Course Information Society and E-Governance (3 CPs) will take place at the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Tallinn University of Technology (TUT) in Spring Term 2009. It will be coordinated by Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Drechsler and Tarmo Kalvet, and assisted by Margit Suurna.

Estonia is known internationally as a well-developed ‘e-country’ that can be well described by the current advancement and activity in the field of e-governance. This is implicitly characterized by the wide usage of electronic applications in management, the submission of income tax returns over the Internet up to the Internet based elections, etc. At the same time, e-governance has raised several principal problems in the field of public administration, as well as democracy issues. On the one hand, this is about how e-governance fits into and what kind of impact it has on the current public administration system. On the other hand, the question is about the perceptiveness of citizens to use different e-applications.

The main aim of this course is to introduce main theories about and practice in information society in the context of public administration systems and reform. The course will cover topics as follows: the current state and development of the information society and e-governance (including issues such as Internet-based voting, e-security, m-governance, etc.) with special emphasis on the Estonian case; the impact of the information society on public service delivery (based on the examples of e-health and e-learning); the impact of e-Government on the private sector; and critique of e-governance. The course will be conducted in English.

The course takes place as a two-week session from 20 April to 4 May 2009, Monday–Friday 16:00-17:30 (18:00) h. It is an elective course for all public administration graduate programs; participants from other graduate programs from TUT, as well as outside guest participants (who may fully register), are welcome as well.