Rialtas.net – Government 2.0

Kilkenny Local Authorites launch “Our plan” the online consultation for the Kilkenny County Development Plan and Kilkenny City & Environs Development Plan 2014-2020.

The site will be the online location for Citizens to collaborate with the City and County Council in the creation of the plans. Citizens can register on the site to make comments or suggestions on the plan or formal contributions to the plan. The site will evolve along with the planning process and the Councils hope that it will provide a useful additional opportunity for citizens to contribute to the development of the plans.

The site will use video , polls and other interactive elements to encourage citizens to engage with the Councils and with their community in the formulation of the Plans.

http://ourplan.kilkenny.ie

Graeme Burton write on Computing.co.uk

Amazon – which claims to be the world’s largest web services company – and cloud platform vendor Salesforce.com are set to join the government’s G-Cloud 2.0, according to the organisation’s new programme director, Denise McDonagh, who takes over from Chris Chant at the end of the month.
The recruitment of the two big names is a boost for the G-Cloud, and will enable public-sector organisations to use the two companies’ software and services on uniform terms and conditions. Both had turned down the opportunity to join up in February, when G-Cloud 1.0 launched, over concerns about their legal obligations under the terms of G-Cloud 1.0.

According to McDonagh, the organisation has had to reduce the number of terms and conditions – from hundreds of pages down to just 20 – and simplify the wording to attract new suppliers.

The recruitment of Salesforce.com is significant, following stinging criticism from the company’s CEO, Marc Benioff, in September last year.
“The UK government is way behind in this and way too much into virtualisation and the G-Cloud, which is basically just a big virtual machine that has not been executed well,” he told ZDnet.
He added that he believed too much public-sector money was being wasted on datacentres with utilisation rates running in single-digit figures. The public sector could make huge savings by adopting cloud services, he suggested.

Read entire article..

From  SARAH LAI STIRLAND writing on TechPresident

The New York City Council is expected to today vote on a far-reaching open data bill  that would codify many of the principles articulated by open government advocates in recent years.

If made law, the bill would go further than San Francisco’s pioneering 2010 open data law in depth and scope, obliging agencies to provide data online in machine-readable format though a single, citywide portal. But perhaps in a nod to the amount of work involved in working through large volumes of existing data, city agencies won’t have to make theirs available through the city’s portal until the end of 2018.

The city’s move is the latest step taken in the United States as part of a wider movement by open government advocates to remake government services in the Web 2.0 age. While the specifics can be esoteric, the impact of the changes are expected to be profound. The goal of publishing machine-readable information using common technical standards is to enable both the public and government employees to make cities better, whether that’s through the new raw material for a civic-oriented business to more strategically and efficiently making services available to citizens.

Read entire article..

See also an Article by Nick Judd at TechPresident on San Francisco’s g 2010 open data law

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, Feb 23, 2012 (MARKETWIRE) — The Honourable Tony Clement, President of the Treasury Board and Minister responsible for FedNor, today delivered a speech to representatives of the North Vancouver business community on the Government’s collaborative approach to communicate and serve Canadians through Open Government and better use of Web 2.0 tools.

“The Government of Canada recognizes the importance of social media and Open Government and is taking action to integrate these tools and ideas in its day-to-day operations,” Minister Clement said. “We are making more effective use of Internet-based tools, making the Government more connected and collaborating better with citizens than ever before.”

Read press release.

Puzzled by Policy is now live at http://join.puzzledbypolicy.eu/

Puzzled by Policy ‘Helping you to be part of the EU’ aims to provide citizens with an engaging and easy-to-use platform, where they can learn about and give their voice to policy issues concerning immigration in the European Union.

The platform allows users to graphically compare their views on immigration with national and EU immigration policies, as well as with the opinions of relevant stakeholders. Users are then encouraged to join discussions on particular aspects of immigration policy they feel strongly about

http://join.puzzledbypolicy.eu/

See previous Rialtas post on Puzzled by Policy.

Over 50 UK Local Authorities are participating in the re-launch of Roadworks.org, formerly known as www.elgin.gov.uk, later this month. ELGIN (Electronic Local Government Information Network) is a web-based system, which harvests information from local Streetworks Registers, and provides it to Utilities, contractors and the public.

Among the new features of the re-launch is a newRoadworks Alert feature, which sends map based information about forthcoming roadworks in their area to local Councillors and Parish representatives.

