As politicians ponder how to promote (or, in some cases, wreck) Europe's constitution, officials are already creating a single European Union on the web. The goal is a web portal through which citizens wanting to live, work, set up a business or study in another member state would be able to find out what they need to know, and tackle the necessary bureaucracy online.

The portal, called Your Europe, is supposed to go live later this year.

Whether this is realistic remains to be seen: most member state governments are having enough difficulty putting their own official procedures online, without worrying about other member states.

Europe already has a website, the gateway www.europa.eu.int, revamped this year to handle the EU's 20 country languages. It is packed with information for Euro-junkies, including the draft constitution, but there's little of use to people's everyday lives.

Hence the need for Your Europe. In its strategy for the new site, the European Commission's Interchange of Data between Administrations project warns that individual countries' e-government services could become barriers to freedom of movement if they don't work across borders.

A pilot Your Europe is already at http://europa.eu.int/public-services. The site contains pointers to information, especially for businesses, but is not a compelling experience. A search for "social security" turns up a page for employers, information on family allowances in Luxembourg and a link to the European Agency for Health and Safety at Work.

According to the commission, Your Europe will answer useful questions, such as whether a qualification is valid in a particular member state. The strategy recognises that the only way to assemble this kind of information is to do it locally. However, central coordination will be essential to control quality and set standards for terminology and processes.

The project may be good news for thousands of monoglot Brits relocating to France, Spain and elsewhere: the portal's home pages will be fully multilingual, while information it finds in national sites "should be available in at least one official language" in addition to languages spoken in the country concerned. However, the choice of additional language would be up to local administrations.

The project has a modest cost: €750,000 this year, with an annual cost of €500,000 to sustain it.

Even so, the project isn't getting a particularly warm reception. Most e-government programmes are surprisingly inward-looking, and are busy sorting out the balance of power between national, regional and local web portalsinternally. If Your Europe lives up to its promise, it will add another layer of complexity. One suggestion is that the portal should be accompanied by cutting one other tier of e-administration.

As most public services are run by local authorities rather than national government, a good candidate for the chop would be national web portals. Which is yet another reason why a great many people would like to see Your Europe strangled at birth.