To detect target groups to interview was not a problem. In a small municipality everyone knows everyone and ideas for target groups were huge and we had to decide which groups we should set our focus to. The selected groups were:
Civil servants employed by the municipality, refugees, unemployed young people, SME´s, the parish, politicians and pensioners.
To find and to contact the people we wanted involved in the user panel groups we had to use the local networks we got.
Phase 1
During springtime 2006 we started up the work with interviews. The university college of Borås was involved in the interviews and they collected all the data for later compilation and analyses.
The first group we interviewed was all the directors and heads in the municipal internal organisation. The discussion was made in two parts.
- First part was from the view of the organisation.
- The second part was from the view when they were of duty, and they become a citizen.
The argument they had as a civil servant didn´t always answer up to them self when they got them as a citizen.
There are different needs when they are in different roles.
As a citizen the need to get face-to-face contact wasn´t so important. It was just important to have the opportunity for face-to-face contact, not actually need to have it as they thought as a civil servant.
The most important was that they could leave a message or ask for action/task/function and that the errand came to right person. Some of the civil servants doubted the need for e-services (and also showed a little bit of fear). If the e-services was completely built-in in the municipality," -What should happen to the organisation?.
Highlights from other user panel groups were that the youth group who is born and raised with computers, they didn´t see that the contact with authorities should be by Internet, “we go down to the city hall if we want something".
The refugee group was split, the gap in competence and skills in using computer and Internet was in the wide of not-being-aware-of-what Internet is to daily-use of the services that are offered in the net.
The SME´s didn´t want to use the e-services, but they thought that the municipality should be better to put information regarding different kind of permissions and forms to the web and then it would be nice if they could e-mail or send the forms directly....
Other groups we had were an elder panel group, a politician group and a group representing people from the different parish in the municipality.
The common agreement in the groups was that it´s important that the citizens are involved in the process developing e-services or in developing the municipal web-site but they didn´t have much time to get involved and they didn´t really know what the need is but it´s good if we could fulfil all coming needs!
The most important issue is updated, easy to find Information about everything concerning the municipality.
Phase 2
After the installation of terminals in different small villages in the rural parts of the municipality and when we succeed to adapt the developed i-COIN platform, the middleware between the municipal web site and the databases, we once again collected feedback from the users, by the user panelgroups.
This time in phase 2 when we got something to show, to put hands on: the terminals and the published municipal diary we got other reactions/demands than from phase 1.
One reflection concerning the demands: regarding the i-COIN project and the phase 2 evaluation and demands for develop the technique, is that when you talk to users they cant see or do not know what´s depending on technique (the portal/server/platform/web) and the information (text/ the content) it self.
So often the discussion was about layout and how to find information (the structure). This reflection was confirmed among all partners in every country.
The demands we in Svenljunga got was:
1. -more terminals.
2. -possibility to print from the terminals.
3.-more access to Internet.
4.-possibility to login to the municipality to get access to role-based information, to see in what status their errands are, who is responsible and where in the process it is.
The published diary was criticized because the information was not understandable.
The information the civil servants use to write in the database was only for internal use, not for a person who wasn´t familiar in the matter.
This experience has made affect to the writing in the diary. We had to take the diary offline and the civil servants have begun to write in an understandable way.
We are planning to open up the diary again later this year. Unfortunately the time limit in the project didn´t last for putting the role based login technique online before ending the project.
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