A Prototype Km System for Urban Regeneration: the Case of Intelcities Ip

Lifelong Learning (LL) has been widely accepted and being recognised as one of the most important issues and decision-making criteria for European Commission's (EC) Knowledge Society policy making and its Member States to play a part in a world economy and in societies. The initiatives that implemented in European LL area already provide Member States social and economic players with incentives, guidance, tools, and financial supports to invest more effectively in both (formal and informal) learning and training. The Intelligent Cities Integrated Project (INTELCITIES IP)-Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) addresses the full integration of the electronic-governance (e-Governance) services and sustainable developments across the European cities to form a pathway to 'Networked Knowledge Society' as envisioned by the EC's Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme. This paper discusses the issue of e-Learning, knowledge transfer and capacity building (EKTCB) in a knowledge management (KM) system prototype study for European civil services, businesses and citizens within the context of INTELCITIES IP. This includes the demonstration of strategic applications of the KM system for a range of e-Governance services i.e. electronic citizenship (e-Citizenship), electronic inclusion (e-Inclusion), and electronic participation (e-Participation) that contribute to the sustainable urban regeneration. INTRODUCTION The focus of the INTELCITIES IP is to develop an open, secure, interoperable and re-configurable e-Governance platforms i.e. Integrated Open System City Platform (IOSCP) and the provision of a wide range of innovative applications and multi-modal services that integrate inter and intra-government administrative, planning, public and business consultation, and local government policy development dimensions (INTELCITIES IP, 2002). The challenging issues in this context include the coverage of all aspects of city government, management, planning and urban regeneration operations as well as the interaction with citizens and businesses, governmental process re-engineering, and knowledge management (ibid.). From the European Union (EU) policy perspective, INTELCITIES IP will help to achieve EC goal of Knowledge Society by 2010, by developing new forms of e-Governance of cities and allowing for greater social inclusion by enhancing citizens' and businesses' access to government services (European Commission, 2004:p55). The entire project consists of 20 cities, led by Manchester and Siena with 20 ICT companies including Nokia, Microsoft and CISCO and 35 research groups to undertake prototype studies in a number of EU cities. There are 16 different work packages (WPs) working together on the four major categories of works i.e. technology development and demonstration activities; ICT research development and innovation; knowledge transfer and capacity building; and …