The 1st Network-Building Workshop on Electronic Governance in Developing Countries will be organized as a parallel event of the World Summit on Information Society, and the first in a series of workshops under the UNU-IIST's UNeGov.net initiative.

The aim is to build a Community of Practice interested in developing, sharing and applying concrete solutions for Electronic Governance, especially in developing countries. In addition to Workshops, the Community will be supported by a Portal and an annual Conference on the Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance.

The purpose of the Workshop is to introduce the UNeGov.net initiative, enlist initial members and discuss future development.

1. Experts in Public Administration, Information Technology, Knowledge Management, etc.
2. Managers leading government technology or reform programmes
3. Government practitioners, researchers and educators
4. Government decision-makers and CIOs

Governments are under pressure from citizens, businesses and civil society to address public needs, to support local industries, to deliver high-quality services at reasonable cost to the public, etc. In response, they try to develop Electronic Governance - leverage the use of Information and Communication Technology to bring about customer orientation, businessline management, new forms of public service delivery and other public sector reforms.

In doing so, government leaders face many challenges, such as:

1. Leading necessary structural changes to accompany technical solutions, against resistance to change.
2. Finding ways to cooperate on cross-agency projects, against traditionally hierarchical organizations.
3. Building stable, long-lasting solutions for the public sector, while facing volatility of supporting technologies.
4. Relying on the private sector to deliver public services while keeping data secure and avoiding vendor lock-in.

UNeGov.net will provide a forum for addressing these challenges, bringing together the stakeholders in government, civil society, academia and industry. Specific solutions will be also addressed, for instance the use of open-source software.

Developing Electronic Governance merits a multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder approach whereby the experts and practitioners in different disciplines come together to exchange experiences, share technical know-how, transfer skills and knowldege and reach consensus on the best practices in the field. UNeGov.net aims to bring together such experts within the framework of a Community of Practice supported by, among others:

1. a community portal
2. a series of network-building workshops
3. an annual conference on the Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance

The focus is as much on solving concrete problems as it is on consensus-building and advancing the practice in the field. The portal, for instance, will provide technical support for collaborative problem-solving by offering a rich collection of web resources - papers, software, projects, people, etc. and the mechanism to assemble such resources into 'solution patterns'.

1. to raise particular societal needs
2. to present government-adopted measures to address such needs, along with the challenges faced
3. to discuss a possible solution frameworks based on international and local experience in Electronic Governance
4. to disseminate the knowledge gained through the portal