Conference “Towards E-Municipality – The Digital City” under the patronage of Sofia Municipality
11/25/2008On 25th November 2008, in Sheraton Hotel, Sofia, a Conference on the theme “Towards e-municipality – the digital city” took place. Organizer of the Conference was Foundation “Internet and Law”. Partners of the Conference were: Motorola, Materna Group, VoiceCom, IBSolution, Cisco, ICW, Ericsson, SAP, Bull and Sildex.
The Conference was opened by Mr. Boiko Borisov, Mayor of Sofia City. Mr. Borisov said that two and a half years earlier there was established “one office” in 90 municipalities in Bulgaria. During that time there were none in Sofia. Today, Mr. Borisov said that there is “one office” established in 21-22 of the 24 sections of Sofia.
Mr. Rosen Jelyazkov, Chief Secretary of Sofia Municipality, made a presentation on the theme “Sofia towards a better future using digital services”.
Mr. Jelyazkov described the current condition of Sofia Municipality and accented on the maim problems: lack of quality in serving the citizens and the business representatives and the inefficient spending of the financial resources for implementation of IT projects.
The first steps in order to deal with the problem have been already done:
-Sofia Municipality now has a clear vision how a digital municipality should be developed,
-The first components needed a System of Systems (Integrated Informational System of Sofia Munisipality) to be created are already defined,
-Recruitment of qualified personnel.
Representatives of the Austrian Ministry of Internal Affairs and sector “ E-government” of the Wien Municipality - Mr. Osvald Kesler and Mr. Rinzner were guest-speakers of the conference. They shared the Austrian experience in the development of E-Government. For two years in a row (2006, 2007) Austria kept the firs place in the list of “Best developed e-government” among all 27 EU member states.
Representatives of the Ministry of State Administration and Administrative Reform presented the opportunities municipality’s projects to be financed through Operational Programme Administrative Capacity.
The partners of the Conference made presentations of their e-services that would facilitate the citizens, such as:
-Creation of an unified vision of all websites of the administration (MaternaGroup),
-Creation of “One number for NON-emergency matters” (Cisco),
-Broadband development (Motorola and Ericsson),
-Applying SMS payment system (VoiceCom),
-The advantages of SAP Net Weaver Platform (IBSolution),
-“City card” (BULL),
-Electronic patient’s file/electronic recepies etc. (ICW),
-Traffic optimization using GSM signals (Sildex).