National workshop on UN e-Government Survey and FOSS4Gov

A national workshop on UN e-Government Survey and FOSS4Gov-Sri Lanka will be held at Hotel Taj Samudra, Colombo from 29 September to 1 October.

Organised by ICTA with the strategic partnership of the United Nations Project Office on Governance (UNPOG), the workshop will focus attention on three inter-related subjects on the three days, ICTA sources said.

The workshop on 29 and 30 September will consist of full day sessions while the session on 1 October will be a half-day forum.

The session on 29 September instant will be on UN e-Government Survey and Critical Success Factors, a senior ICTA officer said. Aimed at improving operational efficiency of public service the workshop on this day will go into a detailed consideration of the indices of successful surveys.

After the registration of participants the audience will be welcomed by ICTA Chairman Prof. P. W. Epasinghe and Head of the United Nations Project Office on Governance Jong-moo Choi.

This will be followed by keynote addresses by two erudite experts on the subject, Presidential Secretary Lalith Weeratunga and UNDP Country Director Douglas Keh.

The workshop which brings together local and foreign experts will be a rare opportunity for sharing of experiences and inducing synergy. Among other speakers lined up for sharing their valuable knowledge and experience are UNPOG Programme Operations Expert S. K. Belal Hassan; ICTA Programme Director Re-engineering Government, Wasantha Deshapriya; ICTA Information Infrastructure Programme Head Dil Piyaratne; Telecommunication Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka Consultant Dr. Manoda Gamage; Republic of Korea SangMyung University Prof. Kyoung Y. Bae; Republic of Korea Ministry of Public Administration and Security Winner of 2011 UN Public Service Award Seok-tae Lee and Republic of Korea, Winner of 2011 UN Public Service Award, INVIL Deputy Director Shin Hoon.

The 30 September event is scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. and will focus attention on Free and Open Source Software for Government (FOSS4Gov). Colombo University, School of Computing Senior lecturer Dr. Ruvan Weerasinghe will present the keynote address at this session.

Other speakers at this session include ICTA Legal Advisor and Programme Director Jayantha Fernando; ICTA Head of Technology and Chief Technology Officer Sanjaya Karunasena; FOSS Localisation Consultant Danishka Naveen; Surveyor General Department Lecturer in Survey and Mapping Dr. A. H. Lakmal; Kolonna Divisional Secretariat Network Administrator Rajeen Prasanna; Siti Hawa of Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) Open Source Programme; Government of India Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Department of Information Technology Joint Director Punyabrata Ghatak and Respere Lanka (Pvt) Ltd. CTO Mifan Careem.

The third day’s programme (1 October) scheduled to begin at 9 and close at 12:30 p.m. will be a forum on Public-Private Parnerships and South-South Cooperation.

Among the presenters scheduled to make presentations at this session comprising two open discussion sessions are ICTA CEO Reshan Dewapura, UNPOG Head Jong-moo Choi, Jae-won Kim of Samsung and Amanthi Wickramasinghe of UNDP.

Referring to the two-and-half day event Dewapura said that the workshop would greatly help in sharing of experience and expertise in the relevant fields. Drawing attention in particular to the UN e-Government Survey, Dewapura said that the survey and the report emanating from it would induce public trust. This is founded on the transparency contributed to by the reported findings. The trust thus gained is consolidated via free sharing of Government data based on transparent standards. The potentiality for e-Government to deal with public service would also promote reform in the best interests of the people served.

Expressing his views on the UN e-Government Survey ICTA Programme Director Re-engineering Government Wasantha Deshapriya said that it was true that technology could not replace good policy but technology could empower the citizens so that they would be able to offer constructive criticism to existing but improvable methodologies.

E-Government to Connected Governance assesses the e-government readiness of the 192 Member States of the UN according to a quantitative composite index of e-readiness based on website assessment, telecommunication infrastructure, and human resource endowment. ICTs can help reinvent government in such a way that existing institutional arrangements can be restructured and new innovative arrangements can flourish, paving the way for a transformed government.