The event goal was not only to disseminate the second year project results, but also to underline their impacts on policy making and on how regions can contribute to the achievement of the i2010 agenda.

The event was opened by Mrs Marie-Claire Neill Cowper – head of Unit of EDUC that stressed the role of regions in the achievement of i2010 objectives and indicated in the benchmarking an important tool to measure its progress. Luca Protti from the European Commission presented the indicators that will be monitored in benchmarking i2010.
The presentations from the Understand partners provided updated information on about 200 indicators collected at the regional level related to 4 domains: e –government, e-business, citizens and broadband. The presentations showed the updates in comparison to the surveys carried out in 2004 as regard new issues investigated in 2005, indicators refinements and trend data.
In the morning session three European best practices on benchmarking presented their methodology and the expected results: Bentli as regard methodology guidelines for digital literacy benchmarking, Birra as regard the e-ladder evaluation model that will be tested in remote areas and Sourir the organisational approach adopted by the French regions.
Finally to go more in depth with benchlearning, the opportunities for further analysis on Understand data have been presented so that to model the relations between the different group of indicators.

In the afternoon session, regional ICT policy managers have discussed about the contribution of regions in delivering the i2010 agenda, by presenting those activities in which policy intervention has been successful and those areas in which intervention is now required.
The session was closed by Gareth Hughes, that underlined that most of the expenditure on ICT is made by regions and regional action needs regional data. Measurement at the regional level proves to be a fundamental supporting tool for decision making.
Feed-back from experts in the field about data have been very positive and the Commission showed some true interest in the project and in particular in the possibility to widen the benchmarking to new regions.

Presentations are available for download