1. Open City Portal Delta Nigeria, November 2008 Step1 Overview of Open City Portal

2. Contents 1. What’s the e-government 3. Open City Portal strategy and design 3.1. S tand-alone government portal 3.2. Linking the government portal to the government systems 3.3. Services categorised according to citizens’ needs 3.4. Functions of the portal 3.5. Daily use of the portal 1.1. The goals of the e-government 1.2. The scope of the e-government 2. What’s the OCP proposal for cities? 2.1. The five main features of Open City Portal 2.2. The Knowledge Sharing function 2.3. The OCP competitive costs

3. Contents 1. What’s the e-government 3. Open City Portal strategy and design 3.1. Stand-alone government portal 3.2. Linking the government portal to the government systems 3.3. Services categorised according to citizens’ needs 3.4. Functions of the portal 3.5. Daily use of the portal 1.1. The goals of the e-government 1.2. The scope of the e-government 2. What’s the OCP proposal for cities? 2.1. The five main features of Open City Portal 2.2. The Knowledge Sharing function 2.3. The OCP competitive costs

5. 1. What’s the e-Government The chain covered by the E-Government project: The user performs the task (consulting certain data, paying an item, sending a content...) The user surfs the website and find what he is looking for (*) The system gives the order to the bank of making or receiving a payment in an automatic way The transaction performed is registered in the DDBB used to gather that kind of data (*) A friendly interface and tools such as search engines are required Navigation Interaction Payment Posting Reporting Outstanding information is organized and displayed for the responsible person to monitor Confirmation to the user

12. Contents 1. What’s the e-government 3. Open City Portal strategy and design 3.1. S tand-alone government portal 3.2. Linking the government portal to the government systems 3.3. Services categorised according to citizens’ needs 3.4. Functions of the portal 3.5. Daily use of the portal 1.1. The goals of the e-government 1.2. The scope of the e-government 2. What’s the OCP proposal for cities? 2.1. The five main features of Open City Portal 2.2. The Knowledge Sharing function 2.3. The OCP competitive costs

14. 2.1. The five main features of the OCP 1. Citizen Centric Portal OpenCityPortal Traditional Approach The OCP aims to provide all the information necessary for citizens' life comprehensively. Information is categorised based on "life stages" (Birth, Marriage, Retirement), and "types of activities" (Health, Education, Work, Starting a Business), rather than the organizational structures of central and local government. In this way, the OCP creates the single window or "one-stop-shop" for every category of municipal services. This is a useful first step for the administrative process reform at subsequent stages. In traditional approaches, municipal services are classified according to the government organization. The consequent problem is that citizens often search for various agency pages or websites to find the necessary information.

15. 2.1. The five main features of the OCP 2. City Portal created with a few clicks OpenCityPortal Traditional Approach The OCP is an open-source platform, which can be used free of charge (a modest amount of membership fee is applicable to cover training, technical support and global content support). Once decided the categorization of the city services, the Portal of your city is created with a few clicks. This Portal has all the functionalities and any government official can start putting content using any Internet browser without using special authoring tools. This means there is no need for software "development” which is the most expensive part of the Portal creation. A standard traditional approach portal will cost on avarage EUR50,000 to 100,000. Content creation and software development are not clearly separated. So whenever the city want to add new content, they need to develop software or new pages using the content management system. All the content should be linked to the page using content management system.

16. 2.1. The five main features of the OCP 3. Inclusion of all the citizens into content development OpenCityPortal Traditional Approach The OCP promotes the inclusion of all groups, public and private, that are working to meet citizens' needs. For example schools, hospitals, and transport services are run by the private as well as the public sector. Citizens need all information concerning one service to be accessed in one place. In addition, civil society, NGOs, private sector businesses provide useful urban amenities and social services. The Open City Portal promote all such service providers to contribute content to the Portal. Traditional city portals deals only with public sector services. Content is developed by the municipal government officials only. The citizens miss many comparable services provided by the private sector or NGOs.

17. 2.1. The five main features of the OCP 4. Saving transaction costs OpenCityPortal Traditional Approach OCP provides systematic information about city services, policies, procedures and all the contact information. Citizens can download all the application forms required by city government services. If there is no legal requirement for digital signature, citizens can apply some services online. City government can gradually develop back-office systems to allow on-line applications and can gradually increase the range of its online delivery of certificates, etc. In the Traditional Approach, city portals are only aim at providing online service delivery, namely, citizens can apply for a service through online and receive the results online. However, it requires a complex authentication system and back office computerization, cost of which sometimes exceeds the benefit. Simpler interactive information portal, with comprehensive download function provides much more cost-efficient solution to the citizens.

18. 2.1. The five main features of the OCP 5. Promoting transparency and administrative reform OpenCityPortal Traditional Approach OCP promotes transparency of municipal governance through the provision of budget, action programme and monitoring results of all the city programmes. Such information on policies encourages participation of citizens in policy-making processes. OCP also has a policy diagnosis (opinion polls) function, a collaborative strategy and action plan development functions, discussion forums for citizens to make complaints and proposals. These functions together create a useful policy tool to promote "E-Democracy." Except very rare cases, Traditional Approach portals, promote the E-Democracy, or, participation of citizens to the policy-making processes.

19. 2.2. The Knowledge Sharing function The Open City Portal has two views in each service category ; a city specific view and a global knowledge view . "Go Global" and "Go to Municipality" buttons allow to toggle between both views NOT EXPLAINED HOW IS THE KNOWLEDGE SHARING AMONG CITIES PERFORMED (annual meeting, conference call… how do a certain city know that the bridge it wants to build is similar to the one constructed by another city last year?) City-specific view Global knowledge view The city specific view provides information about services to the citizens of a specific city or municipality. The global knowledge view provides tutorials, case studies from other cities, lists of resource persons, global statistics and toolkits for policy makers.

