LEFIS project

ERASMUS - the European Community programme in the field of higher education
LEFIS - Thematic Network

The Project pursues to design a steady system (infrastructure) for the governance of the knowledge society addressing both the public and the private sectors in a multi-level approach. The projected system rests upon three pillars:

  • first, a comprehensive and coherent policy system, comprising
a) policies and policy-making strategies for decision makers at local, regional, national and European level,
b) methodologies for information system designers and
c) codes of conduct for public managers and private stakeholders,
  • second, a certification infrastructure assuring the practical implementation of the policy system, and
  • third, a consolidated knowledge base, comprising, in an electronically retrievable manner, the vast amount of collected and generated information on electronic governance.

The project will accordingly serve to develop a comprehensive strategy for legislation and policy which coheres with the emerging democratic conception of governance, which is in turn defined through a strong orientation to citizens. In this regard, a special focus is devoted to new forms of participation and social self-regulation as a specific means for getting citizens and other stakeholders involved in the governance work, to the extent that the project itself is build on a participative working procedure.
The targeted policy system is comprehensive inasmuch as it addresses a wide range of crucial legal issues raised by the knowledge society, which is made up by cross-national informative, legal, political and commercial interactions. This implies, in turn, the detailed analysis of those environmental technical, economic and social factors supporting or constraining democratic governance (ranging from feasibility and affordability issues to standardization and technical implementation). Ultimately, this project itself may be regarded as a knowledge-based one, since it also entails a knowledge consolidation, diffusion and teaching programme.