The Guide Consortium groups 23 organisations across 13 countries. It has been established with the shared vision of enabling Europe to become the global leader of e-government services through the creation of an open architecture for identity authentication and appropriate ID management.
Supported by government representatives across 12 member states, project GUIDE is multi-disciplinary and will span a range of established technologies. The project will also consider the social, economic, and ethical policy making issues across Europe. It is one of the largest projects to be funded by the European Commission Information Society Directorate-General.
GUIDE is a project funded by the European Commission and the Swiss Government, conducting research and technological development with the aim of creating an architecture for secure and interoperable e-government electronic identity services and transactions for Europe. The project’s approach is multi-disciplinary and includes technology, procedural and policy development across Europe.
GUIDE’s vision is to enable Europe to become the global leader of e-government services through the creation of an open architecture for identity authentication. GUIDE will bring together excellence in eGovernment across Europe through cooperation and the creation of pan-European consensus in Identity Management. The project is part funded by the EC Sixth Framework Programme.
The European Council’s Conclusions on eGovernment in November 2003 called for projects such as GUIDE that would “evaluate necessities, obstacles and solutions… to explore … possible interoperable European solutions for citizens’ and companies authentication for e-government in the Internal Market, in order to facilitate mobility in Europe and provide cross-border services on line”. The Council also called for “remaining legal and regulatory barriers to e-government” to be identified. GUIDE’s multi-faceted approach will address these elements by exploiting existing technology, trusted models and proven commercial frameworks.
Many attempts have been made to advance e-government services in Europe and to address the problem of online authentication of the identity of citizens and businesses. A number of solutions have been developed but to date these have had limited success, which has hindered the development and take-up of e-government services.
Lia Borthwick, Project Director of the GUIDE consortium, said: “A multidisciplinary and multicultural structure such as ours is ideal to achieve the aim of developing a citizen centric, user driven and technology enabled open architecture that best suits the needs of administrations, businesses and citizens. Our members are now hard at work to produce mass scale product demonstrations with governments and citizens.”
The adoption of e-government services currently faces resistance from administrations, businesses and citizens due to lack of trust in system security and the potential threat of identity theft. These issues have to be addressed if EU member states are to adopt systems that can dramatically improve the efficiency of inter-administration communication and harness the full potential that pan-European integration brings.
Quelle: PublicTechnology, 30.04.2004
