HP

Hewlett-Packard

In the projects on local and regional governments and legislative assemblies HP is continually confronted with issues relating to accessibility and prioritisation of information. These issues often are not addressed prior to IT implementations. Overall this detracts from the potential benefits of IT in the government sphere. To address the accessibility issues and the multiplicity of legacy systems and data, HP developed and released Dspace as a durable repository system linking into multiple legacy systems. HP believes that this can contribute much to the open content and open access debate in eDemocracy, as it has in the educational space. The eRepresentative project will help in the reiteration of the development cycle addressing usability issues relevant to DSpace and information access in legislative assemblies.

To date the IT world has not been able to create the needed synergy of innovative solutions that would benefit Legislative services on a pan European scale. European Legislative organisations have very specific implementations of legislative information systems and are all on a different level in relation to implementation of eEurope initiatives. The results of "eRepresentative" will help to develop solutions that integrate legislative back-office systems with an innovative interface that have a high level of commonality throughout Europe.

HP is the largest world implementer of Open Source solutions in public and industry sectors including academia. This incorporates work related to Linux, Samba and the International Standards bodies. HP sees DSpace as being the Open Source Framework answer to address a large amount of the information management issues governments and citizens are currently facing. Accessibility, organisation and prioritisation of information will deliver impact to offer meaningful solutions that are trustworthy and secure.

Another advantage from the Open Source framework where "eRepresentative" will take place will be the multiformity of legislative information systems in Europe. This opportunity exists to invest in development of interoperability between the Open Source Framework and other platforms in use with the Parliamentarian organisations in Europe. This could tear down walls between information silos, making public sector organisations more accessible and contributing to the eEurope objectives within an enlarged EU.

HP aims to provide "eRepresentative" solutions in Europe helping chambers, committees, constituencies, parties, campaigners etc., enhance accessibility to legislative services. The high level of commonality, avoiding legislative system specificities, enables joined up Government approaches and initiatives to encourage cross agency working in Europe.

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eRepresentative is a project co-financed under the 6th Framework Programme of the European Union