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The paper introduces the concept of digital city and discusses how to assess a particular project, concerning its success in connecting the real city with its virtual counterpart. The Gaia Global project is a three-year digital cities project within the Portugal Digital Initiative, a program related with the Information Society operation program framework. It provides a digital city counterpart for Vila Nova de Gaia, with around 288000 inhabitants, considering 2001 figures. The Gaia Global project is focused in offering an environment to involve as much as possible both the local population and other people interacting with Gaia related and/or based activities. A central issue to the success of the project is bringing together people to use and adopt Gaia Global features in their day to day life. This paper argues that beyond the definition of traditional project indicators related with digital cities projects, the use and potential project dissemination counting people involved is a central issue to both assess and measure impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

University Fernando Pessoa, a small university with around 4500 students enrolled, has developed a Web application to support administrative work for its teaching staff. It is a well known fact that the biggest burn for a higher education teacher is its administrative work, which encloses reporting students' marks, interacting with the administrative staff in order to provide information about classes, contents and teaching service, and after each semester, make a summary report of its work and provide students evaluation. Some of these requirements are imposed by the national board for higher education and require a precise format. This paper briefly presents the Web application and discusses its role on the relationship between the teaching staff and students. As a result of the available information provided by the system to the whole university community, a number of issues arise. Among these issues, one of the most important is the concept of information transparency which the authors present on the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

University Fernando Pessoa, a small university with around 4500 students enrolled, has developed a Web application to support administrative work for its teaching staff. It is a well known fact that the biggest burn for a higher education teacher is its administrative work, which encloses reporting students' marks, interacting with the administrative staff in order to provide information about classes, contents and teaching service, and after each semester, make a summary report of its work and provide students evaluation. Some of these requirements are imposed by the national board for higher education and require a precise format. This paper briefly presents the Web application and discusses its role on the relationship between the teaching staff and students. As a result of the available information provided by the system to the whole university community, a number of issues arise. Among these issues, one of the most important is the concept of information transparency which the authors present on the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper introduces the concept of digital city and discusses how to assess a particular project, concerning its success in connecting the real city with its virtual counterpart. The Gaia Global project is a three-year digital cities project within the Portugal Digital Initiative, a program related with the Information Society operation program framework. It provides a digital city counterpart for Vila Nova de Gaia, with around 288000 inhabitants, considering 2001 figures. The Gaia Global project is focused in offering an environment to involve as much as possible both the local population and other people interacting with Gaia related and/or based activities. A central issue to the success of the project is bringing together people to use and adopt Gaia Global features in their day to day life. This paper argues that beyond the definition of traditional project indicators related with digital cities projects, the use and potential project dissemination counting people involved is a central issue to both assess and measure impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents the initial model proposed for the Gaia Digital project. This three-year project is currently starting off within the Portugal Digital Initiative, within the Information Society operation program framework. It provides a digital city counterpart for Vila Nova de Gaia, with around 288000 inhabitants, considering 2001 figures. The Gaia Digital model is briefly described and its main concepts are introduced such as the action areas and the notions of square, building, roads, and citizens. The Gaia Digital project is focused in offering an environment to involve as much as possible both the local population and other people interacting with Gaia related and/or based activities. Additionally, Gaia Digital adopts a social approach t o the digital cities concept where technology follows information needs and information just exists to support people interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]