Bulgaria Development Gateway

ARC Fund Releases its Assessment of e-Municipality Websites
ARC Fund has just made public a study on municipal websites carried out with the support of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Bulgaria. The study looks at the availability and quality of a total of 125 municipal websites in an attempt to determine the level of local e-government development in the country and identify positive examples which can be transferred as best practice to other municipalities. Adapting a comprehensive websites assessment methodology developed and piloted in the EU in 2002 (KEeLAN - Key Elements for Electronic Local Authorities' Networks), the study ranks Bulgarian municipalities according to such criteria as: usability of their websites; functionalities, including availability of special features for people with disabilities; feedback options allowing citizens participation in local policy-making; electronic services available through the websites, etc. In very broad terms, the study responds to three key questions: 1. Do Bulgarian municipalities have own, official websites? 2. When such websites are in place, how can users (e.g. citizens, economic agents, etc.) find them? 3. What can user do once they access a municipality’s website? The results show that: 1. Forty-seven per cent of Bulgarian municipalities (125 out of 264) have official websites, as of July 2004. Websites are more common among municipalities with population over 30,000 people. 2. There is no online registry of the official municipal websites to facilitate users. Not even the central government portal contains a full and up-to-date listing. 3. Only 37% of the existing municipal websites in Bulgaria have registered their own domain names; the other 63% exist as sub-domains of other websites (e.g. Domino.bg). The lack of a proper domain name policy leads to confusion, lack of trust in the users, higher transaction costs and, ultimately, poor ... e-Municipality website on Bulgaria Development Gateway (in Bulgarian) e-Municipality self-assessment tool (in Bulgarian) Benchmarking of e-Municipality Websites in Bulgaria, Nov. 2004 (in Bulgarian) read entire article

Contributed by: Lyubomir Harizanov	[ previous ]
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