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Understand has been presented at the Workshop "Measuring the information society: what, how, for whom and what", in the context of the 5th Annual Conference of the association of Internet Researchers (18 Sept 2004 - Brighton).
The Lead Partner representative David Osimo attended the Conference and presented the project together with Karsten Gareis, representative of the BISER Project, a recently finished research project supported by the European Commission’s IST Programme which, like Understand, developed and piloted indicators for measuring Information Society developments at the regional level.
The projects are related as follows: BISER, which started in 2001, used a top-down approach for indicator development and piloting, i.e. the list of indicators to be selected was derived from a generic model of regional development in the Information Society rather than the specific political objectives of any individual region. eris@ worked with BISER towards defining common indicators. Through eris@ the Emilia-Romagna region has taken the lead of a group of regions which signed a Memorandum of Cooperation for sharing data and work towards common indicators. The first concrete act of this cooperation is the UNDERSTAND project, where ten EU regions are currently engaged in designing a common methodology for data collection. Understand takes a pragmatic approach by not developing a shared model of regional development (as was the case in BISER), but rather by picking the most relevant domains and indicators out of existing projects in order to meet the concrete needs of
policy-makers. It therefore follows a bottom-up approach.
You can download the Paper "Benchmarking Regional Performance in the Information Society: Turning It into Practice".
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