The First Project Conference took place on March the 17th in Brussels and was hosted and sponsored by the Committee of Regions.

The event goal was not only to present the project methodology and approach and the first UNDERSTAND results, but also to rise awareness on regional Information Society benchmarking relevance and to invite non-partner regions to test, evaluate and adopt the methodology.

Both DG REGIO and DG INFOSOC contributed to the event with a presentation. Mrs. Fitzegerald from DG REGIO pointed out how welcomed was the UNDERSTAND initiative, considering the shared regional benchmarking methodology a tool to assess the running initiatives and to target the spending. Mrs. Laura Pontiggia, from DG INFOSOC, gave very interesting anticipation on the eEurope benchmarking report that will be soon published: her intervention pointed out the inner consistency by eEurope and UNDERSTAND rationale and the need for regional data that EEROPE, even in the EU25 version, doesn’t provide.

During the Conference, the UNDERSTAND project partners have presented the methodology handbook and the first survey results on four domains (broadband infrastructure, e-government, e-business and ICT usage by citizens) in the partner regions, while in the afternoon session, regional ICT policy managers have discussed the data from the point of view of their regions’ policy-making and good practices.

Conference participants were representatives of regions, development agencies, research centres, European networks working on ICT and regional development and some very interesting remarks on the methodology come from them during the conference debate.

The overall approach of the project is meant to exploit and harmonise the indicators and methodology that are most widely adopted at the international level instead of developing new ones. For this reason the methodology takes into account previous regional Information Society benchmarking experiences, most of whom gave relevant results (such as BISER, ebusiness-watch, SIBIS, BISER, BEEP, ESPON, REGIONAL-IST, SOURIR).
Another point of the base rational was to pursue the highest consistency with EUROSTAT and eEurope.

Finally, one of the project main goals is to rise the attention (and contribute to the awareness) on the relevance of regional Information Society benchmarking and to involve as many regions as possible in the project, in order to have a really shared, largely adopted framework where regions can effectively compare with each other, evaluate local performances, policy and actions and eventually redirect them. The UNDERSTAND project already has a good geographical coverage of European regional models of Information Society: partners are Emilia-Romagna (I, project leader) Aquitaine (FR), Baleares (E), Hessen (D), Piedmont (I), Valencia (E), Vasternorrland (SV), Wales (UK), Wielkopolska (PL), Yorkshireand the Humber (UK), while ERIS@ association is supporting the initiative.
Early reactions to the project are favourable: regional and national statistical bodies in Spain, Italy, Poland, Denmark and Norway have already shown interest in the methodology and in exchanging the data. The project aims at involving as many regions as possible in using the methodology and comparing the data.

Presentations are available for download.