1. FINNISH SOCIETY IN BRIEF

1.1. Virtual Finland

For a comprehensive source of information about Finland go directly to the Finland Information Pages. These pages are maintained by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

1.2. Finland: an information society

Considerable efforts have been made to develop Finland into an information society. Citizens are expected to adopt and master new information technology skills, the aim being that all or almost all citizens should acquire these skills.

The use of information technology is progressing rapidly: the number of mobile phones currently stands at more than 50/100 inhabitants, over 40 per cent of all households have a home computer and 22 per cent of households have an Internet connection.

Internet connections are also available widely outside the home: by the end of 1999 all educa-tional institutions in Finland should have access to the Internet, and some 80 per cent of all public libraries should offer Internet services to their customers. Currently 1.3 million Finns, 42 per cent of the population, have access to the Internet at home, work or school. More than half of all Internet users access the Internet on a daily basis (source)

The focus in the evolution of the information society is shifting towards the development and production of content-based applications and services. The programme of the present Finnish Government encourages, for example, the further development of electronic services and of cultural and informational content that is easy-to-use, safe and available to everyone.

The present Government is also to put into effect a Decision-in-Principle on electronic transactions, development of services and reduction of data gathering. This Decision-in-Principle was taken by the previous Government in 1998.

The Decision-in-Principle states, among other things, that

• a citizen ID card subject to a fee and available to all citizens will be introduced in 1999 as an alternative to the existing non-electronic ID cards. It will incorporate the cardholder's electronic identification and digital signature. The Population Register Centre will be the certification authority responsible for issuing and maintaining the citizen ID card in Finland.
• the legislation required for electronic transactions covering administration, electronic documents and digital signature as well as ID card and the public key infrastructure services, will be prepared by the end of 1999.
• the appropriate Ministries and agencies will see to it that information on the central services provided for citizens, companies and communities as well as the forms requested by them are available on the Internet in both Finnish and in Swedish and will ensure that a significant proportion of application forms and requests can be instituted electronically by the year 2001.

There are currently more than one hundred different pilots schemes and projects in different fields within the Finnish public administration sector for creating new electronic services for citizens. Various services, such as change of address notifications, tax returns, applications for changes to tax cards, registering as a job-seeker at an employment office, etc. will soon be possible using electronic forms and data networks.

Service outlets will be made available to people at public libraries and municipal service centres as well as at special 'info kiosks'. Moreover, it will also be possible to access directly from a computer at home or work via networks such as the Internet. The use of mobile phones and digital TV as end-user terminals is also being developed.

1.3. Public management in Finland

Public management in Finland is coordinated by the Ministry of Finance and by the Ministry of the Interior .

The Ministry of Finance launches and organises projects designed to strengthen the structures of administration, information technology, data security and service provision throughout central government.

The Public Management Department of the Ministry of Finance is in charge of preparing the Government's governance policy as well as coordinating public management reforms. The future guidelines for the governance policy are stated in the Government Resolution entitled High-Quality Services, Good Governance and a Responsible Civic Society adopted in 1998.

The Public Management Department currently coordinates two public services on the web : the public register of projects and legal preparatory work of the Finnish Government, opened in 1998 and the Citizen's Guide giving access to public administration services on the web, launched in 1997.

2. DEVELOPMENT OF THE CITIZEN'S GUIDE

2.1. Citizen's Guide in book form in 1992

The Citizen's Guide was published for the first time in 1992, in book form. It was also published in Swedish in 1993, and revised editions of both versions were published in 1994. Production of the Guide was undertaken by the Ministry of Finance. The aim of the book was to describe public administration services from the citizen's viewpoint. The Guide contained relevant information concerning the lives of citizens, their service needs and the services available and procedures to be followed.

With the development of the information society it was natural that the Guide should appear on the Internet. The computer skills of citizens had increased, as had the number of home computers, and information technology equipment in schools and public libraries had also improved. More and more authorities in the public administration sector had also introduced Internet-based services for use by citizens.

A user survey directed at all those who had ordered the Citizen's Guide was carried out in sum-mer 1996, focusing on use of the Guide and its success as a service. The survey revealed that only a small proportion of the Guides were being used by private citizens, with the bulk having been ordered for work use. The majority of respondents to the survey were in favour of the same information being made available on the Internet. The printed book was also regarded as necessary, even if it were only to be updated occasionally.

