Opening speech of Dr. Pavel Gantar, Minister of the Information Society, Slovenia (Published on: 03.06.2002) Ministers, Heads of Delegations, Representatives of the European Union, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, On behalf of the organisers - of the EU Comission, DG Information Society and Slovenian Government I welcome you at the European Ministerial Conference "Information Society - Connecting Europe". I am very glad that so many participants are taking part at this conference. This indicates that the issues that we are going to address at the conference are important for the future development of our societies. The conference is going to address the development of information society, we will assess the past experiences that are outlined in the Progress report to eEurope+, but more importantly we are going to review some recommendations for the future development. No doubts, central questions that we will raise and try to answer are how to speed up the processes that lead to information society, how to catch up with the most advanced countries and of course how to make the benefits of new informational technologies and services to the benefits of our citizens. And that is what the slogan of the conference "Inclusion, Participation, Trust and Security" speaks about. Action plan eEurope+ has enabled the participation and inclusion of accession countries in certain information society programmes and projects of European Union. And I certainly hope that some other countries will follow soon. Trust and Security are necessary preconditions for further development applications and projects that will deliver services for our citizens. Nonetheless we still have a lot to do. We have to modernise our governments, to speed up the processes that will enable competition at the telecommunication markets and to make services available to the citizens for fair prices. Greater emphasis should be given to make the new telecommunication and information technologies available in our education system. To sum up we have to put the programmes of information society higher on our governmental agendas! Ministers, Heads of delegations, distinguished guests, I wish you fruitful two days in Ljubljana, I wish that many ideas and incentives will produced in out discussion and above all that all this will have a positive effects on our endeavours to make to make the benefits of new technologies available for our citizens. Thank You very much Republic of Slovenia, Ministry of Information Society in co-operation with the European Commission, DG Information Society and DG Enlargement Contact info: gp.mid@gov.si Web: http://emcis.gov.si, http://www.europa.eu.int/eeuropeplus