The plan of municipal leaders is to continue activities in 2018 aimed at bringing online services closer to citizens and making them more accessible. In that direction, it will also be essential for Bojnik to modernise its outdated computer equipment.
E-Government is the surest way to reduce queues and costs and to increase transparency and efficiency. What are the future plans of the local self-government in this field and do you intend to generate services on the eGovernment Portal?
– E-Government, as a centralised online service, certainly represents one of the ways to ease communication between citizens and local self-government. The Municipality of Bojnik doesn’t have any services on the portal at present, but the site www.bojnik.rs offers several ways for citizens to communicate with local government bodies.
First, there are the options “Ask the president” and “Citizens’ questions”, which citizens can use to pose various questions to the president and other local government bodies. Then there is the possibility of reporting problems in communal services and other problems that fall under the jurisdiction of the municipal administration or public enterprises, and emails with specific requests are received by the president of the municipality and the head of the municipal administration, which forward them to the competent services.
Moreover, there is also the possibility of ordering birth certificates and confirmation of citizenship certificates, which is accomplished either by filling out the form on the actual site or by downloading request forms that can be then filled out and submitted by regular postal services.
Finally, citizens can also use the site to find the email addresses of all departments and thereby establish direct communication with those responsible for specific areas within the competences of the work of local self-government bodies.
We are, of course, planning to generate services on the eGovernment portal, but the biggest obstacle to implementing that is equipment that has become obsolete. We certainly plan to update hardware during the course of 2018.
Digitisation, as a way of preserving and presenting data, can best be used in the presenting of tourist and development capacities
How much do citizens utilise the opportunities provided to them through the municipality’s website?
– The most frequently used option is ordering birth certificates and certificates confirming citizenship, which are actually most commonly usually by citizens who don’t live on the territory of our municipality. The reason for this should be sought in the age and educational structure of the population.
Computer literacy here is among the lowest in Serbia, hence the somewhat reduced interest in available online services. This in no way means that we should give up on the further development of e-Government services. On the contrary, this provides a motivate to exert additional efforts aimed at bringing online services closer to the population and adapt them to citizens’ needs.
It seems that culture is among the first areas was the benefits of digitisation have been felt in small communities. In which other domains can digitisation most contribute to improving the ambience of Bojnik?
– I’m of the opinion that digitisation, as a form of protecting and presenting data in an electronic form, can be used the most and the best in presenting tourism and development capacities. On the municipality’s website, you can find the ‘Brochure for Investors’, which presents Bojnik’s greenfield and brownfield locations. This brochure is the work of a group of young people who conducted traineeships in the municipal administration during 2016. With this as a model, it is possible to present the tourist, sports, business and other capacities and activities implemented by the municipality.