SEEM background and the Research Reflection Group In October 2002, the New Working Environments Unit F4 of the European Commission DG Information Society organised a workshop on the Single European Electronic Market (SEEM), where the basics for the SEEM vision were introduced and discussed. After the organisation of the workshop, a group of individual, self-funded volunteers, were grouped in the “SEEM Research Reflection Group” (SEEM RRG) which was active in disseminating the SEEM concept and achieving contributions from many industry sectors and communities from within Europe and abroad. The process started with a Networking Session in the EU IST event in Copenhagen in November 2002 where, in a very crowded room, different sectors expressed their opinions on what SEEM should be and which research frontiers they envisaged for achieving such an objective. Chemical, agriculture, furniture, textile, and building and construction were some of the sectors that took the floor.  These were coupled with different horizontal perspectives about the SEEM vision such as the research interfacing to standardisation and interoperability frameworks, education and training of engineers, and the constraints and opportunities of the legal issues. Up to thirteen different meetings and workshops were organised or participated by the SEEM RRG. This process ended months later with the Plenary Panel of the CE2003 Conference in Funchal “Vision for a Single Electronic Market”, where invited experts from the EU, USA, Australia, Canada and Korea exchanged their views about a common space of information for business from a world-wide perspective.
The SEEMseed project Resulting from this activity the SEEMseed project was designed as “the seed for the SEEM design and implementation”. Partially funded by the European Commission in the frame of the EC Priority 8 “Policy orientated research”, the project has a two-fold structure: §          The design of the basics for a logical SEEM infrastructure, and its application in a complex scenario to serve as “proof of concept” – the technological side of the project. §          The conducting of a study with the participation of all the SEEM stakeholders, feeding an open discussion on strategy and policy-related actions to be taken – the policy building side of the project.
The SEEMseed team has applied a structured methodology to develop the SEEM roadmap, identifying the challenges and defining specific goals and actions to meet the detected gaps. The SEEMseed project designed and performed a Delphi study to which over 1400 participants from 70 countries contributed. With 20% of participants from outside Europe, the European vision is appropriately complemented with international perspectives. From the point of view of the stakeholders diversity, the study received contributions from research (43%), technology and eService providers (21%), industry (12%), policy makers (6%), standardization bodies and consortia (3%), and education and training (15%). Complemented with interviews of officers at the European Commission, the results of the study fed the roadmap design for SEEM concept implementation. This provided input to the SEEMseed roadmapping team, to start mapping near- and long-term needs, and to identify solution approaches to meet those needs. The SEEMseed team then conducted a focused workshop in Rome targeting each SEEM key area and defining time-based goals, requirements, and actions to develop the SEEM roadmap.	Related project results: D1-1 Identified target issues and stakeholders. D1-4 Stakeholders’ viewpoint.
Based on the survey and workshop results, the roadmap document was developed and distributed to SEEMseed partners and external experts for review. The SEEM roadmap is comprehensive. Each of the three key areas – Business Perspective, Technological Perspective and Regulatory Perspective – is broken down into a series of tiered "relevant themes" encompassing the important concepts in that domain. For every relevant theme, the SEEM roadmap characterizes the current state, defines the desired future vision and actual gaps, identifies the goals required to achieve the vision and surpass the gaps, and defines tasks to achieve each goal. The tasks are re-organised into four main action lines, respectively towards awareness, policy, development and deployment,  then time-phased to create the pathway to SEEM concept implementation. The SEEM roadmap defines visions and supporting goals that can be used as a resource pool of recommendations for the EC on the formulation and implementation of community policies. The SEEM roadmap is a living document with its own life-cycle, requiring continuous surveillance and refinement.	Related project results: D4-3 Vision for a SEEM infrastructure. D4-4 Legal and trust issues. D4-5-b Info Space for SMEs and workers. D4-7 The Roadmap to SEEM implementation.
In parallel, the SEEMseed project organized or participated in over twenty international workshops in order to disseminate the initiative and to complete the collection of opinions from the research society and policy makers.	Related project results: List of events and presentations D5-6-b Contribution to i2010 – Key Workshops. Report on dissemination (1). Report on dissemination (2). Report on dissemination (3).
The SEEMseed project also contributed to the SEEM concept implementation from a technical point of view by developing what could become the embryo of the SEEM technical –logical- infrastructure. Though the SEEM concept is very wide and many different technical issues are contemplated in its vision about the future, the SEEMseed project focused on registries and repositories of information, within the field of SEEM. The focus on registries and repositories has been made since these are often intrinsic as a basic level of infrastructure which can then be later augmented with other conceptual layers such as execution mechanisms, business processes, transactions and semantics.	Related project results: D2-1 Requirements specification. D2-2-1 Business design specification. D2-2-2 Technical specification. D2-3 Prototype (steps for a user willing to implement). D2-4 Prototype validation report. D2-5-2 Technology and market watch.
