ireland, which accounts for 36 per cent of total exports of goods and services. Productivity in the sector is high. Between 1995 and 2003, productivity increased by 165 per cent or 13 per cent in annual average terms. This compares with 14 per cent and 1.6 per cent respectively for other industry sectors.
UK: Ian Watmore: The eyes have it, when your job is to know every citizen in Britain
The best night of Ian Watmore's life was in May 2002, when he saw Arsenal beat Manchester United at Old Trafford to win the Premiership and celebrated in a bar at Manchester airport. It's not the kind of admission you would expect from the Government's chief information officer, whose job is to make sure the public sector's notoriously temperamental and expensive computer systems are up to scratch. You might expect someone in charge of the Government's computers to be a bit more, well, geeky.
UK: ID card plans face delay over technology, ministers warned
Ian Watmore, the head of Tony Blair's e-government unit, has told ministers they may have to phase in the controversial ID card scheme because the complexity and scale of the project is so ambitious.
UK tails Europe in e-government take-up
UK public sector agencies are failing to entice citizens to use e-government services, new research has found.
Only 11 per cent of Brits downloaded government forms last year, according to research from Eurostat, a European publisher of statistics. The report said 31 per cent of citizens had obtained government information over the web but only five per cent had returned completed forms to the government over the internet.