Let me introduce myself : my name is Godefroy Beauvallet and I am advisor for IT to Michel Sapin, who is the minister in charge of public service and eGovernment in France. More about him and the ministry here.
The BBC article is based on Governmental decisions taken on November, 15th here in France. I actually am one of the guys who briefed the BBC journalist on that one.
Branded "eGovernment : Second Stage", these decisions aim at generalising online services in the public sector before 2005.
To know more about the second stage, you can go here. To know more about the first stage, there is a page in English here.
It's of course difficult (and is it really interesting, anyway) to try and find out which government is the most advanced as far as eGov is concerned : what we all know (and we discuss that at EU level and with US, Canada and many others) is we all are still at the begining of the journey.
A few French highlights : the equivalent of FistGov is Service-public.fr. We believe it is a good informative portal, with about 100 online services, 1100 online static forms, access (index and search engine) to 6500 public websites, a "user manual" of 2500 pages and 1600 Q&A on about anything you want to do with the government (both local and national). Another site publishes everyday (and someone who said the opposite on the list is wrong) all laws and decrees taken by the Governement. Among services provided online are tax filings and payments (individual and firms), scholarships to students, access to public service jobs (through competitive examps) and many others.
We also try and do a lot of things to enhance interoperability among our information systems. We believe this is crucial, as we do not want to be mono-supplier of IT (for legal as well as strategic reasons). That lead us to rising interest in open-source software, and the Government Agency in charge of IT publish a lot of information on them here. Michel SAPIN also publicly endorsed the open-source movement in several occasions.
And to end this rather long post, I want to stress out that French citizens are very hot on privacy and personal data handling. Since 1978, there is an independant public body in charge of these questions here : the CNIL. Any database a ministry creates needs to be approved by the CNIL before it is put online, and there are many an example where a project was stopped by the CNIL on privacy concerns. We want to think carefully about these issues before we go on with a technical widget or another : the PM decided on November, 15th that three "wise guys" are to think about it : the former president of the Cour de Cassation (more or less the equivalent to the Supreme court), a high-ranking civil servant and a well-known sociologist. First report due on January 2002.
I could not explain a whole policy in this post. I would be pleased to try and answer more specific questions in the thread of by email.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me introduce myself : my name is Godefroy Beauvallet and I am advisor for IT to Michel Sapin, who is the minister in charge of public service and eGovernment in France. More about him and the ministry here.
The BBC article is based on Governmental decisions taken on November, 15th here in France. I actually am one of the guys who briefed the BBC journalist on that one.
Branded "eGovernment : Second Stage", these decisions aim at generalising online services in the public sector before 2005.
To know more about the second stage, you can go here. To know more about the first stage, there is a page in English here.
It's of course difficult (and is it really interesting, anyway) to try and find out which government is the most advanced as far as eGov is concerned : what we all know (and we discuss that at EU level and with US, Canada and many others) is we all are still at the begining of the journey.
A few French highlights : the equivalent of FistGov is Service-public.fr. We believe it is a good informative portal, with about 100 online services, 1100 online static forms, access (index and search engine) to 6500 public websites, a "user manual" of 2500 pages and 1600 Q&A on about anything you want to do with the government (both local and national). Another site publishes everyday (and someone who said the opposite on the list is wrong) all laws and decrees taken by the Governement. Among services provided online are tax filings and payments (individual and firms), scholarships to students, access to public service jobs (through competitive examps) and many others.
We also try and do a lot of things to enhance interoperability among our information systems. We believe this is crucial, as we do not want to be mono-supplier of IT (for legal as well as strategic reasons). That lead us to rising interest in open-source software, and the Government Agency in charge of IT publish a lot of information on them here. Michel SAPIN also publicly endorsed the open-source movement in several occasions.
And to end this rather long post, I want to stress out that French citizens are very hot on privacy and personal data handling. Since 1978, there is an independant public body in charge of these questions here : the CNIL. Any database a ministry creates needs to be approved by the CNIL before it is put online, and there are many an example where a project was stopped by the CNIL on privacy concerns. We want to think carefully about these issues before we go on with a technical widget or another : the PM decided on November, 15th that three "wise guys" are to think about it : the former president of the Cour de Cassation (more or less the equivalent to the Supreme court), a high-ranking civil servant and a well-known sociologist. First report due on January 2002.
I could not explain a whole policy in this post. I would be pleased to try and answer more specific questions in the thread of by email.
Best regards !