The School on Foundations of Electronic Governance will be organized as the fifth in a series of schools under the UNU-IIST's UNeGov.net initiative.

The primary purpose of the School is to provide participants with a good understanding of Electronic Governance. Specifically, the School will teach how to carry out strategic planning and develop both organizational and technical structures for Electronic Governance. The school will also provide a medium for international and local experience sharing on e-Government development in general and within the framework of the UNeGov.net Community of Practice in particular.

1. Government IT Practitioners, Researchers and Educators - Government
2. Information Technology Professionals, Software Engineers, etc. - Industry
3. Academics and Postgraduate IT Students - Academia

In doing so, government leaders face many challenges, such as:

1. Leading necessary structural changes to accompany technical solutions, against resistance to change.
2. Finding ways to cooperate on cross-agency projects, against traditionally hierarchical organizations.
3. Building stable, long-lasting solutions for the public sector, while facing volatility of supporting technologies.
4. Relying on the private sector to deliver public services while keeping data secure and avoiding vendor lock-in.

UNeGov.net provides a forum for addressing these challenges, bringing together the stakeholders in government, civil society, academia and industry. Specific solutions will be also addressed, for instance the use of open-source software for e-Governance.

Developing Electronic Governance merits a multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder approach whereby the experts and practitioners in different disciplines come together to exchange experiences, share technical know-how, transfer skills and knowldege and reach consensus on the best practices in the field. UNeGov.net aims to bring together such experts within the framework of a Community of Practice supported by, among others:

1. a community portal
2. a series of network-building workshops
3. an annual conference on the Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance

The focus is as much on solving concrete problems as it is on consensus-building and advancing the practice in the field. The portal, for instance, will provide technical support for collaborative problem-solving by offering a rich collection of web resources - papers, software, projects, people, etc. and the mechanism to assemble such resources into 'solution patterns'.

A series of schools are planned as part of the UNeGov.net initiative. The aim is to help building human capacity for e-Governance, particularly for Developing Countries. Practitioners and trainers from Government and Industry can be the primary target audience, while schools can also be designed for training Public Administration officials and representatives of other stakeholders of e-Governance.