ECRN (European Civil Registry Network) is a project funded in the EC initiative, Information and Communication Technologies Policy Support Program for Competitive and Innovation.
The ECRN project is striving to become the European Service Platform for the Civil Registry with the establishment of an ECR_Platform among the Civil Acts Registries of National Administrations. It is implementing an ambitious policy of strategic cooperation with key players of the Civil Registry in Europe with the set-up of an experimental system designed to ensure the safe and certain identification of the Civil Acts (birth, death, marriage, divorce etc.) exchange. Together with the cooperation in the public arena, ECRN is active in cooperation with European market technology leaders of the Civil registry and Demographic Services in Europe.
At the moment the Civil Registry sector is undergoing in Europe a tremendous change process mainly due to the increasing number of expatriate in each Member State, and consequently a growing of demand of trans-national certifications. The ECRN initiative intends to reply strategically to this trend with an outstanding governance of the process i) aiming at strengthening the administrations’ ability to use new technologies, ii) increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the local administrative action in the European context while reducing costs, iii) improving the administration-citizen relationship by shortening the procedures for citizens’ civil status in 2-3 days and enabling citizens to reply in costs due time to request for documentation or certificates.
In the beginning of 2010, all the ECRN project consortium’s competences and skills are mobilised and running in order to fully achieve the ambitious project objectives; at the moment the technology platform is under intensive testing and the key functionalities are robust and are replying well to the severe pressure of the tests. The Administrations involved in the project (Italian Association of Civil registry officials, Municipality of Rotterdam, City Council Gent, Municipality of Bologna, Slovenian Ministry of Interior, Romanian Ministry of Communication and Information technology), are already using the platform functions for requesting, signing, sending, controlling, receiving and acknowledging receipt of Civil Registry documents.
To highlight, the ECRN Consortium is continuing to develop strong links with new potential customers and partners for its services, is continuing in the dissemination and advertisement of ECRN services, inviting new Administrations to enter in ECR Platform and to test its services, In addition, ECRN is dialoguing with other EC large projects to extend the cooperation and to build a large infrastructure of interoperable platforms, in order to exchange services together in a safe, secure, efficient and reliable way. For the upcoming months, the strategic cooperation to promote ECR Platform will be intensified, with the involvement of additional countries and players, both from the institutional and market sectors. They will pave the way for high value market services in the strategic sector of the Administrations in the whole Europe.
If you are interested, please subscribe on-line in http://www.ecrn.eu
The movie about the ECRN services http://www.ecrn.eu/site_movie.exe
Antonio D’Amico, ECRN, Rome (antonio.damico@ecrn.eu)


