NESTA in the UK (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) - has commissioned a couple of very useful publications. Social by Social is a practical guide to using new technologies to create social impact. It makes accessible the tools you need to engage a community, offer services, scale up activities and to sustain projects.
NESTA also commissioned the authors of Social By Social to produce a separate policy pamphlet based on the Social by Social materials. Local by Social outlines how local authorities can use social media to achieve more for less. It also highlights the risk to councils if they ignore the technological advances of social media and the people using them. You can download the pamphlet from the same website.
Ten months ago Fingal County Council launched Ireland’s first open data website. Ten months later Fingal remains the only Irish Government website to make its data available online. In this post Dominic Byrne of Fingal County Council explores why this is the case and makes some suggestions for encouraging more Irish Government Agencies to publish Open Data.
We need a National Open Data policy
Government agencies should identify and release data that is subject to FOI.
Create a standardised Open Data technical infrastructure that can be rapidly deployed at low cost
Those agencies that currently publish data under restrictive licences should change to a more open licence where possible
Create an Irish Open Data licence
Develop standards for formats, protocols, vocabularies, etc. This work should happen in parallel with the release of Open Data.
Raise awareness within the Public Sector of Open Data and its benefits, and demonstrate that Open Data is an opportunity and need not be seen as a threat.
Debategraph offers a powerful way for communities to learn about, think through, and decide upon complex issues.
It does so by enabling communities of any size to externalize, visualize, question, and evaluate all of the considerations that any member thinks may be relevant to the topic at hand – and by facilitating intelligent, constructive dialogue within the community around those issues.
Moreover, each public map contributes to, and forms part of an accumulating graph of structured understanding and insight across all of the communities on a growing range of topics, which, as the topics intersect, may accelerate and enrich each community’s understanding of the topics each is considering.
Thus, for example, three separate maps developed by communities of experts on changing weather patterns, population growth and water resources may begin intersect, as cross-links are added, and the specialized knowledge from each domain can start to be seen, and considered, together as part of a broader and deeper systemic whole.
Similarly, the arguments mapped in the context of a proposal to build a wind farm in one location, become a useful resource to other people facing the same kinds of choices elsewhere (in the country and globally).
Governments today recognize that in order to deliver effective public policy, they need to enhance citizen and community involvement in the policymaking process. Unfortunately, policymaking, particularly at the EU level, is seen by many as an elitist process, taking place only among highlevel decision makers and the more influential members of society.
For the average EU citizen, locating, accessing and using uptodate information, resources and tools can often be very difficult – leaving many citizens unsure about the key policymaking issues facing Europe or even how to begin to understand them. Puzzled by Policy aims to help correct this worrying situation by providing all citizens – regardless of their subject matter knowledge, IT or literacy skills – with an engaging and easytouse platform where they can learn about and engage with topical policy issues, starting with immigration.
Since 2005, the European Commission has attempted to tackle the perceived democratic deficit in Europe by funding a wideranging series of eParticipation projects. Until very recently, however, technical and social limitations have tended to prevent panEuropean projects from reaching a mass audience. For the most part, citizens have needed direct access to a computer to locate and use the new tool as well as significant IT and literacy skills to navigate the policy debate. Given these restrictions, it is hardly surprising that most projects have only been able to target specific groups such as the young or environmentally conscious.
Puzzled by Policy meets this challenge headon by combining fully researched and tested eParticipation concepts and tools, with new Web 2.0, advisory and widget technologies, to reduce the complexity of policymaking and legislative processes at the EU level and proactively engage citizens in the policymaking process.
The project is led by the National University of Ireland, Galway – Digital Enterprise Research Institute (NUIG) and a consortium consisting of 12 partners from nine European Countries (Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and United Kingdom). European University Institute (EUI), Cyntelix and Athens Technology Centre (ATC) will collaborate on the technical implementation of the platform. 21c Consultancy, Greek Research and Technology Network (GRNET) and the Institute for Electronic Participation (INePA) will provide project support, evaluation and dissemination expertise to engage their networks of NGOs and industry groups as well as other stakeholders. Finally, the City of Torino, Dimos Athinaion Epicheirisi Michanografisis (DAeM) for the Municipality of Athens, Kopint-Datorg in Budapest, and the University La Laguna in the Canary Islands will coordinate the deployment of the local pilots whilst Lusa (the Portuguese News Agency) will support the European dissemination.
The Puzzled by Policy project: Helping you to be part of the EU (CIPICTPSP20093bis) is funded by the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP) – ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP).
The project started on 1st October 2010 and will run for 3 years.
The Political Reform Scorecard is a tool designed with leading independent experts to rate the quality of Irish political parties’ commitment to reform before election 2011, and to track implementation of reform measures thereafter.
Each party’s manifesto will be rated in five key areas in the lead-in to the election: Legislative; Electoral; Open government; Local government; and Public sector.
After the election the program for government 2011 will be rated to assess the extent to which manifesto promises have been incorporated. This site will then operate as a community hub for ongoing monitoring of implementation of reform.
In the first stage of the project, leading up to the agreement of the programme for government 2011, you can get involved by emailing admin@reformcard.com.
