Portuguese e-government initiatives: villages, towns, cities and the constitutions

Traditionally, the interaction between government agencies and citizens or companies was made in governmental buildings, where a public employee receives all the requests. This scenario is gradually changing and evolving because of the rapid growth of use of new communication technologies. Thanks to this, the government-citizens interaction has been moving to considerably closer to the citizen, and sometimes it takes place on his home or working place via his personal computer and the internet. This paper explains two initiative of the Portuguese government in shorting the distance between the government and the citizens: allowing a fast access to information on parliamentary initiatives that concern the creating, changing or extinguishing villages, towns, cities, districts or other administrative areas, and enabling the consulting of the current Portuguese Constitution online, with the possibility to navigate within their reviews, enabling the consult of every article that is (or was) active at a given time. The focus of this paper is implementation issues on both initiatives, from the projects specifications until their delivery to the Portuguese Parliament.