UAE’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) has launched a promotional campaign to enrich content of the official portal of UAE Government, relying on the "crowdsourcing" method.

TRA allows users to contribute to content editing and development with their ideas and suggestions, as well as providing any information unavailable on the portal, and correcting any language errors that may exist.

The campaign has been a remarkable success, with the number of entries reaching 7847 during the first four months. The portal management team has studied and analyzed these posts, summarized them in the form of queries and addressed them to relevant government entities. Based on these queries and suggestions from portal users, more than 60 topics have been added and updated in different areas of the portal.

Hamad Obaid Al Mansoori, TRA director general, said: “Due to the rapid development of ICT and the ease of communication between governments and customers, crowdsourcing or community collaboration has become a successful method of achieving community goals that matter to people. This approach relies on individuals' participation to volunteer their efforts in group to serve a goal, case or project.”

“The TRA is keen to take the lead in crowdsourcing where it has launched the UAE Hackathon in January 2018, bringing together more than 781 participants, 213 volunteers, 58 observers and 46 trainers. The participating teams have come up with more than 60 viable ideas in different areas of life, in order to make people happy and raise the quality of life,” he added.

Salem Al Hosani, acting deputy director general of the Information and Smart Government Sector, said: “As the UAE government seeks to achieve global leadership in the Online Service Index (OSI), the TRA applies latest global practices to enhance e-participation, which is a component of the OSI. We came sixth globally in the OSI, and we are working to achieve further progress by 2020 to make the UAE a regional and global role model in digital transformation.”

“The UAE government seeks to shift from a ‘government to people’ approach to a ‘government with people’ approach, which relies primarily on people's participation in decision-making and policy-setting, as underscored by our wise leadership that the whole community is the real team and the government is the executive arm of projects and initiatives, and that society can shape the future,” he added.

The TRA published a questionnaire to make it easier for users to provide information and invited them to report any missing information in the portal or wrong information should be corrected or duplicate information to be deleted. – TradeArabia News Service