VERA – ‘Digital Social House’ - Alfresco Credit Crunch Innovation Awards 2009

VERA, Vlaamse Brabant autonomous governmental organization, addressed the obligation of the municipalities to have a ‘Social House’ where citizens can find all information on social services and rights. The Flemish government ordered the communities to have this available by May 2009. VERA grouped +20 communities around the idea of a hosted solution for a ‘Digital Social House’, where the workload of managing the content of web sites are shared between several levels (Flemish, Provicial, Communities, other) and still each community would have their localized ‘Digitaal Sociaal Huis’ with customized content and layout.

Based on the Alfresco ECM platform, XeniT has developed a custom application where the work process of requesting new service descriptions, appointing editorial responsibility toward a specific person or group, approval of the content, publication of the content and changes in the published content is organized in a structured way.

Municipalities collaborate on the provincial level to manage the content of generic service description while on the local level, they can extend the description with local information. The workflow for the approval of the content has been worked out for both the ‘generic products’ as the ‘specific products’.

Sharing the workload on the generic level, municipalities can ‘customise’ the product toward ‘specific product’ and the web styles for their local ‘Digitaal Sociaal Huis’.
Finally they can publish the content on their local web portal where citizens can search for the social service and launch request toward their local authorities. The process for managing and publishing the content in two languages is supported.

In July 2009 Alfresco awarded the ‘Alfresco Credit Crunch Innovation Awards 2009’ for the public sector in the EMEA region to VERA. (Alfresco customers awards)
Currently over 40 communities have subscribed to the DSH service and are participating in the process of managing over 300 social products at the generic level. Due to the high demand, the DSH project is expanding to other provinces through partnerships.

http://www.digitaalsociaalhuis.be

Download the full reference case available in French and Dutch