Effective interaction between public administrations, citizens and businesses is essential to build the digital society. Online delivery of basic services to citizens and businesses (such as personal documents, income taxes, company registration, social contributions or VAT) help public authorities meet people’s needs.

Today, many public services are available online but their cross-border dimension has to be reinforced.

Key in the strategy to improve such interaction is the development of Large Scale Pilot projects (LSPs) engaging stakeholders such as public authorities, service providers and research centres across the EU in the implementation of common solutions to deliver online public services and make them accessible throughout Europe.

Five LSPs are on-going:

1.    e-CODEX
2.    epSOS
3.    STORK
4.    PEPPOL
5.    SPOCS

to support interoperability of services and as a consequence, the mobility of citizens and businesses.

Run largely with and/or by Member States, the pilot projects develop practical solutions tested in real government service cases across Europe.

These practical solutions will aid in making crossborder government services a reality. They will ensure that government administrations of different countries in the EU can speak to each other digitally despite different national technical specificities and languages.

These solutions will tear down the digital borders in Europe, many years after the physical barriers have already been removed, and will lay the foundation for future European growth and competitiveness.

The LSP story video was firstly presented during the 6th European Ministerial eGovernment Conference on November 17th-18th 2011 in Poznan, Poland.