The 1st School on Technologies for Electronic Governance in Developing Countries will be organized as the first in a series of schools under the UNU-IIST's UNeGov.net initiative.

The aim is to help building human capacity for e-Governance, particularly in developing countries.

The purpose of the School is to introduce the XML Technologies and Java APIs related with them.

1. Experts in Information Technology, software developers, etc.
2. Government IT practitioners, researchers and educators
3. Postgraduate IT students

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'.

A series of schools are planned as part of the UNeGov.net initiative. The aim is to help building human capacity for e-Governance, particularly for Developing Countries. Practitioners and trainers from Government and Industry can be the primary target audience, while schools can also be designed for training Public Administration officials and representatives of other stakeholders of e-Governance.

Schools can be designed, organised and implemented in a variety of ways. In most cases, it may be most beneficial to organise schools as back-to-back events vis-a-vis workshops. The duration and course composition can also vary according to particular needs. Member institutions of UNeGov.net would be responsible for organising these events.