The overall objective of Met@LoGo© is to diminish the digital divide by improving com­munication and cooperation capabilities between small cities and communities in Latin America and their SMEs by the use of information and communication technologies (ICT).

• Improve the quality of services
• Increase efficiency
• Contribute to economic development and ensuring the attractiveness of business locations
• Encourage democracy and participation
• Create broad access to Internet and Multimedia technology

Met@LoGo© concentrates its direct efforts on goals 1-3, while the project's process will encourage a more general shift towards increased participation and broader access. To reach these goals, Met@LoGo© seeks to provide 14 local administrations in 5 Latin American countries (Chile, Colombia, Honduras and Peru) with a simple tool to build and maintain a basic e-local governance portal for the benefit of local SMEs. The project purpose is to build tools and methodologies so that the results of the project can be passed on to other local administrations, ideally starting a snowball effect of innovation diffusion. The dissemination of information and technological innovation can spread both horizontally (local to local) and vertically (local to regional).

To increase e-readiness, tailor-made open source based Administration-to-Administration (A2A) and Administration-to-Business (A2B) applications will be developed to demonstra­te the benefits of digitalized transactions and workflow solutions. The “meta-e-local-governance” system will be hosted on an Internet-accessible server and will be managed by a local ASP (Application Service Provider) that will host a number of e-local gov­ernance portals, which will be interconnected via a peer-to-peer network. In this way, the technological innovation starts at the point with most obvious benefits: information-sharing and lower transaction costs for both SME and local administration. Met@LoGo© aims to be a clearly defined and pragmatic starting point, the first of many arches to the bridge across the digital divide.