Furthermore, the role of the technology development as ICT-related policy enabler can not be complete without exploiting it in the society targeted by the policy. The project implemented the SEEM concept in a specific and complex scenario including business-to-business, business-to-administration and international relationships both amongst industries and public administrations in different levels (member states and regions). Therefore putting in practice the embryo of the infrastructure referred above, and solving issues of a relevant sector for the European economy: the pollutant waste management and control across Europe. The objective of the project in this field was to facilitate companies and public authorities in controlling hazardous and pollutant waste generation, transportation, management and recycling within each member state and across the European Union. This deployment implemented the specifications of the registry framework developed by SEEMseed. The project tested the approach with pilot applications involving both SEEM technical issues (trust, discovery and negotiation, open standards required, authentication and non-repudiation of transactions, services for mobile workers, and so on) and SEEM stakeholders (public authorities, industry, and technology providers).	Related project results: D3-1 Process model. D3-2 Waste management scenario. D3-4 Waste management case study. D3-5 Common dictionary.   Project management report: D5-5 Publishable management report.
The project therefore generated tangible resources for facilitating the wide understanding of the SEEM concept by the society, including industry SMEs and public administrations at regional, national and European level; as well as to detect further needs of improvement at organisational, technological and legal levels. This scenario contributed to the ultimate project aims in two main ways: §          Facilitating a much better understanding for the SEEM stakeholders of the concepts behind the policy formulation in a technology-oriented perspective, as well as in the market, legal and trust perspectives. §          Contributing to improve the basis and the experience upon which further recommendations for future Community policies can be generated. Along the project progress, and especially in the final stages, other research initiatives were launched, specifically focused on ICT research and less policy-oriented. Some of them claimed to contribute to the SEEM concept implementation. Others were simply detected and analysed, concluding that their contribution could be very valuable. It is expected that those projects will keep building the SEEM concept if an appropriate umbrella for co-ordination is created by the European Commission.
The i2010 Strategy, SEIS, SEEM and SEEMseed While running the SEEMseed project we introduced the concept of the “Single European eSpace” at the European Business Summit, organised in March 2004 with the title of “Research and innovation: a European strategy for more growth and jobs”. By going further to the original SEEM concept, our objective was to drop the mental restriction that the concept “market” could generate in public, and to expand the scope of the SEEM principles to the e-Society as a whole[1]. The concept of a Single European Information Space comes now to the forefront of the European strategy. In 2005 the targets of the Lisbon strategy were not achieved and the new Commission re-launched the programme with the main focus on growth and jobs. The importance of ICT was clearly highlighted in this respect and the new ICT initiative i2010 is an immediate response to the Lisbon strategy re-launch. The EC Annual Progress Report on January 2006 reviewed the National Reform Programmes and identified four challenges: §          Investing more and better in research and education by setting clear targets (3% for R&D, 2% for higher education). §          Freeing-up SMEs and unlocking their business potential (strengthening entrepreneurship and cutting the red tape). §          Getting people into work (a lifecycle approach to employment). §          Towards a European policy for energy in a global environment. All these areas have strong links to ICT, and ICT is recognised to be a key area to spur productivity growth. Not only all the National Reform Programmes address ICT, but for a some Member States ICT is a central challenge of their strategy. The i2010 strategy is a general framework to reinforce the contribution of technology to Europe performance, creating a favourable environment for competitiveness and growth, and increase the welfare of European citizens through increased use of ICT. The i2010 strategy is conceived as a shared responsibility between the EU Institutions, the Member States and all other Stakeholders. The i2010 strategy, addressed to a European Information Society for growth and employment, includes three areas of priority[2]: §          A Single European Information Space –SEIS-, which promotes an open and competitive internal market for information society. §          Innovation and investment in ICT research to promote growth and more and better jobs. §          Inclusion, better public services and quality of life, to assure that everybody benefit from ICTs and also public authorities increase efficiency. As the first priority, SEIS has an aim of open and stable markets for electronic communications, services and the emerging digital services economy. Whilst SEEM certainly is strongly linked to, and can promote, the 2nd and 3rd priorities clearly it is most linked to the first.  In fact, the SEEM definition was a pre-cursor to the SEIS term although its scope has now widened.  The SEIS priority is itself focused around the following challenges: §          Interoperability: Enhancing devices and platforms that talk to one another. §          Security: Making the internet safer and increasing trust. §          Content: Increased legal and economic certainty to encourage new services. §          Speed: Fast broadband to deliver richer content. The focus of SEEM and SEEMseed is around the challenge of interoperability whilst still being respectful of the need for security and trust.  Thus, in this sense, SEEM ideas are a kick-start to the ICT research endeavours connected with SEEM, and the SEEMseed proposed embryo infrastructure can form a basis for many SEIS related research projects. SEEMseed is focused on interoperable layers to provide digital services in an open, neutral and standardised way. Therefore, the SEEMseed project is in a perfect position to contribute to the design of EC Policies related to Single European Information Space. What is also needed is a policy framework supporting the initiatives contributing to SEIS/SEEM. In addition to the opportunity of including SEIS vision in the 7th Framework Programme objectives, the Competitiveness and Innovation Programme (CIP) for 2007-2013, and mirroring the i2010 strategy, one of the three proposed CIP programmes is the ICT Policy Support Programme, which shall provide the action for the Development of the Single European Information Space and strengthening the internal market for information products and services[3].