If you want, you can see the flash version.
Hello and welcome to Barcelona. My name is Lali, and I'm the virtual assistant at gencat, the Generalitat of Catalonia's website. I'd like to invite you to get to know what I do, while strolling through this part of the city.
As you can see, we are close to the Rambles and the sea, and over here you can see the monument to Christopher Columbus. The monument commemorates Columbus' return voyage from America and his reception by the monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella in Barcelona.
We're near a square that's called Plaça Reial. Would you like to come with me?
This square, which was created in 1848, is one of the best-known places in the city.
Barcelona, although it is home to a large part of the population of Catalonia, is just the capital of a country which I encourage you to get to know.
Catalonia is a country with a population of 7,134,000, in the northeast of the Iberian peninsula. It has a Mediterranean climate and, as you can see from these photographs, it has a rich variety of landscapes, from the Pyrenees Mountains to the beaches of the Costa Brava and the Costa Daurada. All this in 32,000 square kilometres!!!
It has its own culture, with universally recognised names in art and architecture, such as Romanesque style or Gaudí's modernism. Its traditional festivals have even been adopted in other countries, for example Sant Jordi's day, which is April 23rd. It's a day when people make gifts of roses and books and when La Rambla and this square are full of people celebrating the festival. Another Catalan tradition that has become famous the world over is that of building human towers of up to nine levels. Catalan gastronomy is, of course, another excuse for visiting the country!
If you'd like more information about Catalonia, you can find it on the Internet, on the website of the Generalitat, Catalonia's autonomous government. The Generalitat of Catalonia's website is gencat.
The people of Catalonia have their own language, Catalan, a Romance language, which more than 94% of its inhabitants know and understand, along with Spanish, which is the other official language. Catalan is also spoken in other places, such as Perpignan, the Balearic Islands and Valencia.
Recently, the ICANN authorised the use of the .cat domain, which designates websites that are part of the Catalan linguistic and cultural community on the Internet. gencat was one of the first sites to adopt it, and therefore gencat can be found on the Internet at www.gencat.cat.
In 2005, gencat started a restructuring and modernising process. Since then, it has added new services to improve the relationship between the citizens and the Administration.
gencat has made a million government and administration documents accessible and has facilitated access to more than 280 public organisations' websites through a new search engine, a common structure for subjects and sections such as the A-Z of websites.
In 2006, gencat received almost 70 million hits, an average of more than 191,000 a day, meaning a 70% increase compared to the hits of the previous year. According tothe Survey of the Mass Media Association, which measures the audience of the media and websites in Spain, it is the sixth most visited site in Catalonia and the thirtieth in Spain.
In May 2006, gencat was given a mention in the public administration website category of the 2006 Stockholm Challenge international awards. This recognition placed gencat as one of the five best website in the public administrations' ICT initiatives category.
The same year, gencat was also given the ComputerWorld 2006 Award for Impact on the Citizens of Catalonia. This award, granted by ComputerWorld Magazine is given to the entity that has done most for citizen well being. In 2007, it is a finalist in the eGovernment Awards promoted by the European Commission.
In its search for new interactive experiences, the Generalitat of Catalonia firmly believes in Web 2.0. This concept is the new way of relating with others, finding information and working that has been developed by Internet users in recent years.
The Catalan Government has transferred this emergent philosophy to the e-Catalunya platform, designed to help the construction of virtual communities of citizens with common, specific interests.
Some of the e-Catalunya communities are very large and active and others are more reduced, as they can be made to measure. For example, the Justice portal started with a single group, destined to professionals in family mediation, and it now consists of 32 groups, with some 1,700 participating members.
Users can make use of the tools that e-Catalunya makes available, such as blogs, wikis, document repositories, calendars, forums, mailing lists and photo albums to share contents and opinions and to relate with others. The most important feature is strengthening the social network around common interests.
Real examples of groups that operate in e-Catalunya are family mediators in the Justice portal, Catalan communities abroad, cultural promoters in Town Councils, specialists in the health network that write up medical protocols, etc.
I was created to help users carry out procedures with the administration. I'm Lali, the virtual assistant. For example, I can tell citizens what they need to do to make the preliminary registration and then register their child at a school. If you've got any doubts, you can ask questions and I'll answer thanks to a system of questions and answers that learns from the questions I'm asked.
I deal with the public in a place that is called the Virtual Citizen Care Office that is part of the projects designed to simplify and help in procedures with the administrations.
Some 200,000 registered users already do on-line procedures with the Generalitat and the interoperativity with other administrations is advancing little by little. One example of this is the municipal register. 80% of Catalan citizens can now notify their change of address to their town council and this is automatically communicated to the Generalitat and the main organisations in Spain.
The gencat website is complemented with services that are offered by means of various channels. Citizens can use the phone to ask for help and to carry out procedures, the number is 012; and their mobile phone to receive personalised information. For example, you can find out about the state of the traffic, and you can even consult cameras on the roads in real time.
Another example is that of registering your child for school for the 2006-2007 academic year, in which I played an important role and for which more than 300,000 text messages were sent out at the request of citizens. The messages informed parents about how the process was going, guaranteeing transparency and fairness is assigning places at state schools.
In the immediate future, you will also be able to ask questions and receive certain services by means of digital terrestrial television (DTT), such as asking for a doctor's appointment or interacting with health professionals on the television, which is known as telemedicine. The embryo of these services was the t-Govern project, jointly developed with the Catalan Corporation of Radio and Television.
Well, if you'd like more information about any of these projects you can take a look at gencat.cat. You can find me in some sections of the website to help you. Ah!!! I'm also in Second Life, of course. I'll soon have a permanent office in Catalonia Island, which is being built. Come and see me! Bye for now!
