Our project focuses on the Government to Citizen (G2C) relationship, with government referring mainly to local and regional authorities. Eurostat's study (2013-2015 ) shows that EU citizens use their websites - and thus interact with eGovernment - for three main purposes: to download applications, complete applications, and obtain information. At the national level there are many solutions but often they are not effective enough.There is very often no reflection on why e-governance services are not as popular as they should be. There is lack of such effective training that would equip citizens with the skills to use e-government services in an efficient way. Specially in the case of older citizens, low-educated or with disabilities.This attitude raises more tools and services, but still part of the citizens especially with lower education can not take advantage of them. This project fills this gap. The project partners were chosen because of their complementary characteristics and specifity of activities and needs. T.C.Duzce Valiligi (project partner from Turkey) is the representative of public administration that implement e-government services in their regions. Partners from Spain (DILERSUR ANDALUCIA E.A., S.L.) and the Czech Republic (GLAFKA s.r.o.) intend to broaden and strengthen their educational activities (also related to new technologies) and make them more effective. The Soclab Foundation (Poland) is an organization that is engaged in public participation and empowering citizens in their social activities in the local and regional communities using new technologies. We want to do short research based on good practices and existing data (reports) concerning e-government in participaiting countries/regions. Get to know how the situation of using the e-services looks like in different countries. And focus after that on issues related to cross-sectoral cooperation, emphasize the benefits of involving social organizations in creating and promoting e-governement tools. Writing conclusions and summaries about specificity of e-government in each partner country as part of the handbook of good practices as the result of the project. We also want to focus on issues which illustrate what are the best ways to encourage the inhabitants to the e-services. We also want to introduce our results and developed ideas to the local and regional governments. We indent to publish a handbook with good practices of all partners available for free. Various working methods will be used in the project. Mostly we want to use different active methods, based on workshop work, because they are most effective in adult learning. Workshop work will be carried out with using Kolb cycle (experience, analysis, theory, implementation). During international meetings we will use group work methods such as: workshops, case studies, study visits to e-governance institutions, thematic debates, various forms of discussion (eg. world cafe, problem tree). The Soclab Foundation is using Design Thinking and Service Design methodology. In the context of e-governance services, we indend to apply some elements of the method of the test with users so-called „web accesibility and web usability”. As part of project cooperation, we will use group work methods. Project decisions will be made jointly by consensus. During regular meetings in individual countries as well as in distance work (mails, Skype), we will continue to discuss advancement in the project or problems which have to be solved. A very important element of the whole project and methodology of work is a constant evaluation. We understand it first as the ongoing reflection of all the partners on how we manage to achieve the project objectives, what are the difficulties in cooperation together. It will be very important in every country to start a discussions how to use e-governance as a tool for social inclusion. Direct participants of the project will gain new and comprehensive knowledge about the of e-governance services and they will be able to enhance people with low digital skills into this kind of education more effectively. By directing our actions primarily to educators, multipliers we know that the knowledge and experiences they will have acquired will be passed on to disadvantaged groups and through the participation of government offices also to decision-makers in public administrations and IT service designers which are involved in the design of IT services.
The project concerned the exchange of practices in the field of effective citizens inclusion into the process of designing and developing e-services by the local and regional administration. In the digital times of today, there are more and more opportunities for citizens to become involved in such processes. Nowdays the local and regional authorities are increasingly facilitating the citizens' cooperation with various types of applications and virtual platforms. They care about the fact that public institutions have ceased to be perceived as hostile institutions for residents, hindering their daily life and dealing with administrative matters. Moreover, often in the context of such e-services they offer opportunities for participation, e.g. in the public consultations or in forms of civic participation. Unfortunately, this offer is still very inaccessible to people with low competences and digital skills. Due to the lack of effective ways in terms of learning using e-government services, some part of the population is even more socially excluded. For this reason, the project handle the issue of social inclusion through using the open and innovative practices related to new technologies. Therefore, the main objective is using the idea of e-government as a tool for more effective social inclusion of EU citizens. The aim is to be more e-governance than e-government. Through the development of good practices in adults teaching effectively, especially for those who have low educational competences, we can change this situation and take advantage of the potential of e-government fully. In the project over 600 people were involved, including 240 in Turkey, 124 in the Czech Republic, 171 in Poland and 108 in Spain. Participants were people with low digital skills, eg elderly people, residents od rural areas or migrants. In the project, we also established cooperation with non-governmental organizations or specialists in the ICT industry. Very important partners were local and regional administration offices that implement e-services and inform and train residents in this area. The basic activities were transnational meetings in Poland, the Czech Republic, Spain and Turkey. We exchanged experiences during them, we learned good practices and worked out an e-book recommendation. During field work, each of the partners held meetings on e-services with residents, cooperated with offices, eg by researching the user experience of existing e-services and developing a plan of information activities. One of most important results of our activities is an effective exchange of experiences between partner organisations and cooperating institutions on how to involve citizens and encourage them to use e-government services. Thanks to these acttvities the E-book titled: "E-GOVERNMENT CLOSER TO THE PEOPLE" was written. The main issues within this publicaton are: what is the idea of e-governance and how the systems of e-government in all project partners' countries looks like, what are good practice examples for effective adult learning with the use of new technologies in differnect countries and how effective are e-government practices in partner countries and also how to educate effectively low-skilled citizens by using e-government. In order to make the publication more practical, we took much care of the recommendations and references. We exchanged our national experiences putting special interests on the obstacles in using e-government and e-services, needs, barriers, support and key elements of effective usage of e-government. We discovered the big gap in designing effective adult education which can transfer effectively the knowledge of e-government services and acquire skills in using them. We have already taken steps to create a continuation of the project. We want to develop a specific platform that could be used by the administration and non-profit organizations in creating e-services, especially at the local level with strong involvment of the citizens. We would like also work out specific educational forms for adults that would be the most engaging and effective way to teach using e-services.