The on-line version of the Guide was developed on the basis of the book and was set up on the Internet in summer 1997, when publication of the book version was discontinued. The electronic publication was produced in both Finnish and Swedish; the English version was to be produced at a later date.

2.2. From book to electronic publication

The information for the printed book had been collected from over one hundred service providers in the public administration sector. Keeping this amount of information continuously up to date was very demanding. One object of the electronic publication was thus to transfer the responsibility for producing the information to the service provider as far as possible, thereby also seeking to guarantee the accuracy of the information. The on-line Guide therefore includes only short introductory texts on different topics and incorporates links to the web pages of the relevant service providers.

The electronic publication was, however, somewhat less comprehensive than the book version, as it did not contain all the information collected for the book. Neither had the service providers set up web pages with comparable information on services and procedures as had been available in the printed book. Moreover, the Swedish on-line version is less extensive than the Finnish one, since not all the information suppliers featured in the book have Swedish web pages, or if they do, the pages are often very brief.

Nevertheless, the undoubted benefits of the on-line Guide are its speed, topicality and flexibility.

2.3. Citizen's Guide on the Internet

The Citizen's Guide on the Internet includes essential information that citizens need at different stages in their lives. Citizens can access this service from any computer with an Internet connection, whether at home, at work, in public libraries, in schools. This electronic service can be used with all the general browser programs. Retrieval of information from the Guide is free of charge.

The Guide is available in Finnish and Swedish, and an English version is being prepared. Short presentations of the service in English, German, French and Russian are already included in the Guide.

The front page of the Guide presents Internet pages provided by the various authorities which are linked to the Guide. This page can also be used to present recent administrative decisions which may have an influence on citizens' lives.

The citizen's Guide consists of the following sections:

• Emergency phone numbers
• Children
• Young people
• The working population
• The elderly
• Families
• Immigration and emigration
• The citizen in Finland
• The citizen in Europe

The Citizen's Guide also includes the following:

• Forms
• Legal information
• More links
• Service directory with links to administrative authorities' home pages
• Directory of municipalities
• Search
• Directions
• Feedback
• About the Guide

The information available under each of the headings is arranged according to the different types of situations that people encounter in life. The Guide provides information relevant to children, young people, the working population, the elderly and families, about housing, working and living, education and studying, health care services, family planning, birth of a child, day care, financial affairs, public transport, hobbies and cultural events, legal protection and the opportunities for citizens to make their voice heard in society. The Citizen's Guide also includes information pages for immigrants and emigrants and information relevant to the rights of citizens in Finland and in Europe.

The electronic Citizen's Guide includes brief texts on each topic, as well as links to the relevant authorities for further information. The information obtained via the Guide should thus be as correct and up-to-date as possible. Information in the Guide is gathered from more than one hundred authorities and municipalities. The Guide incorporates more than 1,000 separate links.

The Guide has a search engine specially developed for the service. The search index does not yet cover all the information suppliers' pages. Users can also send feedback and questions about the service to the Guide's editor.

The guide also includes links to the home pages of various state authorities and municipalities.

Various forms used in public administration are available to citizens in the electronic form service. The forms can be printed out and filled in by hand or they can be printed out after filling them in first on the computer. When electronic signatures are introduced, it will be possible to send electronic forms to the authorities directly.

The Guide allows citizens to follow progress with legislation in Parliament and to access a data base of existing Finnish legislation.

The Citizen's Guide thus opens the door to the use of services provided by public administration. The Guide is edited by the Ministry of Finance, and the information contained and referred to in the Guide is produced by more than one hundred authorities, municipalities and associations that are responsible for updating their own home pages. Alda Media Oy is responsible for the graphic and technical design of the Guide.

The total budget for the Guide is 500.000 FIM per year.

2.4. From handbook to dynamic service in 2000

When the Citizen's Guide was put on the Internet, the resources for its proper maintenance and further development were insufficient. The authorities and other bodies supplying the information were not devoting enough attention to their role as active suppliers of information.

The lack of a permanent editorial team and the inadequate functioning of the cooperation network gradually led to a decline in the service offered, to a level which no longer corresponded with the aims.