David Brownsey Joyce writes on Local Government Chronicle

Opening up local roadworks information is sometimes inhibited by a natural fear that inaccuracies will be exposed. This is a theme taken up by Warwickshire’s Jane Inman again: “Exposing the data encourages both ourselves and Utilities and their contractors to keep the information up to date”.

Accountability and transparency may be big drivers but so too is efficiency saving.  Opening up information and sharing it is the very basis of attempts to coordinate the forward planning of works and the savings of millions of pounds lost to the economy by traffic disruption. In July 2010 the Local Government Association  reckoned that greater coordination of works, produced by data sharing efforts like ELGIN , would save the economy millions of pounds in fuel savings alone!

The third plank of the Government’s Transparency agenda is that opening up public information will stimulate innovation and growth.

roadworks.org

Aniket Bhushan (of the North South Institute )Introduces Canada’s new International Development Platform

from the Market News

“The Candian North South Institute has developed, and recently launched, the Canadian International Development Platform (CIDP). The CIDP is a one-of-a-kind data-and-analysis-driven interactive platform that shows Canada’s engagement with the developing world. The CIDP offers the most comprehensive mapping of flows between Canada and developing countries, including detailed data and analyses on foreign aid, trade, investment, migration, and several other topics. The CIDP is an initiative of theNorth-South Institute (NSI) – which was recently ranked the best small think tank in the world – and builds on the institute’s 15-year track record of publishing the Canadian Development Report.

The aim of the CIDP is to engage Canadians on international development, elevate the level of debate by grounding it in the best available evidence base, and ultimately raise the profile of international-development issues in Canadian foreign policy. They do this by employing a combination of the latest in Web 2.0 tools and highly interactive data visualizations. The platform provides a virtual home for academics, policymakers, NGO and civil-society members, the media, and representatives from the corporate sector to come together to discuss development trends and issues, backed by the best available information base.”

Read entire article..

Visit CIDP website..

From Nick Judd on Tech president

“One of a very few large-scale experiments in how to apply open-source technology into government will largely be put on hold.

Civic Commons, a non-profit created to foster use of open-source technology in government and to encourage governments to release the software developed on their behalf for peers to adapt for their own uses, will become part of Code for America, another nonprofit initiative that brings Web 2.0 technology teams to city halls around the country, CfA announced on Friday. The most experimental aspect of Civic Commons was its work as a sort of openness sherpa for governments, helping them build software that can be shared and reused by other governments as well as adapting the work of other cities rather than contracting out for duplicate systems from scratch. That work will be discontinued for the time being, CfA announced.

This marks a new turn for a group of open-government and technology advocates hoping to make cities better with technology, part of a unique and ongoing effort to find out what works and what doesn’t when the worlds of the 21st-century tech sector and marble-floored city halls and statehouses collide.

CfA will continue to maintain another aspect of Civic Commons, Marketplace, which is a platform for tracking which software is being used by which cities and giving technologists the opportunity to compare notes. Going forward, CfA Director of Strategy Abhi Nemani will be the project manager on Marketplace.

Civic Commons is also the current home of Open311, a standard specification that now sees wide use in cities’ non-emergency call centers and allows for third-party applications to interact directly with the data, plotting incident reports or adding incident new ones. Its de-facto community manager, Philip Ashlock, will continue working on Open311 through his role at the civic technology development shop and people-centric urban planning and policy group OpenPlans. CfA and OpenPlans cooperated last year in incubating Civic Commons until it was ready to become more of an independent organization.

The shift comes as Civic Commons reaches the end of its current funding and most of its leadership moves on to other projects.”

Nick Grossman’s Closing Comment on Civic Commons

Previous Rialtas Post on Civic Commons

From Siliconrepublic.com

The Irish Government , EMC, along with Cisco, VCE, VMware and the IDA revealed plans to create a major cloud innovation centre.

Eircom recently hosted a symposium in Dublin on Social Media in Goverment.

“Can Social Media Deliver Better Online Government Services?”

the presentations are available for download from the site….someone should tell them about slideshare

Dr. Matt Crowe – Learning about Social Media and its Role in Communications
Joe Horan – FixYourStreet Case Study
Barry Kenny – Twitter On Track
Nathalie McDermott – Inclusion & engaging hard-to-reach communities with the web
Captain Pat O’Connor – Social Media in the Defence Forces Strat Comms
Andrew O’Kelly – Next Generation Channels & Service Experience
David Scanlon – Building Better Networks With LinkedIn Groups