NetU was the Task Leader for Technologies for urban e-Governance; which constitutes a portion of INTELCITIES, a European Union (EU) funded project through the 6th Information Society Technologies (IST) programme. The project kicked off in January 2004 at an estimated cost of €7million.

INTELCITIES’ objective is to create a new and innovative set of interoperable e-Government services to meet the needs of both citizens and businesses. This will provide interactive citywide on-line applications and services for users that will make all aspects of what is “going-on” in the city available to everyone. This will support:

• Everyday needs and requirements of citizens and business through 24 hours access to transactional city services.
• More efficient city management and administration by integrating functions and services across city authorities, regional and national governmental agencies, utility and transport system providers and citizens/NGO networks.
• Much more innovative and effective approaches to urban planning through more reliable city modelling, using advanced visualisation and predictive techniques, which will enable citizens and businesses to play a far more participative and inclusive role in influencing how planned changes in the city will affect their lives.

INTELCITIES brings together 18 cities, with 20 ICT companies including Nokia, Microsoft and CISCO and 36 research groups to pool advanced knowledge and experience of electronic government, planning systems and citizen participation from across Europe. It will help achieve the EU policy goal of the “Knowledge Society” by 2010 through new forms of electronic governance of cities and greater social inclusion through enhanced access to services by citizens and businesses.

The methodology and approach is based on research undertaken on social learning experiments spanning technical development and socio-economic dimensions through prototype modules in six EU cities that will be integrated together as shown in the figure.

NetU was part of the consortium commissioned to identify gaps and specifications and propose apt software and hardware to enhance e-Governance. NetU is participating due to the long-term expertise in the successful utilization of methodologies in the Government sector. EU related projects in the portfolio of NetU include PRISMA (Providing Innovative Service Models and Assessment for e-Government), BEEP (Best eEurope Practices – NAS), MEMO (Medical Mobile Devices – Cluster Project).