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“Waterschap”

The e-Governance Academy had the pleasure of a visit by a group of members of KRIHCIA today, which is the association of chief information officers in Dutch waterboards.

In their own words:

Dutch water boards (in Dutch: “waterschappen” or hoogheemraadschappen) are regional government bodies in the Netherlands. A water board is charged with managing the water barriers, the waterways, the water levels, and the water quality in its region. Water boards are among the oldest forms of in the Netherlands, some of them having been founded in the 13th century.

One of the main goals of KRIHCIA is to share information between the waterboards and co-operate to achieve a stronger position of information management inside and outside the waterboards. To gain information and inspiration, they organized a study visit to Estonia, which, as we know, is a leader in the field of e-governance and employing ICT in the business of government. On the agenda: an introduction to the activities of the e-Governance Academy, talk about e-voting and m-voting, an overview of the underlying infrastructure (the x-road), information about electronic ID-cards and how they can be used for distance identification and digital signatures, and a demonstration visit by a police car, to talk about e-police systems.

Lots of ground to cover in half a day, but I think we did a good job. Most notable, and somewhat surprising to me personally, is that there was a genuine interest towards e-democracy initiatives, such as e-voting (which in the case of Estonia means Internet voting) and citizen participation. It is great to see that these aspects are becoming more and more mainstream, and that e-democracy is gaining a solid foothold in the policy of many countries, governments and organizations.

The visit was especially interesting to me, as I got to introduce the Academy in Dutch – something I don’t often have a chance of doing. It is at times strange to do something in my native language, after I have been working for years in English. But this time it was a great experience, not in the least because of the apparent interest and enthusiasm of the audience.

I should probably have recorded the whole thing, but for those who are interested: here are the slides.