The European Alliance Group Political Co-ordinator on the SEDEC Commission
Mr Kieran McCarthy (Councillor, Cork City Council) participated in a workshop on eGovernment and its implications for local and regional governments organised by the EU Commission. The workshop brought stakeholders together to address the initial roll-out of the EU eGovernment Action Plan, 2016-2020. Speaking at the workshop, Mr McCarthy noted that eGovernment plays a large role in the ground-up revolution and evolution of the digital-turn and agenda. The plan at its heart is about people and connecting citizens to local government in new innovative ways; “eGovernment brings local and regional governments to uncover new interaction opportunities and configurations in terms of partnerships. The aims of eGovernment are diverse in an attempt to understand and manage cities and regions in order to harness better powers in augmenting place-making. It aims to recover and engage the public good, plugging into and archiving the everyday lives of citizens through broadband and their smart phone – developing new online communities. It embraces a collective understanding of cities, regions and their ongoing development to tackle diverse topics through big data such as health, politics, economy, society and the environment”.
Mr McCarthy continued by detailing that eGovernment is being called the democratisation of knowledge with the emphasis on lateral thinking. "It is crucially a social and cultural transformation. There is a blurring of boundaries between technology and humans, science and culture. New modes of knowledge production, new synergies and new interfaces are being created. E-government encourages crowd-sourcing, creating, sharing and modifying ideas of modernity, of imagined futures and new visons for our cities and regions”. The eGovernment Action Plan, 2016-2020 can be found here:
