Dubai eGovernment recently distributed prizes to the first four weekly winners of the Modhesh Friends Forum, an eGovernment initiative which has turned out to be one of the major attractions of the ongoing Dubai Summer Surprises (DSS). Modhesh Friends Forum is an online forum that enables children to post articles, pictures and paintings on a host of topics, while also allowing them to chat with Modhesh, the DSS mascot.
While three of the four winners – Maith Rashid Ali, Walid Mahmoud Hajouny and Mroud Bader Abdel Karem - belonged to the Modhesh Arabic Forum, the winner of the third week – May Ali - was a participant of the Modhesh English Forum. The English forum received a total of 1,055 responses whereas the Arabic forum received a remarkable 2,780 responses.
"The enthusiastic response to the forum has surpassed our own expectations," said Rehab Lootah, eServices Provisioning Manager, Dubai eGovernment. "By skillfully merging education and entertainment, the forum has emerged as a key attraction at this year's DSS, and the overwhelming number of articles, pictures and paintings posted by children bears testimony to the popularity it enjoys."
"The forum offers immense entertainment value through its various attractions, while providing children an outlet for creative and artistic expression, thereby enabling them to constructively spend their summer holidays. Moreover, it has served as an excellent debating forum drawing wide participation from among children, where specific issues of interest are discussed and debated at length," she added.
The forum allows children to chat live with Modhesh from 10 am to 1 pm every day by logging on to the website, www.emodhesh.ae. To encourage children to interact with Modhesh, Dubai eGovernment has set up Internet kiosks at shopping malls and at the Modhesh Fun City.
In addition to the Modhesh Friends Forum, Dubai eGovernment, which is a member of the Organizing Committee of DSS, is organizing a website creation competition, with the aim to identify young talents and promote their web designing skills.
"Empowering children with essential IT skills is central to realizing our vision of a digital society. Dubai eGovernment will continue to organize innovative events and programmes aimed at enhancing children's familiarity with computers, and nurturing their technology skills," Lootah concluded.
Dubai eGovernment is a pioneering initiative in the region to provide online services across the spectrum of corporate and community life in the emirate. It also has a vision to integrate
individually automated government departments under the single umbrella of the eGovernment initiative, thus empowering employees across lines of businesses and levels of government, besides facilitating the lives of citizens and customers of the government. Dubai has taken a lead in the region in deploying eGovernment applications and is among the first few governments in the world to provide such integrated services to its citizens. The eGovernment portal (www.dubai.ae) is a single contact point masking the complexity of the bureaucratic procedures, and guiding access to all services in the easiest possible way. In addition, the eGovernment initiative seeks to improve and enhance procedures by maximizing the benefit from technology, so that users from all walks of life will be able to utilize the portal for their specific needs with considerable ease.
