Impact
At this moment the following three strands of solutions are supported:
- e- shops for target communities to market products such as booklets, paintings, handicraft, music productions, or other
- jobboards, for target communities to promote their skills, publicise their employment interests while also having access to suitable employment offers
- affiliate marketing, whereby the target community may link to other businesses as an Internet marketing partner (service is in development phase)
Lessons learnt
As a general rule advancements towards a more inclusive society are triggered by three types of action:
1 - Legislation and other more “soft†policy instruments (voluntary approaches, etc.), whereby organizations are required to comply with certain provisions, at the risk of financial or other penalties.
2 - Business, whereby the initiative is triggered by the pursuit of commercial profit. For example, the growing business of assistive devices is one of the many business driven activities, with a clear impact on inclusion. What we emphatically stress here however is that there can be settings where the exclusion prone may not just be on the receive side (of, e.g. assistive devices) but on the supply side of business services. As the ICTforALL.NET is underlined by the quest for increased employment opportunities, the importance of this distinction becomes paramount.
3 - Ethics, whereby organizations adopt inclusive approaches on moral grounds. It is often difficult always to identify the true driver of this behavior; it can be a deeply rooted sense of equity or something perhaps more superficial, aspiring to also develop a society- friendly corporate image that, in the long term may pay off even financially. The term corporate social responsibility is what most accurately summaries this thread of action.
ICTforALL.NET addresses primarily the second and the third above drivers, although as it will be shown below, the basic assumptions and initiatives on which this plan is built, often span across more than one of the above drivers. In general however our founding questions are:
- How can ICT help exclusion prone communities increase their employment opportunities on business arguments, by offering services on the supply side of the business equation?
- How can ICT help exclusion prone increase their employment opportunities by building on the ethical driver of inclusion?
Network
Promotion/awareness campaign
Workshop on development of eProc solutions in line with the EU l
The Forum is organising, in cooperation with Auftrag.at, a workshop for exchanging experiences on the development of eProcurement solutions alligned with the EU Directives.
It will be also the opportunity to have a deep insight on the new version of the IDABC eProcurement demonstrators and on the helpdesk service.
The workshop will take place next 14th January, in Wien (all the details are available on the workshop page at
http://www.epractice.eu/workshop/37 and the registration is already open).
Experts interested in presenting their own experience are invited to contact the Forum (by email to eprocurement@epractice.eu ) by next 5th December.
Social computing and public services
In April 2008 a list of cases was published on this community. These are more than 100 initiatives related to social computing in public services. This is a work in progress, useful to identify the key areas of impact and "what you can do" with social computing. But it is also a useful ressource in itself. This is not meant to be exhaustive, but continously updated.
Please inform us about missing projects or incorrect information, by contacting TNO or replying to this post. When suggesting new projects, please specify the name, the URL, the description (including why it is about social computing) and the public service for which it is relevant.
The cases are now available via an online database at: http://webmonitor.ict.tno.nl/