GR: Municipalities to get open source platform for electronic services

[kranidiotis at vatica.org]

http://www.osor.eu/news/gr-municipalities-to-get-open-source-platform-for-electronic-services


GR: Municipalities to get open source platform for electronic services
by Gijs Hillenius — last modified Dec 17, 2008 04:40 PM
— filed under: [T] Deployments and Migrations, [GL] Greece

Greek municipalities are building an open source platform to offer citizens
and small and medium sized business access to their services. This Local
Government Application Framework (LGAF) will be developed by the Central
Union of Municipalities of Greece (Kedke).

Sixteen cities and municipalites will begin the development project,
including Imathia, Ithaca, Konitsa and Chios.

LGAF will allow citizens and SMBs to pay taxes and fines, add and modify
their public administration records, purchase permits and licences. The
system will also offer information on public health, social care, the
environment and sport and cultural activities.

The municipal services can be accessed using the Internet or by a voice
response system. Kedke is also planning to build-in an SMS gateway that can
inform users via text messages.

LGAF will be made available to all Greek municipalities at no cost,
according to a statement published by Kedke. "All municipalities will be
able to build on the experience of the sixteen communities." Kedke will
however charge for technical support." The organisation hopes the platform
will become a reference for other interoperability projects.

Kedke will use open source software such as the content management system
BetaCMS to offer access to legacy IT systems. The system will also be based
on the Greek government Internet backbone, Syzefxis that links all
municipalities.

The LGAF project website was launched in June.


More information:

Local Government Application Framework