Wednesday 28th May

The main conference proceedings are being held at "De Montil" conference centre in Affligem. Today was dedicated to LOLA business, with just a couple of dozen delegates in work-shop style. Clearly, I am still learning about Socitm and its affiliations, and today I learned that LOLA is organised into two divisions – LOLA International, and LOLA Europe, chaired by Peter Ryder! I also think I learned that this Belgian conference is mainly a Flemish affair. Belgium is organised into two administrative regions, each with their own parliaments – Flanders, with 6m Dutch speakers in the north, and 3m French speaking Walloons in the south.

Speakers, today, included the Flemish e-Government Minister (and Minister for Foreign Affairs) and civil servants from federal and regional government. In the past 3-4 years Belgian e-Government has developed fast. There is national e-Identity Card, and citizen data is exchanged through its "Magda" data exchange platform. A Flemish privacy commission supervises the transfer of information between administrations. Use of this system is mandatory for central information but, for now, it is optional for Local Authorities. LAs have recently been asked to make proposals to central government on how they will use the e-IDs. Within the past few weeks, Flemish legislation has been passed that guarantees citizens the right only to give information to government once. There are published information owners for each government database, and departments that need to access information about citizens are expected to find it themselves in the appropriate "authentic" source.

Access management (through "ACM") is based on the national e-ID Card, and provides single sign-on and Identity and Privilege Management is based on a industry agreed federated identity management standards. Antwerp will be the first Local Authority to use the system.

The e-Government Minister played a film the Government commissioned to exemplify its vision of how citizens may interact with Government in 25 years' time! I understand this will be published, with the other conference proceedings, to the V-ICT-OR web-site, so I'll link to it from my Blog as soon as I know it's available.


An Academic from Amsterdam University presented the proposed approach to investigating ICT competencies. I'm relieved to say that this will include reviewing the Aspire arrangements. However, for me the outstanding sound-bite from his presentation was that Amsterdam's Executive Master in Information Management degree is targeted at people aged 35 to 55. I did my MBA at 40, so I guess that's about right by its criteria, but I do think the notion that professionals need a mid-career academic boost is reasonable.

Christian presented proposals to apply for EU funding for LOLA work, which he illustrated by reference to the I-COIN project that his Swedish municipality led. I thought this looked quite a lot like the ATTACH EU-funded project that Newham was involved in some years ago…
This was a very long, tiring day, so you may be glad to hear that we made-up for yesterday's day of leisure!