In the autumn of 2004, two higher educational programs in e-government will be starting up at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Southern Sweden. One of these is a Master’s level program, while the other is a more basic, two-year vocational education. Each will be the first of its kind in Scandinavia, and both will be offered as net-based distance education. The interdisciplinary group of researchers/teachers now developing the courses for these educational programs, in co-operation with several other research groups in Scandinavia, see this co-construction of distance education as the beginning of an active Scandinavian network of competence around higher education and ongoing research and development in the e-government area. We are currently exploring the possibilities of using distance education in this area as a way of networking around on-going e-government research and competence enhancement in Scandinavia. The Scandinavian tradition of Participatory Design, as well as ideas about e-government as constantly ongoing co-construction, have inspired us in our work with developing the new educational programs. A reference group consisting of representatives from a number of municipalities and various government agencies plays an important role in this work.
The conference proceedings from the third international conference EGOV 2004 are published in the Springer Verlag series Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS 3183), edited by Roland Traunmüller (ISSN 0302-9743).