Around the same time, the Finnish Government issued a Decision-in-Principle covering electronic business and services, and legislation was being prepared on electronic communication in administration. A new Act was also being completed on the public nature of actions by authorities. At the EU level, too, discussions were started on the use of public administration information pools.

Also underway were a number of different projects aiming at electronic communication in public administration, which were connected in one way or another to the Citizen's Guide.

All these factors were influential in the decision to further develop the Citizen's Guide. The Guide was seen as a way of opening up the road to electronic services in the administration sector. The Ministry of the Interior is also involved in developing the Guide, alongside the Ministry of Finance.

The principal aim is to make the Guide an interactive, dynamic service forum, where citizens can find all the services available on-line from just one location and can then use the available electronic services directly. The aim is also to commit the Guide's information suppliers to maintaining the Guide's information and links for their field. A recommendation is also to be put together for a new organizational structure to manage production of the Guide.

The various tasks to develop the Guide can be grouped under three headings: improving the Guide and ensuring it is up to date; improving the cooperation between the producers of the Guide and its information suppliers; and investigating the resources needed and the new organ-izational structure for the Guide.

3. EVALUATING THE CITIZEN'S GUIDE

3.1. Views of users: feedback and customer survey

The views of users were studied by examining the feedback received and by undertaking a cus-tomer survey. All feedback on the Guide that had been received by the end of February 1999 was examined. The customer survey was conducted on-line via the Finnish and Swedish front pages. The questions were posted there for two weeks in February 1999.

The feedback from users was largely positive, with general satisfaction being expressed con-cerning the overall concept of the Guide. The Guide was praised, for example, for its quick in-formation retrieval, the extent of its links, its general operation and its comprehensiveness. Nevertheless, users expressed a desire for more detailed information and clear instructions on the procedure to follow in different situations. Users also stressed the difficulty of using the search engine.

The Guide was criticized for not being up to date. From the responses, it is difficult to conclude exactly which parts contained non-current information. Such information could be either in the text of the Guide itself, in the list of links or on the information suppliers' own pages. Some links may lead to old pages still in use, even where new material does exist. The text and the links must be checked regularly, which will require a lot of editorial work.

In all, the number of feedback messages examined was almost 100. The customer survey resulted in a total of 62 responses over the two week period. Of these, almost half (29) were first-time users. The survey response would have been more extensive if the survey had been posted for a longer period. The responses do not indicate whether the respondents were individual citizens or authorities looking for information to pass on to another party.

3.2. Good and bad: assessing the present format

An assessment was made of the Guide's present format. The separate functions within the Guide, such as the service index and the search engine, were also subject to separate assessment.

The division of the Guide's contents into the different stages of a person's life (children, young people, working-age people, the elderly and families) is inadequate, and the information is not always easy to find. Each of these stages of life is further divided into different subject areas, such as housing, working, income, leisure time and travel, but the introductory texts on these subjects often differ a little from each other, e.g. young people/housing and working-age people/housing.

This problem also concerns the lists of links following these introductory texts, although the direct links to the information suppliers' own web pages are themselves very good. The lists of links are sometimes rather long and detailed, the length being in part due to the inadequacy of the present structure of the contents.

The information needed for the Guide cannot always be found from the information suppliers' pages. To try to rectify this, various recommendations have been issued and seminars arranged in order to guide the design of information suppliers' own web pages.

3.3. The Guide in use: statistics

Statistics are compiled on the use of the Guide. This information covers the use of the search engine as well as the use of the Guide itself. The figures do not, however, give the true number of users as, for example, proxy servers reduce the number of searches.

The number of successful page requests for a two-week period varies from 34.500 to 60.000. The average number of successful page requests a day varies from 2.500 to 4.000. These figures show the total number of visits directly to one of the Guide's pages.

The Guide's search engine is used by an average of 15.000 users a month. The search engine has so far been indexed with the pages of 12 information suppliers.

4. COOPERATION BETWEEN GUIDE PRODUCTION AND INFORMATION SUPPLIERS

4.1. Producing the Guide

The editorial team for the Guide currently consists of one person responsible for both development and maintenance of the Guide. The actual technical updating of the Guide has been pur-chased externally from AldaMedia Oy. The Guide is updated twice a week.

