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Rupprecht Consult had a key role in the preparation of the project
Evaluation Report (see documents for download below). Derived
from evaluation results, the document provides recommendations
for:
- CENTURi21 partners
for further roll-out activities they may envisage;
- Potential take-up partners for their planned new imple-mentations;
- The European Commission for setting up future pro-grammes;
and
- Readers interested in methodological issues for future assessments.
The evaluation revealed that CENTURi21
has the potential to become an e-government portal that fulfils
the high demands of citizens, community groups, commerce, and
councils.
In order to achieve the project objectives, a Community Empowerment
Forum or, as it was known throughout the project, six regional
CENTURi21 portals were
developed, each providing a common application-serving environment
as well as implementing and integrating them with real-life services
in six interconnected European regions.
The regional portals were rolled-out (demonstrated) in each of
the six project regions as trial versions and evaluated during
a short core evaluation period of thirteen weeks at the end of
the project.
At the current demonstration stage, i.e. at a stage where CENTURi21
was not yet fully developed, evaluation results exposed needs
of improvement and refinement. Most importantly, the need for
more relevant and up-to-date content and more interactive services
was detected. The palette of services needed to include commercial
services, in addition to public services, which already were of
good quality in the trial versions. In order to fulfil these needs,
CENTURi21 needed to conduct a more thorough user needs analysis,
ensure community participation, including the involvement of Small-
and Medium Size Enterprises (SMEs), in the content development
process, and ensure that a well-functioning content delivery structure
was in place.
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