The main urbanisations of the Municipality of Komen are the administrative and economic centre Komen and the medieval town Stanjel (one of the main cultural heritage attractions of Slovenia). Municipality of Komen is a part of the Karst Sub-region. The area is well known for its rich cultural heritage, its unique and well preserved nature, special Karst phenomena (caves), its famous agricultural products as for example Prosciutto (dried ham) and Teran wine.

The municipality sees the development of its ICT resources and dissemination of corresponding competence among the population as a strategic key issue in order to support a local qualified labour force, promote the specific agricultural and other local traditional products and develop a network of tourist services (B&B, apartments, inns), which are in harmony with the cultural and natural heritage of the region. The main focus within the project is to develop specific databases for enterprises within agriculture and tourism as well as the continuous training of the end-users in ICT-technologies.

Slovenian project partners, Municipality of Komen and the Entrepreneur Promoting Centre PPC Sezana started the implementation of the project within the municipality of Komen and now they are extending their activities to the Littoral-Karst-Region (7 % of the population of Slovenia).

The key element in the ptoject in Komen have been e-training courses for all SMEs to engage them in using the regional competence database tools as early as possibly and also in order to create on that basis an own small competence database in Slovene language for practical demonstration purposes. The courses consist of presentation of the regional competence project, open source, use of e-mail and internet, use of databases, work with Slovene competence programme, anti-virus-protection. Almost 60 end-users applied for participation at those e-training programmes and 40 of them concluded them successfully. At the moment 20% of all SME’s of Komen are presented in the database (mostly SME’s, also a few associations).

Supporting activities such as the e-training courses are vital especially for the small SMEs. Small SMEs have less financial, organisational or personal means for using or ordering other tools. Developing and offering the tools developed within the project means therefore concrete support for development of small SMEs and creating possibilities for them to be in a more equal position with the bigger companies.

In June 2002 an internet server was provided (with the technical help of Samuraj Data) to enable the Municipality of Komen to develop and implement further special applications of the regional competence software tools (i.e. for tourist SME’s), to ensure the dissemination of the project to other Slovene regions and especially to ensure the sustainability of the achieved results and programmes also after the expiring of the project in May 2004. The goal is to enable local software engineers to run regional competence software tools on open source base without the need for steady technical support by Samuraj data AB. Since November 2002 the Slovene competence programme (and database) has been running now on the Slovene server, so that is now possible to develop and test additional competence programme on that server.

With the inclusion of the Enterpreneur Promoting Centre Sezana in to the regional competence project, as one of the three regional development centres of the Littoral-Karst-Region, first dissemination activities have started during the second year of the project. A special information leaflet has been published, which will be used for the general promotion of the project in Slovenia. In the next months all SME’s of the Karst-Sub-Region will be invited to take part in the project. Additionally the development agency of Ilirska Bistrica at the border to Croatia will be further involved in the project. Furthermore the Municipality of Postojna (which is not part of the Littoral-Karst-Region) has expressed its interest to get more involved in the project, as they have got very positive information about the results, which have been achieved so far within the project.

In contacts with the Secretariat of the Pilot project Kras and after a presentation of the regional competence programme to the local representatives of the involved institutions (ministries and municipalities), the regional competence programme was included in the sub-regional development plan 2003-2006 for the Karst Sub-Region. This is very important for the further dissemination also sustainability of the regional competence programme after the formal ending of the EU-financed programme period.

The Municipality of Komen will focus on the development of further applications based on the regional competence database in order to show the practical use for local communities and other public institutions for supporting the local development. In our special case we will develop tools for better promotion and presentation of competences linked to tourist and some agricultural services, which foster the development of rural areas (tools will be useful for tourist information centres and local communities). Additionally we will offer all end-users special standardised home-pages of their company in order to make the regional competence tools even more attractive. With the help of those applicative tools we intend to attract more end-users to use the regional competence database tools and also to animate local communities to support actively the further dissemination of those tools.

Erik Modic
Municipality of Komen
E-mail: erik.modic@komen.si