Update April 2000: Latvia

During the first quarter of this year there have been no serious changes in key person contacts and organisations regarding the Information Society field in Latvia.

In most cases people involved in IS activities represent organisations traditionally active in this field. First of all it concerns departments of Informatics and Communications of the Ministry of Transport: http://www.sam.gov.lv . Information about these key people contacts from Ministry of Transport is available in the ESIS database in relation with IS projects and IS promotion activities of previous year. During the first quarter of this year a number of IS projects and activities took place in Latvia where, in many cases, the same people took part. Some of them are included in the ESIS database: The 4^th meeting of the EU-CEEC Joint High Level Committee (JHLC) held in Riga on 2-3 March 2000 (director of the department of Informatics A. Virtmanis); call for projects on creation of the backbone network for cable TV services in Riga (deputy director of the department of Communications A. Jekabsons); IS project "The Unified Information System of Municipalities" (head of the Informatics strategy division V. Briedis).

At the same time we observe a spread of IT more and more in different areas and new people and organisations are becoming involved in IS activities. For example a number of new organisations and people are included in the ESIS database this quarter. Among them are the Naturalisation Office of the Republic of Latvia http://www.np.gov.lv (head E. Aldermane) on the subject of realisation of IS project "Creation of the automated system for the provision of the process of naturalisation", Union of Local and Regional Governments http://www.lps.lv (advisor G. Krasovskis) on the subject of realisation of IS project "The Unified Information System of Municipalities", State Enterprise Register http://www.ur.gov.lv (chief notary public M. Gulbis) on the subject of working out a legal status of electronic documents. For the first time the the Saeima (Parliament) of Latvia http://www.saeima.lv/ (head of Information department A. Dudina) and State Chancellery http://www.mk.gov.lv/eng/statecancellery (head of the department of Informatics A. Sarnovics) are included in a project on the subject of installation of special WWW servers for drafts of laws and normative documents.