Competition in the provision of public and civic services, which these VirtuHalls© services are, is varying across the participating cities. This again has to do with the regulation environments of each country. It seems that the less regulated a "market" is, the more private competition there is. In a "Europe of the Regions" there is focus on local issues. We think we can only compete with the big players in the market if we give room to channels that are based on themes AND have real local content. Here we also see the need to involve the city administrations.

The access to the information of the city services can only be given by the city. The other services like SME information and travel information can also by provided by commercial organisations. Co-operation to make the best total package of services is recommended. One trend also seems to be outsourcing the service to the private sector company but retaining the "say" about the service. This will certainly create a new kind of market and competitive environment for service provision. This also requires municipalities who go along this road, to learn about this new way of working.

One aspect to affect the competition in future will be the growing importance of the so-called third sector. This phenomenon mainly means that the services traditionally provided by the (local) governments will be decreased and the third sector will increasingly start to provide them - either on voluntary or other basis. The VirtuHalls©, to be successful, will need to get a foothold in the local communities, to catch this new wave of activities. Hence the "locally branded portals".

The roots for the VirtuHalls portals lay in the Business Plan, written under Infocities-1 (Contract Number: 45526) from October 1998 until February 1999. In that final stage of Infocities-1 all major decisions for the deployment of VirtuHalls were taken, and they were formulated again in the VirtuHalls proposal. The project phase VirtuHalls is mainly the result of these decisions. It is typical, and proof of the determination of those Infocities partners, that the non-Infocities member Hamburg participated in writing the business plan.

By design the VirtuHalls rely on the technical aspects of the "Digital Town Hall" that were determined in those early days:

The infrastructure solutions in each validation site are individual, as well as penetration rate of modern telecommunication services and IT vary. (p. 166).

Hence the choice for the locally branded portals:

Generally can be said that all the in commercial use existing access methods are being used to bring the Digital Town Hall Services to the different customer groups (Internet through PSTN, ISDN, CAI, Intranet through LAN, Internet through leased line connections, Telenet and ADSL, local multimedia network, CATV Cable Network Access).
Solutions for central information storage, database solutions etc. also vary. The use of different kinds of databases in common in all the sites. Existing solutions are e.g. Oracle database 7.3.4., PL/SQL 2.3.4.0.0, Oracle application server 3.0, static HTML pages and Perl interpreter, and Search97 on the server side.
The protocol used is typically TCP/IP.

It does not mean that Infocities is then about "loosely coupled relationships". The roots for the VirtuHalls portals lay in the Business Plan, written under Infocities-1 (Contract Number: 45526) from October 1998 until February 1999. In that final stage of Infocities-1 all major decisions for the deployment of VirtuHalls were taken. The project phase VirtuHalls is mainly the result of these decisions. It is typical, and proof of the determination of those Infocities partners, that the non-member Hamburg participated in writing the business plan.

In the Infocities Business Plan was a lot of attention for the local flavour of deployment. It is not surprising that this is reflected in VirtuHalls©. Except for France Telecom (see annex to this interoperability report) there is no cross-european technical co-operation taking place, except for technical issues that are discussed in the management board and technical issues that are part of the reporting process. All consortia deploy locally branded portals based on the Infocities Business Plan, interpreted by the local project partners. The Infocities Business Plan explains it well:

At EU level management provisions will be including a collaborative shared workspace in the framework of the [project] website as well as […] management board meeting[s …], where appropriate hosted in the framework of the Telecities network activities. Local Business Exploiters are responsible for further rollout of applications, but they can request assistance from the Infocities EU management team, identified knowledge partners and local partners consultants.

VirtuHalls© will build on the identified "WWW model" of penetration (opposite to Internet penetration as such): WWW usage is driven by the need to serve local users and indicates a growing regionalisation and local characterisation of its content. (According to Evolution of the Internet and the WWW in Europe, European Commission DGXIII.A3 - Telecommunication Infrastructures, Study GI 2.2/96 - Contract N. 45532; available at www.ten-telecom.org/en/evolution.html).

These local markets could be addressed with service packages geared to the needs of "communities". Users of these communities will spend more time online than casual users.

This is the basis of the contract with the Commission. Hamburg's delay in reporting was caused by the typical (and interesting) way they formed their local public-private-partnership. It does not mean that there is any sales going on between Infocities project partners. Intra-consortium sales is not an issue in this deployment phase. The target is investment in locally branded city portals.

Continued in: "Reporting"