Rialtas.net - Government 2.0

The UK Government is inviting feedback from the public to help generate ideas and useful applications for public data. They hope this approach will help to improve the way public information is communicated.The Power of Information Taskforce is running a competition on the UK Government’s behalf, and they have a £20,000 prize fund to develop the best ideas to the next level.

To indicate the kind of ideas that they are looking for they give the examples of Fix My Street Website (covered in an earlier Rialtas post),  and another example similar to the concept of ChicagoCrime.org

To show they are serious, the Government is making available gigabytes of new or previously invisible public information especially for people to use in this competition. 

 http://www.showusabetterway.co.uk

From Iain Thomson at Vnunet.com

A survey of 1,000 office staff has found that nearly a third of younger employees would consider quitting their job if Facebook was banned in the workplace.

The survey by IT services firm Telindus found that 39 per cent of 18 to 24 year-olds would consider leaving if they were not allowed to access applications like Facebook and YouTube.

A further 21 per cent indicated that they would feel ‘annoyed’ by such a ban.

The problem is less acute with 25 to 65 year-olds, of whom just 16 per cent would consider leaving and 13 per cent would be annoyed.

Mark Hutchinson, managing director of Telindus, said: “An outright ban on personal internet usage is clearly not the right approach.

“However, the challenge is to achieve the right balance between allowing employees personal internet time without jeopardising the bandwidth required for business applications.

“It is commercially unwise to have a bandwidth free-for-all, especially when you consider that downloading a single half-hour TV show consumes more bandwidth than receiving 200 emails a day for a year.”

Companies are increasingly looking to ban sites like Facebook because they clog up corporate networks and take up employees’ time.

Interestingly, the survey revealed that employees would be supportive of a ban if it made other network functions faster.

Increasingly young net users are using social networking sites and tools to stay connected with their peers and also to manage their ‘knowledge network’, given the nature of today’s highly mobile workforce, where staff move frequently between jobs and between organisations, use of these tools can assist individuals to manage their individual networks and also to manage their ‘personal knowledge’. Some examples of this would be the use of LinkedIn or Facebook to keep in touch with a growing number of personal and professional contacts, or perhaps the use of Del.icio.us to store bookmarks instead of storing bookmarks  within a corporate browser installation. The use of Web 2.o tools helps to ensure that when an individual moves between jobs or between organisations, that they can bring many of their knowledge resources with them.

Preventing access to these tools hampers knowledge workers in their work and increasingly access to these tools will no doubt prove the deciding factor for many net-genners in choosing what kind of organisation they would like to work for. Many smart organisations have already recognised the benefits both in increased morale and increased productivity facilitated by the  availability of various Web 2.0 tools.

A new (free) report by the New Local Government Network in the UK arguing that e-petitions could become an effective tool in creating a constant dialogue between communities and their elected representatives, helping to maintain a conversation in between elections and engaging voters, particularly young people.

The paper identifies four key advantages for councils to introduce e-petitioning:

* To widen participation to include those who appear to be more disengaged:
the young and the those who are less well-off;
* To establish methods of ongoing engagement that give people the ability to voice their opinions with methods accessible to them and the ability to see the impact this has;
* To ensure methods of accountability and direct dialogue with representatives;
* To provide methods by which information is readily available and accessible.

It also argues that e-petitioning should become a formal mechanism within the local authority “Community Call For Action”, which allows local residents to raise concerns about persistent or serious problems in their area and which local councillors have a duty to respond to.

See also an earlier post on Downing Street’s E-Petitions site. (Open Source software available)

Link

I came across a blog entry (in Federal Computer Week) in the US covering another example of a wiki being  used as part of a public consultative process. Officials from the US Environmental Protection Agency used a wiki to consult with citizens in Puget Sound. The ‘Puget Sound Information Challenge’ wiki was launched at a conference last November and participants were asked to contribute information that could help groups working to clean up Puget Sound.

In the two days that the Web page was up during the 2007 Environmental Information Symposium, the Web 2.0 application experienced over  18,000 page views, and 175 entries with everything from documents to feedback on decision support systems and a significant volume of e-mail. EPA also offered a phone number that people could call, but officials say they never got a phone call.
Link

Don Tapscott (one of the authors of Wikinomics) was invited by the Davos management to organise an impromptu meeting of business and government leaders and some leading academics and thinkers on the topic of rethinking democracy. The topic he chose was government 2.0 – how the new Web 2.0 might lead to new models of citizen engagement.

During the discussion Nine themes emerged:

1. Self organisation
2. Youth
3. What should governments do?
4. The Body Politique
5. Open APIs for Government
6. Levels of Government.
7. Past technological paradigms
8. What does geo-spatiality mean to government?
9. If there really is a new paradigm in government emerging – a government 2.0 – how can such a change occur?

