Project background - to be written.

The UNeGov.net - Community of Practice for Electronic Governance initiative was established in 2005 in order to transfer the experience gained through the e-Macao Project to other parts of the world, particularly to developing countries. The aim is to build a global Community of Practice, comprising experts and practitioners interested in developing, sharing and applying concrete solutions for Electronic Governance.
The initiative established an activity framework comprising: (1) a community portal to document all activities of the community, coordinate its work and maintain a repository of resources relevant to Electronic Governance, (2) a series of network-building workshops around the world, (3) a series of capacity-building schools and courses on various aspects of Electronic Governance, (4) a community-wide practice in collaborative problem-solving based on the common repository of resources, (5) a series of state-of-the-art and stateof-practice reports about Electronic Governance in various countries, (6) a curriculum for training public officials in planning, development and management for Electronic Governance, (7) projects promoting Good Governance through Electronic Governance, and (8) an International Conference on the Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance.
Within this framework, community actions are carried out in the scope of various thematic areas including: legislation, financing, organization, planning, coordination, human capacity development, e-readiness, e-participation, e-procurement, software infrastructure, public services, interoperability, standards for Electronic Governance, and others.

The UNeGov.net initiative collaborates with a large number of institutions world-wide such as:

• Center for Technology in Government, University of Albany, New York
• Institute for Tourism Studies, Macao (IFT)
• Microsoft Corporation
• National IT Development Agency, Government of Nigeria (NITDA)
• National e-Government Strategy Limited, Nigeria
• University of the South, Bahia Blanca, Argentina
• ICT Authority, Government of Mongolia
• ICT Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences
• Macau University of Science and Technology.

Project activities - to be written.

Since its inauguration at the World Symposium on Information Society in Tunesia in 2005, an array of events have been carried out under the UNeGov.net initiative, such as:

• Workshops in Argentina, China, Colombia, India, Mongolia, Nepal, Nigeria, Palestine, Tunesia, and USA.
• Schools in Argentina, Colombia, India, Mongolia, Nepal, Nigeria, and North Korea.
• Other events, such as invited talks at conferences, in Austria, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, Ghana, Singapore, Vietnam, and USA.

In addition to these events, four thematic areas were developed:

• Strategic Planning - a project on Strategic IT Planning for Public Organizations is currently executed to develop experience and a methodology for carrying out strategic IT planning in the context of public-sector organizations. The first planning exercise has been conducted for Macao Institute for Tourism Studies (IFT), a government institution of higher education specializing in hospitality and tourism studies. Funded by IFT, the exercise was carried out between September and December 2006.

• Semantic Interoperability - a project on Semantic Interoperability for Electronic Government was established to develop foundational and technical solutions to the problem of semantic interoperability, particularly for public organizations, and disseminate the findings among e-Government practitioners. The project is a collaboration between UNU-IIST and Microsoft and is jointly funded by both institutions.

• Software Infrastructure Development for e-Government - this thematic area is a direct follow-up of the infrastructure-building tasks carried out by the e-Macao project. The objective is to build a formal foundation - from models, to specifications, to reference implementations - for rigorous development of infrastructure software for e-Government. Underpinning the delivery and rapid development of Electronic Public Services, the infrastructure comprises five main components: (1) Front-Office Framework, (2) Back-Office Framework, (3) Workflow Infrastructure, (4) Messaging Framework, and (5) Infrastructure Management Services.

• Software for Communities of Practice - this thematic area is a consequence of the efforts to build a portal for UNeGov.net, generalized to support communities of practice in any domain. The objective is to build a formal foundation - from models, to specifications to reference implementations - for rigorous development of software that enables the launching, growth and sustained operations (indeed, the whole lifecycle) of online communities of practice.

Project exploitation - to be written.

Project duration - to be written.

Project schedule - to be written.

Project structure - to be written.

Project risks - to be written.

Project conclusions and lessons learnt - to be written.