Comparative Study of Public e-Service Centres in - ePractice.eu

PUBLIC E-SERVICE CENTRES IN EUROPE
A. Users
In the project best practices on Digital Literacy and Adult Education from all partners in the
consortium are identified, analysed and included in a multilingual database. They are
presented by country and vary from courses on eSkills, job training, language training to
'blended learning' (multi-disciplinary approach to learning). The wide array of projects focus
on socially disadvantaged people; people in rural areas; unemployed people; women; young
people; the elderly; disabled people and migrants.
The project team concludes that PICs are conscious of the social dimension of their mission -
the reduction of digital illiteracy - and play their educative roles in a variety of ways, normally
adapting their training strategies to the different target audiences, “customizing” the content,
methodologies or procedures to help users embark on the digital world more easily.
B. User benefits target group
The approximately 2.500 PICs involved in the project concentrate on tailor made approach,
adapted to the individual user or for a specific target group. A conservative quantitative
estimate of PICs’ audience in the five European States involved is that around 1.000.000
users a year benefit from at least one of their several services.
Rastrelli stresses that “this personal approach is strengthened by the bottom-up management
many of the PICs have. Volunteers, employers and users at the PICs share responsibilities; it
is a face-to-face democracy. This is at the core of all ARCI’s work and activities.”
Unfortunately, the project does not have hard data on the user benefits. Measures of changes
in awareness, attitudes and skills over the life of the project are not available. This would
require a large-scale survey which was not envisaged. Nevertheless, the PICs’ map provided
with one of the final project products (the DVD) included web addresses/phone
numbers/contact details, enabling EU experts to get additional data.
The evaluation strategy was considered to be the weakest element of the PIC's project. .
Rastrelli explains that “Measuring the quantitative results of the project has proven difficult
and even where available the reliability of the presented figures cannot be guaranteed. This is
partly caused by the fact that, for example, here in Italy we don’t have a strong history of
monitoring projects and evaluating results. We know of cases where they keep detailed notes
of number of visitors and results of projects. So there is a system but the methodology is not
always given a proper value by public authorities in public tenders. Indeed, quite often public
authorities are interested in knowing the number of users, but not in qualitative results, which
are relevant in services supply processes.
We are now working on the e-Inclusion topic for almost ten years and evaluation and
monitoring is required and necessary. However we still do not have a good methodology to
measure the quality of our services. At the same time, one should also consider that, for
example, PICs in Italy attract many ethnic minorities and we are now faced with a law that
makes it compulsory to keep records with names, surnames and other relevant personal data
signed in the original, despite the privacy laws and the high costs to maintain all of this.
Authorities check these records to look for irregularities. A good monitoring system may then
not be the best solution…” Qualitative-participative evaluation schemes are more likely to give
a concrete added value and to be transferred: some interviewed ARCI’s centres have
developed interesting functional systems (i.e. in Campania region ARCI Caserta and
Passwork in Salerno, in Tuscany the PAAS Network and the TRIO net collaborate with the
University of Pisa). In fact, the key-issue is that services offered by a non-profit entity cannot
easily adopt external monitoring and evaluation systems used in the private sector and by
industry (i.e. ISO). Internal participative evaluation models (like i.e. social reporting schemes
adequately adapted), would probably be more useful as their users (or at least those who
become members) very often participate actively in the PIC services planning/management.
The study on “guidelines for evaluation and quality” of the project concludes that “Experience
has shown that questionnaires are the most frequently used tool to evaluate a PIC´s services.
The reasons for this are that questionnaires are cheap, easy to evaluate and the size of the
respondent group can be unlimited. Regarding the heterogeneity of the individual PICs we
cannot recommend any one evaluation method as each organisation requires different
approaches. It is unrealistic to think that a minor, regional PIC can apply professional quality
- 15 -