Brazil to shift government sites to single domain

The Brazilian government announced plans to consolidate public sector information onto a single website.

The platform, to be named Gov.br, is hoped to go live in less than two years and generate yearly savings of up to 100 million reais ($25.4 million) following the deactivation of the current network, president Jair Bolsonaro said on Twitter earlier this week.

The first phase of implementation of the project is expected to complete by July 31, with a final deadline for migration to the central platform set for December 31, 2020.

"We want only one [information channel] to exist, that citizens in any part of Brazil can access and resolve any and every issue," Bolsonaro said.  

Maintaining thousands of citizen services across a variety of websites renders public services provision expensive and difficult, the Brazilian president noted.

"That is how the most modern countries in the world operate," he added, in an allusion to systems such as Gov.uk, the public sector information website created by the government in the United Kingdom to provide a single point of access to citizen services.

Trials for the UK portal started in 2011. A beta version went live in 2012 and just over a year later, all 24 ministerial departments and 28 other public sector organisations had their URLs redirected to the new platform.

Gov.uk is considered a huge success, having introduced major efficiency gains and simplified access to government content. The platform is now being future-proofed with technologies such as voice and machine learning.