Don blogs about the discussion in Canada’s Globe and Mail Newspaper (last Saturday 26th January 2008)

Read the full blog entry 

Just thought I would draw attention to New Zealand’s E-Government Website
http://www.e.govt.nz/

The site is a resource for government agency people in New Zealand who need up-to-date, easily accessible and authoritative e-government information & resources to assist them to achieve their agency’s e-government goals.

The e-government goals:

• By 2007, information and communication technologies will be integral to the delivery of government information, services and processes.
• By 2010, the operation of government will be transformed as government agencies and their partners use technology to provide user-centred information and services and achieve joint outcomes.
• By 2020, people’s engagement with the government will have been transformed, as increasing and innovative use is made of the opportunities offered by network technologies.

The site contains information on the E-government Strategy, the history of the programme and the ongoing work programme.

This page outlines how the site can be of benefit to government agencies in NZ and can aid collaboration between agencies.

http://www.e.govt.nz/services/workspace/workspace-tools.html/view

The site also outline standards and best practices in a number of different areas from procurement to policy creation to online authentication.

It also hosts information on the NZ Government E-Government Strategy
http://www.e.govt.nz/about-egovt/strategy/nov-2006/index.html

The site also serves as a portal for access to the NZ public sector Intranet

http://www.e.govt.nz/services/psi

The Public Sector Intranet (psi.govt.nz) aims to provide a single point, accessible by all public servants, where they can share information with their colleagues. It makes it easy for people to find information they need for their work, and make contacts in other agencies. It enables a sense of community, shared interests, and cross-agency cooperation.

The Public Sector Intranet (PSI) is provided by the NZ State Services Commission. The Commission launched PSI as a full production system in mid-June 2006.

The homepage lists some outline information about the Public Sector Intranet:

Why do we need PSI?

To achieve shared outcomes and work across agency boundaries, we need tools which support cross-agency work. We can all use PSI to gather together useful information across agency boundaries.

Benefits of the PSI

We can organise and share information and resources for our colleagues to reuse, reducing duplication of effort and promoting collaboration. We can share good practice and specialised services designed for cross-agency use. We can find and access our online-communities and locate useful contacts.

There is no charge for joining or using the PSI.

What will be on it?

Information you can expect to access through PSI:

• news and links relevant to all agencies
• toolkits and good practice
• online communities and cross-agency projects.

How can my agency join?

• Most public service agencies, non-public service departments and Offices of Parliament have already joined
• State sector agencies that are interested in using PSI, are invited to contact the PSI Team.

The NZ ‘E-Government’ Strategy seems to have been recently expanded into an overall ‘Digital Strategy’ involving a large degree of public consultation

The Digital Strategy is about creating a digital future for all New Zealanders, using the power of information and communications technology (ICT) to enhance all aspects of our lives. It is an action plan for ensuring New Zealand is a world leader in using information and technology to realise our economic, environmental, social and cultural goals, more on the digital strategy…

It seems to me that New Zealand may be leading the way in developing an approach to formulating Government Technology strategy. Hopefully a few of the powers that be in Ireland are paying some attention…

Late last year the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on held a hearing enlitled E-Government 2.0: Improving Innovation, Collaboration, and Access.

Invited to speak at the hearing were Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and the non profit charity the Wikimedia foundation, and John Lewis Needham, Manager of Public Sector Content Partnerships with Google.

Jimmy Wales,  spoke about his vision in building Wikipedia. The original vision statement for Wikipedia was for all to imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.

He related how open, collaborative media, like wikis enable more efficient gathering and dissemination of useful information. Although it may be counterintuitive that opening up a wiki project leads to a more useful compendium of information, that is what the experience has been with Wikipedia, and Wales believe that this can be the experience for government agencies and operations as well.

The First Amendment plays an important role in this project, as do traditional American ideals of individual responsibility. Under US law, everyone writing in Wikipedia takes responsibility for his or her own actions, just as is true everyone speaking in any public forum. The maintainer of this forum, the Wikimedia Foundation, has set down some fundamental codes of conduct, including but not limited to what Constitutional scholars call “time, place, and manner” restrictions, and I have personally imposed policies which strive toward respect for others, quality writing, and the citing of sources.

It is counter-intuitive to some that an open discussion with virtually no top-down command-and-control structures can generate a high quality encyclopedia. Nevertheless, it does.

Now, given that Wikipedia is a public enterprise, open to the entire public for collaboration and contribution, you may be wondering how wikis or the Wikimedia model may be useful to government. First of all, I want to note generally that there are other ways in which a wiki can be set up usefully, including setups that don’t involve opening the wiki to the general public. You can control access, but a wiki might be useful to an agency that wants to facilitate sharing information up and down the hierarchy (increased vertical sharing). And controlled-access wikis could be used to set up inter-agency information sharing as well (increased horizontal sharing).

