Impact

Instant feedback of impact indicators is in fact a fundamental part of the project, supporting a dynamic decision-oriented-process approach. An ambitious implementation of accurate metrics was taken as a key component supporting the introduction of Web 2.0. Advanced analysis based on eye-tracking and user surveys (more of 1,200 households) paced the base for a final measurement system (Webtrends platform, covering the whole galaxy of institutional websites and all independent web services). The measurement system allows getting instant and automatic analysis of the use of all the offered services and components independently or jointly taken as dynamically reconfigurable groups focused on definable user targets. The overall growth of the use of the new Web 2.0 approach has resulted in an impressive increase of accesses/day (from 85,000 up to 150,000) and served pages/day (from 1.3 up to 2.4 million). In particular, the use of the RSS-based approach has shown a sustained monthly growth of 10% since its early activation reaching a current total of 15,000 weekly feeds served. The embedded Google implementation complemented with a severe informational reorganization has improved the website positioning by an order of magnitude. All service offer decisions are currently driven by the available metrics.

Track record of sharing

The overall gencat.cat exercise is suitable to be transferred into a number of viable scenarios, one of them being its transfer to the Open Source Software dimension. The simplest instrument to facilitate its broader implementation by interested parties was the consideration of its direct transfer as single components, thus being applicable interms of offering a significant number of gencat.cat “objects”, like (among many others): - RSS reader (Open Source, multi-language, programmed in XUL, already being offered by the Mozilla Foundation) - Query-to-RSS converter software - e- Catalunya social networks management software platform - social interaction software platform: for the generation of blogs and wiki webservices - street maps technology (supporting a large-scale deployment of city-maps based services) - service personalization software components (based on innovative implementation of the AJAX software concept, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) The widest transferability was however identifed in a signifiicantly more ambitious complete project-transfer approach, aimed to address targeting implementations of significant complexity, at the level of big cities, regional or national Public Administrations. This transfer initiative has been already applied under the EUROREGIO umbrella, in which the governments of Languedoc-Roussillon and Midi-Pyrenees (France) and Aragon, Balearic Islands and Catalonia collaborates for the development of a joint Pyrennees-Mediterranean area.

Lessons learnt

Lesson 1 - Opening transparent access to information: the first step to stimulate further involvement of citizens on real participative dimensions requires Public Administrations to proactively secure the delivery of the existing information by digital means (this requiring an important decision process) Lesson 2 - The role of innovation processes: the overall exercise needs to vigorously rethink the existing processes, adopting a serious committment in revising and reorganising any needed component or structural existing organization Lesson 3 - Think big: scale matters, particularly in those cases in which success will immediately result in usage figures which eventually will place eGovernment services at the same level of professional, entertainment or even consumer services (as it is the case at gencat.cat where in termes of 'audience' an eGovernment portal is positioned at the same level than media, financial or consumer services).