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| Interview with Dragan |
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ARIADNE: Dragan, we have first met during a proposal preparation concerning ICT development in the Western Balkan Municipalities. Can you outline, in a few sentences, the state of the art on this regard?
DRAGAN: Owing to collaboration with European municipalities and European R&D institutions through EU funded projects and regional initiatives, as well as support from world financial institutions (e.g. World Bank, GTZ Germany, USAID, etc.), or IT companies (e.g. Microsoft) the larger Western Balkan Municipalities possess very well established ICT infrastructure and implemented e-government solutions.
These slightly vary from country to country, but all of them organized local government information like registry of births, marriages and deaths, land-registry, registry of population, electoral registry, registry of rules and regulations, documents for licence in urbanism, architecture and traffic, etc. into integrated databases supporting all business processes in municipality administration and public companies that are under auspice of local government (public utilities, cultural institutions, sport institutions, etc.).
They have built a network infrastructure (fibre optic MAN) and appropriate information systems to offer e-services to citizens and private/public companies on a regular basis.
To access such e-services, those municipalities either implemented, or are close to a final implementation, City portals and info kiosks.
Also, they have recently put more emphasis on integration of geographic information systems (GIS) in e-government solutions since municipalities are, above all, territorial units and a great percent of their decisions are related to space and are influenced by spatially referenced entities of different domains.
ARIADNE: It is well known that the individual Western Balkan States are running at different speed in social and economic terms. Does this reflect also in the current advance of the Information Society?
DRAGAN: In my opinion a difference in speed of socio-economic development is not so significant to have an influence in the advance of the Information Society in Western Balkan Countries.
With the exception of Albania, all other Western Balkan Countries once belonged to the same ICT education and development space, so their current ICT advance have well established grounds in a very good ICT education and a great number of ICT professionals either working in their native countries or in ICT developed countries of Western Europe, North America, Australia and worldwide with whom we have a very good collaboration.
ARIADNE: We know that in some Western Balkan Countries the lack of infrastructure is felt to be significant. Has this any relevance for ICT development as well?
DRAGAN: The lack of transport infrastructure, like roads, railways, airports, and so on, is a very significant in overall development of Western Balkan Countries and has some influence on the ICT development, but I think not so crucial.
The lack of ICT infrastructure is more important, but I think that Western Balkan countries will very quickly reach the European ICT level of infrastructure with more private initiatives and investments form the Western Europe in ICT sector, especially in wired and wireless telecommunications.
ARIADNE: What’s the current status of R&D on ICT in the Western Balkan area? Can you name three main topics where there has been more progress in the recent past?
DRAGAN: As I mentioned, the Western Balkan countries have well established and worldwide recognizable ICT research, development and higher education at the ICT universities and institutes.
The proof of it are a number of young, ICT educated people from Western Balkan working at universities and ICT companies in West Europe, North America and other ICT developed regions.
It is expected that the R&D on ICT will advance in the future owing to integration of Western Balkan higher education in European higher education space by implementation of Bologna Declaration and by inclusion of ICT research organizations and companies as equal partners in EU IST 6FP and forthcoming 7FP.
I could emphasize several topics, like advanced mobile and distributed information systems, e-services such as e-government, e-business, e-learning, e-health etc., as well as semantic-based knowledge and content systems and their integration, as the topics in which there has been more progress in the recent years.
ARIADNE: A final word on R&D cooperation between the EU and the Western Balkans: how do you see the current situation and future perspectives?
DRAGAN: The current R&D cooperation between the EU and the Western Balkan countries is undoubtedly better than few years ago, but it must be much better in the years to come.
Especially because all Western Balkan countries are very close to EU countries not only geographically, but in the cultural, education, religious and any other living senses.
As I mentioned, ICT education, research and development are very well established in Western Balkans and are of a very good quality, so universities, institutes and R&D companies are a natural partners of the West European R&D organizations.
So I expect a stronger R&D cooperation in the near future both on European level through EU 6FP and 7FP projects, and on the regional level through bilateral or multilateral collaboration and project.
ARIADNE: Thank you Dragan!
Who is Dragan? 
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