Alvard Gasparyan

The city of Abovyan has an official site (www.abovyan.am) on the Internet now. My first thought was that this should be a sign of modernization and reform in the city's system of governance. Maybe I could even participate in my city's activities through this site and make my own contribution to the process. The site's content is brief and to the point, without "unnecessary" details, and it looks like any official news site. However, it offers other advantages - the city's budget is available here as well as the quarterly development plan; one can read up on the work of the Mayor's Office and the system of governance. There are also business documents and official forms. The site presents itself as follows:

This internet site is created by Business support and training center which works around USID Urban institude local self-government program of. The main goal of this site is to present the city and the acted businesses re in universal net-work, by creating the transparent atmosphere for development of tourism and extern investers. The site consiste the official information about city and the events acting in it.

Believing that a site like that should be a dynamic and constantly developing program, the opportunity to express myself there struck me as particularly important. I was expecting the focus of this undertaking to be the residents of Abovyan, for whom various government services would be more accessible and who would now have the opportunity to follow up on and participate in the city's governance.

The only way to express yourself on the site is through the guest-book, where I placed a few remarks and general suggestions. I received the following reply: "I don't understand what you want; maybe we should meet." A while later, I expressed my views on the city's development plan (I have a degree in state governance). They were deleted from the forum, and I received the following reply through email, "Sister, if there’s anything else that you don't like, that's your problem." I asked, "Why? On what grounds did you delete my message?" They replied, "It's our site, we'll do what we like." They also suggested that I spend my time on the Internet in chat rooms.

My experience with the official site of the Kotayk Province (http://kotayk.region.am) was similar. The site was put together by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) as part of their e-governance project. This site offers better content and greater variety. There are no message boards or forums here, but it does have the e-mail addresses of officials and contact information for various departments in the provincial administration. It should be noted, however, that the only way to get in touch with the provincial administration or even the webmasters is by filing an application online. Although some commendable work has been done and there is a lot of useful information on the site, what I always find essential is the ability of a site to develop and to change, and this is closely linked to feedback. I registered and sent different questions to various departments and officials of the administration, trying to gauge their attitude, experience and intentions regarding this system of e-governance. It turned out that all my questions were directed to one person - the webmaster - and his reply was almost exactly like last time, "I don't understand what you want; maybe we should discuss this on the phone." Thus, not only did the web-master receive the applications that were meant for different people, but he was also authorized to reply in their stead, if he saw fit. Our telephone conversation did not inspire optimism – he displayed a clear lack of knowledge a masked aggression against new and unfamiliar views.

I suggested that they set a forum for people to express their views and discuss various issues on the site, and allow citizens to have their letters, and the replies to them, published on the page. I received the following reply: "You know us, but we don't know you. How can we allow you to publish on our site?" He seemed completely confused when I asked about the right to self-expression, and told me I thought I was "living in Utopia".

A while later, hoping against hope that I might actually be able to get some results in this area using the Internet, I sent a question through the site to the Department of Education and Culture of the provincial administration. For about a week, the colorful icons on that page of the site kept telling me that my application was being processed. Finally, I received a reply from the same web-master saying, "There is an error in your application. You haven't mentioned exactly to whom in the Department of Education and Culture it is addressed."

Over the last few years, various international organizations working in Armenia have supported, and often initiated and implemented different projects to introduce Information Technology into the system of governance. More specifically, the United Nations Development Program has realized two extensive projects - e-Governance System for Territorial Administrations (ARM/02/012) andSupport to Information Society and Democratic Governance (ARM/01/001).

Documents describing the projects state that one of the main objectives is to set up an e-governance system for territorial administrations. This is a network of web servers that connects the Ministry for Territorial Governance with the provincial centers, and possibly other cities in the future. Each province has its own site on the Internet, where one can find information about the province and its administration, read up on laws and decisions and, after registration, send provincial officials email. To make all this more accessible, Internet centers have been set up in these provinces, and hundreds of people have received free computer classes.

Clearly, a lot of work has been done, but many questions remain unanswered. There is nothing in the project descriptions about the participation of the central government in these projects, in discussions with those implementing the projects, or in their evaluations (which are the only official reports available). The objectives of these projects are not very clear either, especially regarding the issues they planned to deal with, the services they planned to improve, and the sections of society they planned to benefit. The project descriptions are very general - democracy, efficacy, transparency... It is difficult to find specific and tangible objectives, or mechanisms to ensure ongoing assessment, accountability, and improvement over the course of the project. Instead, there are ready replies to any criticism - the lack of knowledge or interest on the part of the government, the lack of state policy, or the abundance of problems and lack of means to solve them.

The main problem, of course, is the lack of a national policy regarding Information Technology, particularly a strategy for e-governance. The UNDP project evaluator agrees:

Without a clear mid- to long-term National Information Society Policy (NISP) and an attached to it a detailed short-term Action Plan the government’s informal commitment is not sufficient for the sustainable advancement of Armenia technologically, and that basis socially and economically. In these less-than-encouraging circumstances any initiatives supported by various groups and organizations, including those from the international community, will suffer from the lack of vision and poor coordination, which will ultimately prevent from the fast replication of best practices and successful projects across different sectors and as a result form creating for economies of scale.(Evaluation Report of UNDP Armenia ICT-for-Development Program, 2004). Re-establish UNDP as a leader in the formulation of NISP; initiate an annual e-governance/Information Society conference and an annual report on e-governance; develop a system of monitoring and evaluation through policy benchmarking 2. Initiate and support the formulation of a visionary National Information Society Policy (NISP), including e-Governance Strategy and corresponding annualized Action Plans.

These accurate observations beg the question of why these projects continue to be implemented in such unfavorable conditions. Perhaps we should develop an e-governance strategy first. Maybe it would be better if the UNDP were to support the groundwork for a viable policy by preparing specialists and supporting society though the establishment of educational and research structures.