Launching the E-Governance Project

Last week saw the beginning of our implementation of the E-Governance Project funded by the UNDP in Moldova.  Our goals for this project are to increase transparency in local government and to make is easier for citizens to access public records and documents.  To do so, we are filming village council meetings and major local events and putting them on DVDs and later on, the raion's webpage.  We are also scanning documents at the local public administration and will be distributing electronic copies to all who ask, including citizens and local public officials.  We hope this will make it easier for citizens to see what their local government is doing, hold officials to a higher standard of accountability through video evidence, increase redundancy in the storage of public documents by having them in both paper and electronic formats, improve the citizen's user experience with these documents by making it simpler to search through them in an electronic format and enhance access by distributing them through several outlets, including the traditional paper format as well as DVDs and possibly on a future local public administration website.


We first scanned documents at the mayor's office of Climauti de Jos, the village north of us.  We managed to scan all of the 2008 and 2009 mayor's decisions as well as various 2009 forms.  There remains more documents that we did not have sufficient time to work with, so a few more trips will be necessary.  Friday, we began scanning at the mayor's office of Vadul-Rascov.  We scanned all the mayor's decisions from 2003 to 2009.  Again, we did not succeed in scanning all the documents and will have to come back a few more times.  Tomorrow, we will film our first village council meeting.  The topic of the meeting has still not yet been concretized.