The Austrian Presidency of the EU will focus on eGovernment in February with two high level seminars that will take place at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna.

The first of these will be staged on 9 February under the heading ‘Trust in the Net’. It will feature sessions on the concerns of business and citizens, trust and certainty in electronic communications and identity in the information space. Provisional speakers include a host of well-known eGovernment practitioners, including Risto Siilasmaa, CEO of Internet security company F-Secure, Bart Preneel of Belgium’s Catholic University of Leuven, and Reinhard Posch, Chief Information Officer for the Austrian Federal Government.

The second seminar will take place on the following day, and will examine ‘eGovernment for all Europeans’. Senior government ministers from Austria, Finland and Hungary are scheduled to be in attendance, along with Viviane Reding, the European Commission’s Commissioner for Information Society and Media.

The main goal of this event (which is invitation only) will be to gain commitment from stakeholders in respect of a set of joint actions around the issues of eGovernment today: far from being purely technical, many of the open issues concern important legal, political and organisational factors that need to be addressed urgently if eGovernment Services are to become fully enabled.

Security will be a leading feature of the event, as will be archiving and digital storage, long term services and the broader European policy context.

The draft programmes of both events can be accessed by clicking below.