The Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi – AKP), which won the recent elections in Turkey and will soon form the new national government, said that it would restructure government processes by porting the paperwork-based infrastructure to an electronic platform.
The AKP, which has Islamic roots, won 363 seats of the 550 representative seats, making it the leading party in the Turkish Parliament. It captured 34.4 per cent of votes.
The “e-government” project, which has been underway for a while, has been driven by numerous organizations and ministries. The project has many different segments – “e-government”; “e-Turkey”; “Public-Net”; “e-billing”; and “Mernis,” which aims to assign a unique number to each Turkish citizen with the help of a centralized database. The AKP has said that it will set up a new action plan to combine all the e-government projects.
The party program calls for legal arrangements to define the online and offline publishing framework for the e-government projects. The program foresees new arrangements to facilitate online and offline publishing procedures and content management of Web sites. The program also calls for the establishment of publishing houses and the development of new business models in the information and communication technology (ICT) markets.
The plan also aims to discourage the sale of government organizations that do research and development in ICT. Instead, the plan aims to provide profound support to local government organizations, encouraging them to develop their own ICT research and development units.
The party proposal calls for registering property belonging to government and agricultural sources directly into a distributed database. Registered property belonging to the government, whose records are stored on paper in local offices, will be transferred into a shareable database that is accessible to the local administration and private firms.