Overview

The development and implementation of e-government involves consideration of its effects including environmental, social, cultural, educational, consumer issues, among others. On one hand, e-Government software is mandated to follow very strict requirements in terms of evolving regulation, use of legacy technologies, confidentiality protection, and technical constraints related to the management. On the other hand, the design of e-Government applications must consider the impact on the diversity of users in terms of age, language skills, cultural diversity, literacy, and information technologies literacy. Bad design can have huge impact not only on the adoption of user interface by users but also compromise the validity of democratic processes. So that, accessibility had become a mandatory requirement for any e-Government initiative.

As governmental agencies increasingly move towards developing new way of improving the information exchange and services among citizens, businesses, and other arms of government, there is a strong need for inter-disciplinary empirical and theoretical research focused on Information and Communication Technologies and Computer-Human Interaction to guide the development of accessible and usable e-Government applications.

Goals

The goal of this workshop is to bring researchers and practitioners together to explore the issues and challenges related to the development of usable and accessible user interfaces for e-Government applications using innovative Information and Communication Technology (ICT).

We want to facilitate discussion on the topics of identification and management of the diversity of users (e.g. citizens, stakeholders, etc), requirements and constraints for the development of e-Government applications, user experience with e-Government services, user involvement into the development process, universal access, policies for implementing accessibility and usability culture into government agencies.

Topics

This workshop is intended for anyone (researchers and practitioners) who is concerned about the design of interfaces that will be accessible and usable. This will include representatives from administrations, academia (e.g., lecturers in HCI), and policy-making organizations.

We invite participants to present case studies, approaches and reflections on (but not limited to) the following topics:

 

Program

Download electronic proceedings (pdf, 350 Kb)

9h-9h30: Welcome to participants and presentation of the workshop

9h30h-11h: Session I - Methodological approaches

Automation and E-government Services – A Widened Perspective
Asa Cajander and Elina Eriksson (IT/HCI Uppsala University - Sweeden)

PrevFuturo – An e-gov service for retirement applying by illiterate people
Daniel Pataca, Sônia Kutiishi, Esther Menezes and Graziella Bonadia (CPqD – Telecommunication Research and Development Center - Brazil)

Towards Metrics for Web Accessibility Evaluation
Sinésio Teles de Lima, Fernanda Lima and Káthia Marçal de Oliveira (Universidade Católica de Brasília - Brazil)

11h-11h30: Coffee break

11h30h-13h: Session II - Accessibility of e-Government applications

Conditions of use of E-services accessible to visually disabled persons: what contribution for what limitation?
Marc-Eric Bobillier Chaumon and F. Sandoz-Guermond (Université Lyon 2 & INSA de Lyon - France)

Accessibility Legislation and Codes of Practice: an Accessibility Study of Web Sites of French and Belgium Local Administrations
Marco Winckler, Joseph Xiong and Monique Noirhomme-Fraiture (Université Toulouse 3 - France, Université Notre-Dame de la Paix - Belgium)

General discussion about the contributions

13h-14h30: Lunch

14h30-16h - Session III: Invited Speaker

The City of São Paulo Healthcare Information System - A Case Report
by Fabiane Bizinella Nardon, ZILICS Inc.

In Brazil, every citizen has the right to full healthcare, from primary care to complex procedures as heart transplants, for free, any place in the country. With a population of 180 million people, information is the key to better distribute resources and provide better healthcare.

Taking advantage of the concepts and infrastructure of the Brazilian National Health Card, in 2003 a huge project was started aiming to build an integrated web based application for the City of São Paulo to collect patient encounter information, to regulate complex procedures authorizations and to build an integrated patient scheduling system that would allow to schedule consultations and medical procedures in any health provider. This would reduce the waiting time, organize the flow of patients, and greatly improves the quality of care.

The challenge was to build a quality application in a short time frame for one of the biggest cities in the world with impressive numbers: 22 million inhabitants, 386 primary care units, 158 Polyclinics, 105 hospitals, 40.000 first consultations per day, 75.000 healthcare professionals and 7.000 computers that would access the information system. The information system had to be operated mostly by users with no computer training at all and, as such, should provide an user interface that was intuitive and easy to learn.

This presentation will share the experience of building such a system, showing how it was designed, the challenges, the problems, what changed in the health system once it was deployed and how it was possible to build the system on the proposed time frame. From the time the first use case was specified to the time the information system was deployed, only four months had elapsed and 2.5 million lines of code were produced. After 3 years of production, the information system improved the public system efficiency by about 35%.

Invited Speaker's CV

Fabiane Bizinella Nardon has an MSc and a PhD in Computer Sciences. She is currently the CTO of ZILICS, a Brazilian Healthcare Information Systems provider, where she is responsible for all technical aspects of large distributed projects deployed in countries like Brazil and Angola/Africa. She was the architect of the Sao Paulo City Health Care Information System, a Duke’s Choice Award winner in 2005. This project currently handles healthcare information of more than 14 million people in the public health system. Before joining ZILICS, she worked for several consulting companies and for the United Nations in the National Healthcare Information System Project of the Brazilian Ministry of Health, where she was responsible for designing information systems based on the JavaEE Platform. With extensive experience in standardization processes in Brazil and abroad, Fabiane was the chair of the Latin American Chapter of OMG Healthcare Domain Task Force and two times one of the directors of the Brazilian Healthcare Informatics Association. She is the java.net JavaTools Community Leader, was chosen a Java Champion by Sun Microsystems and currently is member of the Governance Board of the OpenJDK, the open source version of the Java platform.

16h-16h30: Coffee break

16h30-18h30 - Session IV: Round table

 

Important dates

15th July 2007: Submission of papers

5th August 2007: Notification of acceptance

31th August 2007: Camera-ready copies of accepted papers due

10th September 2007: Workshop

 

Workshop organizers

Marco Winckler, LIIHS-IRIT, Université Toulouse 3 (France) & Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium)

Monique Noirhomme-Fraiture, Institut d’ Informatique, Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix (FUNDP), Belgium

 

Program Committee

Cecília Baranauskas, UNICAMP (Brazil)

Ana Cristina Bicharra Garcia, Univeridade Federal Fluminense (Brazil)

Maria da Graca Pimentel Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil -->

John Krogstie, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Norway)

Asbjørn Følstad, SINTEF (Norway)

Jan Gulliksen, Uppsala University (Sweden)

Quentin Limbourg, Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium)

Claire Lobet, University of Namur (Belgium)

Klaus Miesenberger, University of Linz (Austria)

Monique Noirhomme-Fraiture, Université Notre-Dame de la Paix (Belgium)

Vassilios Peristeras, National University of Ireland (Ireland)

Antonio Silva, Catholic University of Pernambuco (Brazil)

Helen Petrie, York University (United Kingdown)

Milene Selbach Silveira, PUCRS (Brazil)

Marco Winckler, University Paul Sabatier (France) / University Catholic of Louvain (Belgium)