4.2. Network of contacts

One of the difficulties in maintaining the Citizen's Guide is the inactivity of information suppliers in keeping their information for the Guide up to date. The reason why the network of contact persons has not functioned as it should is largely lack of information. Since the Guide did not previously have its own editorial staff, maintaining contacts was difficult. The view has also been held by some that the Guide is unnecessary and that its maintenance requires too much work.

Efforts have been made to find one person from each of the authorities and other bodies producing information for the Guide who would be responsible for ensuring that the information on their own field is up to date. The contact persons are information and communications officers or officials who are experts in their field. There are currently more than 100 such contact persons.

In 1998 a two-day seminar was arranged for the network of contact persons, at which the discussion focused on the basic issues in creating web pages and in editing the Guide. In April/May 1999, a total of six small-scale meetings were organized for the contacts at which the Guide was presented from the information supplier's perspective, and agreement was reached on communication between the Guide's editor and the information suppliers.

The contact persons are each sent information bulletins on changes made to the Guide itself or on other related matters about once a month. The bulletins are sent by e-mail.

An on-line editorial group consisting of five contact persons has been set up for the Guide. This group operates in support of the editor to improve the Guide.

4.3. Information via links (www.opas.vn.fi/tiedontuottaja)

To improve the information flow between the editor and the contact persons, a separate page has been created giving advice and information specifically on the design of the Guide. The page can be used by contact persons to send a form directly to the editor giving notification of a change in a link or piece of information or of a new item to be indicated on the front page (notification of change).

Contact persons can also examine the link report to see if the links to any of their pages are not functioning.

The page also refers to documents and instructions for producing Internet pages.

5. FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF THE CITIZEN'S GUIDE

The Citizen's Guide is an essential service which must be further developed as electronic services become more widespread. Citizens would not then need to search for services from many different addresses but instead could find them centrally from the Guide.

The service cannot remain a static one either, but must be capable of being easily amended to suit the information needs and availability of information at any given time. Citizens should also be able to use the Guide to obtain the latest information on any matter of interest.

The content of the Guide must be further developed, which will require a planned approach and a planning schedule that looks further ahead than the next 12 months. Improvements to the Guide must take account of new technologies such as digital television and developments in mobile

communications. A number of tasks to be carried out in the near future are described below.

5.1. Rearranging the content of the Guide

A plan for reclassifying the contents of the Guide is being compiled and will be completed by the end of 1999. The present stage-of-life division is to be redefined and the information content of the Guide rearranged, adding new information as necessary.

Reorganization of the service content will also require new technology and a new approach to production.

5.2. Improving the Guide's search engine and information retrieval

The search engine will be indexed with the pages of additional information suppliers and the service will be further improved. The introduction of meta-data to ease information searches will also be promoted, in accordance with the recommendation for its introduction within State administration.

5.3. Information suppliers for the Guide to be divided into groups using selection and quality criteria

Information suppliers will be divided into two groups: principal and other information suppliers. The first group consists of those suppliers that produce key information for the Guide, while the second comprises those parties whose presence in the Guide is desirable.

Selection criteria, and later also quality criteria, will be established for each of these groups.

5.4. Necessary resources to produce the Guide

A report will be prepared on the human resources needed to produce the Guide and an annual budget will be drafted. The service should in the future be produced as a standard service by the authorities, for which resources will be allocated from the State budget.

The Guide is presently the responsibility of the Public Management Department of the Ministry of Finance. Investigations will continue into a new form of organization to take charge of the Guide.

5.5. Effective marketing for the Guide

It is important to market the Guide so that it will be visited by new groups of users. Particularly important here are schools, various educational institutions, public libraries and service points operated by different authorities. Marketing efforts will be pursued in earnest at the end of the year, once the English version of the Guide has been produced.

5.6. Investigation into establishing links using Suomi.fi

There is no specific organization within the Finnish State administration for managing on-line services aimed at citizens. Projects for on-line services are managed by both the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of the Interior.

Finland presently has no public sector information system index similar to the GILS (Government Information Locator Service/Global Information Locator Service) developed in the USA. The GILS is an information location system which can be used to find out which public sector information systems exist and where they can be found. The GILS also includes an information search standard. In Finland, such an index could be arranged under Suomi.fi. The Citizen's Guide would then be part of the Suomi.fi service.