20. 2.2. The Knowledge Sharing function Contents are developed and stored in different ways in the global and specific views: City-specific view Global knowledge view When you register your municipality, you are assigned a three-letter acronym unique to it. This acronym is attached to all the category IDs for your municipality. Each municipality can create up to 81 service categories to cover the range of their services. Some categories may well be the same as those in the standard model presented by the Open City Portal. Others will be custom-made. All the municipality-specific contents are associated with one of the category IDs and carry the municipal tag. In the "municipal specific view", you will only see content with your municipal tag. There is a global repository for each service category. This applies whether the categories are from the standard categories or are categories customized for your municipality. Each time you create a new category in your municipal Portal, a corresponding category is opened up within the global repository. There are resource persons who are willing to contribute contents for the global repositories. In these cases, the content will be stored with an associated "global category ID" which has no municipal acronym but which is a three digit number.

24. 2.3. The OCP competitive costs NOTE : These figures are indicative of the order and subject to change (but not in a significant way) when the OCP business plan will be reviewed regularly Table summing up the OCP cost and the comparison with the traditional e-Gov portals

25. Contents 1. What’s the e-government 3. Open City Portal strategy and design 3.1. S tand-alone government portal 3.2. Linking the government portal to the government systems 3.3. Services categorised according to citizens’ needs 3.4. Functions of the portal 3.5. Daily use of the portal 1.1. The goals of the e-government 1.2. The scope of the e-government 2. What’s the OCP proposal for cities? 2.1. The five main features of Open City Portal 2.2. The Knowledge Sharing function 2.3. The OCP competitive costs

26. 3. OCP strategy and design The Government Portal is the starting point for the e-government programme. Open City Portal presents a platform structure that meets all the requirements needed to achieve the e-government goals and have the scope within reach . It is important to keep in mind that, in order to achieve the highest state of e-government (with all the benefits associated to it), Open City Portal means not only a platform but a whole project to implement and maintain it. Citizens together with the Government employees must been involved in it. OCP structure is the result of the combined work of several universities and development organizations with a deep understanding of the municipalities and citizens’ needs. These group of agents is called Light Houses Taskforce .

29. 3.2. Linking the Portal & the Systems Cities should have a medium-term plan to link government information systems to the portal step-by-step. Linking systems such as e-procurement and e-tax payment and return to the portal will bring important benefits to citizens. These additional benefits of government portals means an increase of the costs . Linking the city portal to a government information system need not necessarily be within the immediate scope of the Open City Portal as such information system costs up to 100 times as much as the stand-alone city portal. Open City Portal will develop such "on-line transactions" as extension modules using open-source software . So within the next few years , major online transaction modules can be installed to the Open City Portal with much less cost . OCP approach

30. 3.3. Services categorised as citizen needs Traditional government portals simply present information according to the government organizational structure . No attempt to integrate content on the basis of the needs and perceptions of citizens was done. The result is a collection of websites created by different government agencies and departments . Consequently, users had to check several websites hosted by different government agencies or by private sector organizations offering the same services , each time they want to access to information on schools, hospitals or any other data. This is cumbersome and frustrating for the user . The Open City Portal offers a design that classify government (or private sector) services according to the citizens' needs and the way they think about them. A standard classification structure is proposed and it can be varied to meet the particular demands and circumstances of each city. OCP approach

31. 3.3. Services categorised as citizen needs OCP standard structure is made up by 9 sections . Citizen’s life Life events Regional’s development Education Business work Health and social care Municipal infrastructure Social Inclusion Information society Tourism Business Environment My city Creative city Unique local product Sustainable city Safe and secure city Social Inclusion Information society Example: Regional’s development Categories All categories are made up by the same 14 subcategories (which are analyzed in the following point: 3.4. Functions of the portal). Each section contains 9 to 10 categories which are different in each section case an cover all areas concerning them. All the sections and the categories in each one of them are seen at a glance in OCP frontpage, as it is shown in the following capture of the OCP page.

32. Section Categories

33. 3.4. Functions of the portal The next step in portal design is to identify the functions needed to disseminate information and interact with citizens in each category of government service . It is very important to classify these sources of information and interaction from a point of view understandable for the citizen , otherwise they will not use them. Events E-community Forum Basic Facts Contacts Policy Diagnosis Best Websites Business Partners Online Application Making a Business Plan Funding Resource Persons Case Studies Downloads Activities The platform structure proposed by OCP presents 14 subcategories in each one of the 9 to 10 categories in which the each one of the 9 sections are divided. These subcategories provides the platform with several “Forums” for the users to interact and participate in the community platform. The 14 subcategories are seen at a glance in the category page, as it is shown in the following capture of the OCP page.

34. Contents Subcategories Contents Subcategories

36. 3.5. Daily use of the portal The contents of the portal should always be updated to provide the newest information and reflect the real and changing citizens’ demands. To achieve this, the contents should be created and updated by government staff who actually formulate policy and guidelines and/or who are in the front offices of such services actually serving citizens. Contents should be input to the portal and updated through internet browsers not requiring HTML or web design professional knowledge . Documents and pictures should be uploaded directly through the web portal, rather than using an FTP programme; no knowledge of the portal directory system should be necessary . The category structure of the government services, which is used to design the opening screens of the portal , should be customized according to local characteristics and citizens' needs and demands. These can be determined through the E-Readiness assessment. Contents always updated Update process easy through browser Category structure adapted to city Three important features about the portal use determine how must its structure be: