"Citizens Europe" - Development of Website and Call Centre

The European Commission, DG X, has published advance notices concerning tenders for the creation, management and development of a "Citizens'' Europe" Website, to be integrated into the Commission''s Europa WWW server, and for the creation of a Call Centre to handle general information requests made to the Commission.

The Website will involve in particular:

- The future management and development of the existing "Citizens'' Europe" site (address: http://citizens.eu.int/) which provides information on the rights of citizens in the Single Market;
- The design, management and development of a site relating to the political rights of citizens (European elections, local elections, etc.), with regard to the protection of fundamental rights in the European Union.

Some texts will be provided by the Commission, whilst editing, re-writing and re-reading work may be anticipated for other texts. These texts will be made accessible on the multilingual "Citizens'' Europe" site. The production of by-products (CD-ROM, brochures, fact-sheets, etc.) is also envisaged.

The "Citizens'' Europe" Website will also act as a work tool for handling requests made by telephone and electronic mail to the planned Call Centre. The creation, management and development of the Call Centre will be dealt with in a separate contract. This Centre will work in coordination with decentralized information relays and networks in the Member States and will entail:

- The design, installation and development of the Call Centre;
- The availability of the necessary infrastructure;
- The rapid handling, in the 11 official EU languages, of information requests made by telephone and electronic mail to the Commission;
- The availability of experienced multilingual operators to answer the information requests;
- Quality control for handling information requests;
- Drawing up of quantitative and qualitative activity reports (analyses of the information requests, statistics, etc.);
- Technical assistance.

Invitations to tender concerning both these contracts are expected to be published in the Official Journal of the European Communities in June or July 1998.