Motivation

E-government is changing the way governments interact with their citizens, businesses and other government agencies, away from paper forms, opening hours, government offices, and the queues in front of them.

What is e-government? The term e-government refers to the use of Information Technology to facilitate the interaction between the governments and the rest of us - citizens, businesses, non-residents - and between different government agencies. IT brings government closer its citizens: from unattended kiosks located in public places, to home computers, to mobile phones when the citizen is on the move. This interaction goes in both directions - citizens listening to the government, government listening to the citizens - promising to really transform the government-citizen relations. The first sign of this transformation is a service-oriented approach: treating a citizen much like a customer. The notion of a service, or e-service when delivered on-line, is therefore at the centre of e-government.

What is an e-government e-service? In concrete terms, an e-service is a piece of software that is part of the government web system and whose aim is to automate or partly automate one particular administrative process. This process can be triggered by a request from a citizen, or by the elapse of time (once a month, say), or even by the diary and scheduling software working on the citizen's client machine. Once triggered, the process can be carried out within one government agency or involve the actions by several agencies. It may be running unattended - entirely within the agencies' computer systems, or involve government staff to give some input to the process, perhaps triggering some other e-services on the way. There are many scenarios possible, as there are types of e-services: obtaining birth certificates, requesting a vehicle registration, applying for unemployment benefits, filing for bankruptcy, paying a parking fine, issuing a complaint on the performance of the agency's staff, or a critique how unfriendly is the agency's e-government system.

What is an e-government e-service infrastructure? In the long term, the likely effect of e-government system development is the rapid growth in the number of offered e-services, the increased level of sophistication and interactivity, and the growing web of relations between them. More agencies are likely to be involved, performing more complex e-services. New e-services may emerge almost overnight, active e-services will have to be maintained (bugs removed, performance increased, appearance enhanced, etc.), inactive e-services will be replaced or altogether retired. Clearly, a middle-ware software infrastructure is needed that would support the running of all such e-services in various phases of their life-cycle: from deployment, daily operation and maintenance, to retirement.

Objectives

The aim of the eMacao project is to advance the state of e-government in Macao SAR. This includes raising the technical ability and awareness of the local IT staff - government and non-government - to engineer, maintain and re-engineer an e-government system, and to develop a prototype version of this system as demonstration and a proof of concept.

In particular, the project consists of the four kinds of activities:

1. training: This is to provide a wide range courses, workshops and seminars in advanced IT technologies deemed particularly relevant for e-government system development. Topics include: object-oriented analysis and design with UML, advanced Java programming, web service development with Java and XML, and others. To complement training courses, participants will carry out supervised software development to practice the techniques learned while developing their own e-services. This will be coordinated with the development activity.
2. development: This is to build a prototype middle-ware software for the delivery and administration of e-government e-services, to build three concrete e-services using this middle-ware, and describe a general application programming interface (API) to be implemented by all middle-ware-compliant e-services. The software is meant as a demonstration and a proof of concept. It might be used, directly or indirectly, as part of the "actual" e-government system, but this is not the main objective.
3. research: This is to build a solid foundation and provide enough technical insight to make informed decisions concerning the development of the e-government system (the product) and the training in applicable methodologies (the process). Research may also benefit from development as it receives practical problems to address, proposes solutions to address such problems, and then receives feedback how those solutions worked in the field.
4. exchange: This is to disseminate the results obtained during research and development among all project personnel and all trained IT staff via introductory seminars, workshops to mark completion of major project phases, and the educational web site. Visitor will be also invited from abroad to share their experience with e-government development, and project staff will have the chance to attend outside workshops and conferences to learn the recent results about e-government.