In its second stage, the project will be looking to build an online community of committed activists to collaborate to weight priority areas for reform and to monitor ongoing implementation of relevant parts of the programme for government.
Interesting article published in the Guardian recently examining the worthiness of collaborative ‘crime maps’ in the UK.
The newly released crime maps site are a fundamentally unreliable source of information, because they are subject to unreported changes by the police forces compiling them both before and after they are displayed, and the data will not be stored on the site for comparison over time, observers say.
There is also growing concern among developers who want to use the data to paint a picture of the UK’s crime and policing strategies that the maps will give a distorted picture of crime in neighbourhoods – and that the apparent transparency in publishing them instead hides behind-the-scenes decisions about what crimes to report.
Adrian Short, a Sutton-based developer, says that “what we’re looking at here isn’t a value-neutral scientific exercise in helping people to live their daily lives a little more easily, it’s an explicitly political attempt to shape the terms of a debate around the most fundamental changes in British policing in our lifetimes.” He accuses the maps of being “pseudo-transparency”, and says that the site is “worse than useless”..
…That contrasts sharply with the US, which trailblazed the concept of crime mapping by allowing third-party developers to use crime data published by local police forces to map reports of incidents. One of the first, chicagocrime.org, was set up in April 2005, and began mapping at once. There have been no reports of adverse effects from the detailed crime mapping – which includes times and locations of reported crimes – from any cities in the US where it has been tried….
…
Jonathan Raper, an external developer who has developed a number of local data sites using UK government information, notes five key flaws in the map data:
• Locations used are approximate (so that “top 10 crime streets” may actually be places which have had no crime).
• Data for streets with fewer than 12 postal addresses is apparently not recorded “to protect privacy”.
• Some data such as sexual offences and murder is removed – even though it would be easy to discover and locate from other police reports.
• Data covers reported crimes rather than convictions, so some of it may turn out not to be crime.
• The levels of policing are not provided, so that two areas with the “same” crime levels may in fact have “radically different” experiences of crime and policing.
Recently launched in the US GovHub is a new ‘GitHub for government’ that aims to be the comprehensive repository for US government open source development projects. Something similar over here would seem to be a good idea, there are lots of simultaneous software development efforts going on across Local Authorities in Ireland, collaboration across public sector organisations would be enhanced with a service like this.
See also Civic Commons, whose mission is committed to the following:
Facilitating the sharing of code among government entities, with an eye towards developing an “Open Civic Stack”
Connecting governments throughout all phases of technology procurement, and building systems for more transparent & informed technology choices
Developing and supporting Open Data and Open Standards as foundations of an “Open Civic API”
Spreading government technology best practices
Building a community of “civic hackers” and give them clear opportunities to assist in the development of government technology
And… Forge.mil
Forge.mil is a family of services provided to support the US DoD’s technology development community. The system enables the collaborative development and use of open source and DoD community source software.
An excellent US army handbook on Social Media this document provides extensive social media guidance. It contains information for Army leaders, guidance for Army Families, operations security tips, branding information, checklists, regulations and frequently asked questions.
Lots of useful tips and guidelines , simple to understand and mostly based on common sense. Any large company could use most of the advice contained in this presentation.
Interesting interview in the Guardian, Harriet Minter talks to Martha Lane Fox,about what UK councils be doing to help citizens join the Race Online?
Martha Lane Fox: They must be encouraging digital champions at every level. These might be employees, partner organisations or private companies. Then they need to find people who are offline and work with digital champions to help them. We’ve got nine million people in this country who have never used the web, so we’ve got to start believing that we can give them the skills to do this. A large part of this is matching up skills. Councils have lots of technology which could be better used for the community. For example, schools and GP’s surgeries – they’ve both got PCs which are locked up at 5pm rather than being used, surely there’s more we could be doing with them?
Councils are being seen as a leader in this, so they need to behave as such. They need to think if there are there ways they could be more aggressive in providing better digital services which will encourage people online
Today Fine Gael Launched a new ‘forum’ on their website to allow the people to make suggestions to the Party, I attempted to post the comment (reproduced below) to the site, but it appears suggestions to the site are limited to 160 characters..
at the moment it seems to be serving the purpose of providing a mechanism for people to vent their frustrations, wouldn’t it be much better if this energy could be harnessed and the forum used to allow people to discuss issues and collaborate on identifying possible solutions?
My ‘attempted’ comment
Why don’t you open this up more and allow people to talk with each other in an online forum? You could moderate it for bad language and slanderous or libellous comments?
This site in its current form lacks transparency (are all comment visible in the scroller? And why cannot I see all comments if I want to?) and is open the same criticisms as those levelled against similar efforts by the Labour Party in the UK and more recently by Fianna Fail on their unsuccessful attempt to do something similar in 2009 (now offline …)
The thing is, people want to talk to each other about these issues, and they will know that if they can have this discussion on a Fine Gael forum, that at the very least Fine Gael are listening, but how much richer would this process be if Fine Gael actually entered a dialog with the people by using this new site (or more ideally, a true forum site) as a tool to start a dialogue with the people?!
