Armenia: In early June, a new version of the Government official website and a webportal dedicated to e-government started functioning. Our Armenian colleagues express their opinion.

The official position is that new Internet resources are developed in order to achieve maximal governmental transparency.

The IIFD asked opinion of its Armenian partner, the Committee to Protect Freedom of Expression, a NGO protecting rights of citizens and organizations to information on activities of government and local self-government bodies.

The Committee’s experts point that the new Armenian e-government website http://www.e-gov.am is much more informatiove that the official governmental website, and also that it allows an applicant to track progress of the application review in a government body (though only two government bodies are now included into the online tracking system). There is no doubt that it will assist achieving governmental transparency, as well as placing information on state procurements, state funding for NGOs, and so on. Several state/citizen interaction systems (for example, systems for tax e-reporting, e-signature issiung, and e-visa application) are also available from the new resource.

So the new system makes rather good impression, but only time can show how it will really work. Moreover, too few Armenian citizens are today able to use Internet and know what it is.