IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

Scarborough Borough Council wants visitors to its website to put forward ideas on how it should develop its online information and services.

The site is being restructured to meet government e-delivery targets and users are being encouraged to contribute ideas on possible changes. The council is running an online questionnaire until the end of May 2005.

Socitm's e2Government programme is designed to promote efficient use of IT in local government. According to Socitm, current e-government initiatives focus too much on technology and improving access to services, while ignoring the need for back-office efficiencies.

As part of the Priority Service Outcome (PSO) for Schools, the take-up target is 5-10% online applications in the first year and 10-20% in the second year. All Marketing workstream LEAs have been actively promoting online school admissions within their authorities since the beginning of September this year.

An online school admissions project will need further careful planning to avoid reinforcing the digital divide, according to an official report.

The eAdmissions National Project, one of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's 22 schemes for local e-government, has so far appealed to "higher social groups", with low usage among poorer people says the report. It finds that overall usage of the scheme is in line with low take-up levels of e-services – 6% of those having made an application for a school place had done so online.

East Sussex County Council is providing the Next Generation Network (NGN) to help schools meet national technology standards and provide the capacity for future developments in classroom e-learning.

The Council has commissioned Socitm Consulting to review its ICT options and to project manage the implementation of an e-government programme strategy.

The strategy lays out NHS Scotland’s approach to ‘electronic patient records and electronic communication becoming the primary means to manage healthcare information within the health system.’

Scottish minister for finance and public service reform Tom McCabe are to be handed out the first professional certificates in smartcard development on 11 April 2005, ahead of a national roll out of the cards for elderly and disabled people.

NHS Lothian and the Scottish Government are to jointly fund a £700,000 large scale telehealth trial that will cover 400 patients with long term conditions, using Intel’s Health Guide.

The Scotsman revealed that the web-based organisation is based on e-Crime Wales, which was pioneered in 2007. Sarah Dougan, the managing director of Glasgow's e-Security Exchange, described the move as "long overdue" to the newspaper.

In the interview, James Ferguson, clinical lead at the SCT, discusses how a nationwide hi-tech drive is enabling people to communicate with consultants remotely to prevent hospitalisation and support carbon reduction targets.

The Scottish Executive released on 8 September its departments 'revised' plans to improve efficiency, which now bring their total identified savings up to €1.85bn (£1.25bn).

The Scottish Parliament's e-democracy work, including its eEurope award nominated e-petitioning initiative, has been showcased at the 6th Worldwide Forum on e-Democracy.

As with so many aspects of the "information superhighway", this turned out to be mainly hype. Politicians soon had their own webpages, yet e-mail from constituents is even easier than a written letter to ignore with a boilerplate reply, and electronic voting may have promised a refuge from fraud, but implementation by politically partisan companies has simply led to more controversy and allegations of vote rigging. Finally, we all know just how useless the online petition proved to be (with a few notable exceptions).

The Scottish Executive has contracted an IT supplier to develop a national education intranet, it was announced on 21 September 2005.

Scheduled to go live in 2007, the network is expected to offer the 800,000 pupils and teachers a range of learning and teaching resources from their computers at school or at home.