In a nutshell:
With 2013 being the Year of the Citizen in the EU, both the Member States and the Institutions of the EU are faced with the critical question of how to gain citizens’ trust by improving the accountability of policy makers. The riddle of how to become more transparent, collaborative and participatory may be solved by putting forward the principle of "User Empowerment", the exchange of best practice cases, the establishment of common targets for transparency among Member States and with the promotion of a measurable system to evaluate those transparency targets. These actions should be designed to enhance citizen-administration relations and can be catalysts in establishing sound finances, good governance and overall fiscal integrity. Even though transparency is often viewed as crucial to government accountability, its measurement remains elusive. This can be by-passed by the exchange of experience and dissemination of information and knowledge among stakeholders, especially at the national level. Since no common European Transparency Objectives exist yet, the EU needs more input from Member States and supranational institutions, so as to understand exactly what data is needed and then be able to access the relevant data in a timely, accurate and reliable manner. This event intends to produce input for EU and Member State efforts to complete the eGovernment Action Plan's actions on improvement of transparency. In particular, the event emphasises on the ICT-enabled transparency targets/policies in Member States, the exchange of experiences on targets/policies and the examination of best practice cases from Member States. Furthermore, the event should discuss how to measure transparency and the potential impact of transparency policy measures on unleashing economic growth. Participation in the event by Member States sharing real life experiences is therefore of key importance.
Event Topics:
• How can we best measure transparency and its different forms?
• What are the key transparency-related policy measures that might unleash the EU’s potential economic growth?
• What is the role of technology and eGovernment applications as a means to improve transparency?
• What can we learn from Member States' experiences, e.g. what are good examples of how eGovernment improves transparency?
• Suggestions for common transparency targets.
• Barriers for establishing European (or EU-wide) Transparency Objectives.
Speakers/Audience:
This is an open event intended for MS, policy-makers and practitioners interested to contribute towards the improvement of transparency in government decision making at European, national and local levels and anyone interested in the area of public administrations as well as businesses and/or citizens who interact with them: eGovernment project implementers; stakeholders in FP6 and FP7 research projects; researchers; businesses; European Commission officers; ePractice members etc.
Registration:
To register for this event, please create an ePractice account if you are not a current member. Subsequently, kindly login and once you are in this page, simply click on the yellow button on your right hand side that reads Participate in this event to activate your registration. ePractice members can simply login and click on the same page as described above.
Submission of summaries/PPT slides:
To be considered for a speaker placement for this event, kindly submit a summary of one page and three PPT slides of your intended presentation to vassilia.orfanou@eurodyn.com with a cc to events@eurodyn.com. Regarding your summary, please download and complete the "Proposal form". Final presentations should not exceed 6 power point slides and should be concise and factual.
Networking:
A few selected speakers will set the scene with a 15 minute presentation and the rest of the programme will be dedicated to roundtable discussions and networking purposes.
Deadlines to remember:
~Submission of summaries/ presentations: 23 October 2012
~Speaker confirmation: 31 October 2012
~Submission of final presentations: 2 November 2012
~Event date: 6 November 2012
~Publication of workshop proceedings: Beginning of December 2012
