With the fast-growing evolution of postal e-services, developing the .post platform for tomorrow’s postal sector is a priority.
The process of getting .post up and running is not easy but progress is being made. As work on establishing .post continues, UPU member countries are being asked to step up their involvement in the project.
“The results of the UPU’s recent study on the evolution of postal e-services confirms what we have heard throughout 2011 during the UPU strategic round tables and Post-Expo in Stuttgart, Germany. Postal CEOs worldwide – from both industrialized and developing countries – say that technology will play a critical role in helping them to deliver modern postal services to their customers,” says UPU Director General Edouard Dayan. “And they are urging UPU members to come together to build the .post platform that will help them deliver these future postal e-services.”
In 2011, the UPU’s official bodies, the Postal Operations Council (POC) and the Council of Administration (CA), approved the domain management policy, and some countries, like China, Italy and Saudi Arabia, are working on pilot projects to demonstrate the .post platform’s potential value. These projects deal with secure, cross-border registered electronic mail and doing business with online shopping malls. A UPU-led pilot project dealing with international registered e-mail is also in the making.
Some Posts are already successful domestically in these areas. But the challenge is how to expand these services at the international level. An interconnected and secure .post platform gathering interoperable e-services is part of the UPU’s vision to help its member countries make that happen, says Dayan.
“What the UPU is trying to achieve with .post is not much different to what happened when the organization was created,” Dayan explains. “In 1874, 22 countries with their own postal infrastructure, services and bilateral agreements came together to create the UPU and a single physical postal territory that interconnected them. Member countries have asked us to obtain .post and, now that we have, they must come together to progressively build .post and turn it into the single electronic postal network of the future.”
The main focus is building .post’s technical infrastructure. Poste Italiane, a leader in postal e-services, is providing expertise on this part of the project. The internet registry, registrar and escrow agent needed to operate .post should be selected by the end of 2012’s first quarter, meaning that the .post platform could be operational by August 2012, if all goes according to plan.
.post Cooperative?
While a handful of countries are supporting the initial development of the .post platform, including Italy, France, Portugal, Macau, South Korea, Tanzania and Sri Lanka, more support will be essential to sustain .post later on.
One proposal is to create an official .post group, a sort of cooperative similar to the UPU’s EMS and Telematics Cooperatives or Direct Marketing Advisory Board (DMAB), which are funded by extrabudgetary contributions by its members. Such a group for .post would help secure member countries’ commitment in developing the platform after its initial creation.
“.post is a significant, innovative project, and innovation requires risk and new thinking and the aim of an extra budgetary group is to support the project’s financing, strategy and development in future,” says Paul Donohoe, e-services programme manager at the UPU.
“.post is an ongoing initiative and having its own cooperative would enable interested member countries to engage in its strategy and be part of its development.”
Dreaming together
Italy’s Giovanni Brardinoni, chair of the Standards and Technology Committee under the POC, presented the proposal to set up a .post group to the CA in November. He said that, creating this group, with its own governance and self-fi nancing structure, would refl ect the strategic importance of .post. It would bring together member countries interested in developing innovative and interoperable .post applications, propose policies, regulations and standards. The group could also narrow the digital divide by ensuring a universal electronic infrastructure accessible to all, including the less developed countries.
To emphasize the importance of such a group for a strategic project like .post, Brardinoni appealed to UPU member countries, using lyrics from a popular Brazilian song: “When we dream alone, it’s just a dream. When we dream together, it’s the beginning of a new reality.”
In the end, the CA adopted the group’s idea in principle but asked that further study on its functioning and fi nancing be presented at the body’s February-March 2012 session, the last before the 25th Universal Postal Congress in September-October.
Extra budgetary groups, such as the EMS and Telematics Cooperative and the DMAB, are not new concepts at the UPU. They enable voluntary members to work together on the promotion on specific services or products and help cover activities that cannot be financed
solely by the organization’s annual budget of 37 million CHF (39 million USD), one of the smallest in the entire United Nations system.
Courtesy : 4/2011 Union Postale · 17 (http://news.upu.int/uploads/media/UPU_4_2011_EN_net_01.pdf )
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