Dear Friends,

You have just received a copy of the official magazine of the Conference Internet in State Administration and Self-Government ISSS ’99/Seminar on the Local and Regional Information Society, in which we present to you some selected contributions which are pivotal for this important event. We hope that you will understand that it doesn't include all of the conference materials, as the variety of themes and the overall extent of lectures, seminars and workshops do not allow for it. Instead of trying to bring all the conference papers together, we primarily focused on providing a valuable guide through the conference programme, aimed as well at being a useful and permanent tool for your work.

The conference The Internet in State Administration and Self-Government ISSS ’99 is the second annual national event which brings together representatives of state administration and self-government, experts in information technology and other participants who are interested in the development of the information society and are ready to discuss the influence of modern information and communication technologies on the public administration at all levels. As the first conference turned out to be mainly a time of evaluating and beginning the discussion which, until then, lacked a forum for a regular meeting of a narrowly-specialized conference, this year’s conference will be rather different. The difference is not just in its being a two-day event, set outside of the capital and having the international dimension of the Seminar on the Local and Regional Information Society. The participants of the last conference may agree, that within the course of just one year the reality of information technologies used in state administration has ceased to be a topic for only a narrow group of specialists. Over the last twelve months the number of state administration bodies connected to the Internet has rapidly increased, as well as the number of those who see it as a routine work tool. Similarly, the number of those to whom the information society brought a real change at the level of everyday life also increased.

Precisely our goal has been the following: to present the participants of the conference with a wide variety of particular projects, to introduce them to governmental schemes and arrangements and to enable them to compare approaches taken in various European countries. We are very pleased to be commissioned to organize this conference together with the Third European Seminar on the Local and Regional Information Society, whose aims are very close to those of ISSS'99. It is not an accident that the programmes of both events overlap. We wanted to stress in this way that the development of the information society cannot remain closed within the boundaries of individual countries.

We are convinced that the Czech Republic understands this, and that its political representatives at the state, parliamentary and self-government levels are willing to purposely support the information society and transform this phenomenon into a driving force behind the social and economic development of the country, as well as a tool for its integration into the European Union.

František Dohnal
Conference Programming Director
Chairman of the Union of Towns and Villages of the Czech Republic