Project Details

Project goal

The overall goal of CENTURi²¹ was to develop a Community Empowerment Forum, a virtual platform promoting the widespread use of electronic services by citizens. This empowered citizens to deal directly with their regional authorities and local commercial organisations. It also assisted and enabled regional authorities to deliver their services digitally and interactively to the citizens.
It aimed to have a real impact on the local economy of the participating regions.

CENTURi21 aimed to achieve the following:

• Develop an interactive Community Empowerment Forum
• Develop new electronic services for citizens and thereby to stimulate:
  • Citizen-led development of community applications and services which will contribute to an improved and sustainable society
  • Increased participation and communication between citzens, councils and commerce (the 3 Cs)
• A common range of services giving communities easier use of electronic services through increased seamless access, more efficient delivery and commercially viable networks.

Results

Rupprecht Consult had a key role in the preparation of the project Evaluation Report (see download section on the right of this page). Derived from evaluation results, the document provides recommendations for:

• CENTURi²¹ partners for further roll-out activities they may envisage;
• Potential take-up partners for their planned new imple-mentations;
• The European Commission for setting up future pro-grammes; and
• Readers interested in methodological issues for future assessments.

The evaluation revealed that CENTURi²¹ has the potential to become an e-government portal that fulfils the high demands of citizens, community groups, commerce, and councils.

In order to achieve the project objectives, a Community Empowerment Forum or, as it was known throughout the project, six regional CENTURi²¹ portals were developed, each providing a common application-serving environment as well as implementing and integrating them with real-life services in six interconnected European regions.

The regional portals were rolled-out (demonstrated) in each of the six project regions as trial versions and evaluated during a short core evaluation period of thirteen weeks at the end of the project.

At the current demonstration stage, i.e. at a stage where CENTURi²¹ was not yet fully developed, evaluation results exposed needs of improvement and refinement. Most importantly, the need for more relevant and up-to-date content and more interactive services was detected. The palette of services needed to include commercial services, in addition to public services, which already were of good quality in the trial versions. In order to fulfil these needs, CENTURi21 needed to conduct a more thorough user needs analysis, ensure community participation, including the involvement of Small- and Medium Size Enterprises (SMEs), in the content development process, and ensure that a well-functioning content delivery structure was in place.

Project partners

• West Sussex County Council (UK), Chichester, United Kingdom
• Devon County Council, Exeter, United Kingdom
• West Sweden, Brussels, Belgium
• Hämeenlinna region, Hämeenlinna, Finland
• Regione Veneto, Venice, Italy
• Limerick County Council, Limerick, Ireland
• City of Debrecen, Debrecen, Hungary
• Oracle Corporation, Reading, United Kingdom
• British Telecommunications, United Kingdom
• Marconi Communications Ltd., London, United Kingdom
• Telia AB, Luleå, Sweden
• Telecom Italia, Italy
• HTK Hämeen Tietotekniikkakeskus Oy, Finland
• MAC - National Microelectronics Application Centre, Ireland
• Jade Communications Ltd., Newton-le-Willows, United Kingdom
• MATÁV Hungarian Telecommunications Company, Hungary