Layered Government and E-Citizenship: Objectives and Technical Challenges in the EU

A typical citizen engages with governmental agencies at several hierarchical levels - local, regional and national. Federal and international communities add even more layers atop of them. We denote this as the concept of layered government. A citizen within such a community expects to find similar procedures and HCI interfaces to accomplish tasks, e.g., voting registration or business registration. Such commonly designed single points of contact are emerging as real challenges and are often mandated by legal regulations. We use the examples of the German E-Government Initiative and the EU Services Directive to define technical problem domains and propose concepts that address them.