The OASIS eGovernment Member Section hosted a workshop on "Electronic Identity and Citizen-Centric Administration" on 1 May in conjunction with the Open Standards 2008 symposium in Santa Clara, California. The eGov workshop focused on authentication, security, composability for Web services, inter-operability frameworks, and implementation guidelines for open standards.

Good e-government starts from the citizen's eye view, not the bureaucrat's needs. Many expensive e-government investments have failed to deliver - we have good information online, but this adds up to "i-government". To quote from /The Economist, "The citizen-centered perspective is short-hand for the good point - so far largely ignored in e-government design- that setting up new electronic systems only to mimic the old offline ones is a bit of a waste of time"[February 16 2008].

The OASIS eGov Workshop put the spotlight on the citizen and the taxpayer, focusing on their needs and exploring the technology that can deliver real solutions based on open standards.