Project ELOST

Acronym	ELOST
Title	E-government for Low Socio-economic Status Groups
Co-ordinator	University of Tel-Aviv, Israel
Client	European Commission, DG Information Society and Media
Duration	January 2006 - March 2008
Person Responsible	Liana Giorgi
Project Website	www.elost.org
Objectives	Modern information and communication technologies enable government services to develop new procedures for interacting and consulting with citizens. E-Government is rapidly on the increase across European and neighbouring countries and is increasingly popular among European citizens. However, not all citizens can equally benefit from e-Government. Persons of low socio-economic status are less likely to have access and/or use e-Government services. Examples are minorities, unemployed people, low income people and people with low education levels. Excluding such groups from e-Government may have a diverse effect on social cohesion and increase the digital divide within European countries. Against this background, a high-level consortium of European researchers have recently launched the ELOST project to look into the needs and expectations of these groups in order to improve their situation as well as the quality of e-Government services. The ELOST partners will evaluate the attitudes, needs and readiness of persons from low socio-economic status groups with regard to e-Government by means of questionnaires, interviews and focus groups. A special foresight study will analyze the impact of emerging technologies on future e-Government services with special attention to these groups. The findings will lead to policy recommendations for effective and inclusive deployment of e-Government services in Europe, including R&D priorities to address existing and future needs.
Project Partners	Interdisciplinary Center for Technology Analysis & Forecasting (ICTAF), Tel-Aviv, Israel Netvision Institute for Internet Studies (NIIS), Tal-Aviv, Israel The Interdisciplinary Centre for Comparative Research in the Social Sciences (ICCR), Vienna, Austria Le Centre Interdisciplinare de Recherche Comparative en Sciences Sociales (CIR), Paris, France Institute of Mathematics and Informatics - Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria Zentrum Technik und Gesellschaft, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany University of Tampere - Department of Social Policy and Social Work, Finland

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