The main point here is no requirement of necessity for the tool of a wiki to be open to the general public in order for it to be useful.

Wales then went on to give the Committee a quick overview of the concepts behind a wiki

Wales’ wikipedia primer:

The most basic idea of a wiki is “a website that can be easily edited by the readers” but modern wikis contain simple yet powerful features that allow for the users to control and improve the quality of the work.

Wikis maintain a history of prior versions of articles. Every version of every article is stored in the database. Wikis also provide a simple means to compare any two versions. These two simple ideas combined mean that users can quickly revert back to a prior version if a new change is not satisfactory, and users can also monitor the work of others by quickly comparing to a recent version. This tends to cause the quality of the work to improve over time, since any bad changes do not live very long.

Additionally, wikis can provide fine-grained control over who is able to access or edit various kinds of information, thus facilitating the possibility of inter-agency information sharing and collaboration.

Wikipedia represents the power of a wiki open to the general public, but I believe the same wiki technology that powers Wikipedia is also being widely adopted inside many enterprises, and I’ll note here in passing a couple of examples of this innovative use, one in private enterprise and one in the U.S. government.

This brings us back to what might be called The Lesson of Wikipedia — that an open platform, allowing many stakeholders to participate, can facilitate information sharing in an extremely cost-efficient manner, and it can take advantage of a wider range of knowledgeable people than traditional information-sharing processes do.

Good democratic governments strive to be responsive to the citizen’s needs In order to do so, it is important that governments use technology wisely to communicate with the public, and also to allow the public to communicate with the government.

Electronic communications are rapidly developing, and innovations such a wiki point the way towards the kind of balance between openness and control that can make for successful outcomes.

John Lewis Needham, is the Manager of Public Sector Content Partnerships at Google. In that capacity, he leads Google’s efforts to build public-private partnerships with government agencies in the U.S. and internationally. In his testimony he introduced the idea that Goverment agencies should use Google’s new site maps technology in order to ensure that all relevant online information published by government agencies can be found and indexed by the Google Search engine.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. The work that I focus on at Google is critical to this mission because few bodies of information are as important to Internet users as the broad, deep, and authoritative data provided by government.Making publicly available government information more accessible and useful to citizens not only helps deliver to Internet users the government information they need, but it also enables the government to provide services more efficiently and effectively to taxpayers, and it makes our democracy more transparent, accountable, and relevant to its citizens.

In 2005, Google introduced a technical standard that helps to ensure the accessibility of information on a web site.

This standard is called the Sitemap Protocol. It provides a mechanism for a web site owner to produce a list – or map – of all web pages on a site and systematically communicate this information or “Sitemap” to search engines.

When a federal agency places a Sitemap file on its web site, search engines can readily identify the location of all pages on the site, including database records lying behind a search form. Using this sitemap, search engines are more likely to index and make the information that the agency’s web site provides visible to citizens.

In the Web 2.0 world, where more and more citizens are using blogs, wikis, online mapping, video sharing services, and social networking sites to communicate and collaborate with each other, there will be even more demand for government to bring information to citizens where they are through these new platforms. This information will also help serve as a core component of the user-generated content that is driving the deeper engagement of Americans with each other, and with our democracy, through the Web.

The full content of both testimonies in addition to the testimonies of the other panel members:
Karen S. Evans, Administrator, Office of Electronic Government and Information Technology , Office of Management and Budget
Ari Schwartz , Deputy Director , Center for Democracy and Technology

Are available online here:
http://www.senate.gov/~govt-aff/index.cfm?Fuseaction=Hearings.Detail&HearingID=513

Speaking of the OECD Review of the Irish Civil Service ….

…reminded me of another OECD related resource… On October 2007, in Ottawa, Canada, the first international policy forum on the participative web brought together policy makers, academics, business executives and a wide range of civil society to address these questions:

What does the future hold for the participative web? What are the trends and impacts on knowledge creation for business, users and governments? How can confidence and trust be enhanced in an increasingly participative Internet environment? What is the government role in providing the right environment for stimulating innovation and economic growth through the use of digital content and information?

The full conference programme is available online the website linked here has links to all of the keynote speeches at the forum in addition to a number of archived webcasts and full session transcripts. I would say this should be essential reading/viewing for everyone but most especially for policy makers and interested influencers.

Link

The presentations and discussions around the themes of creativity, confidence and convergence will contribute to the OECD Ministerial Meeting on The Future of the Internet Economy in Seoul, Korea, 17-18 June 2008.

Link

Last year the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office opened an online forum where citizens could offer their views and opinions on what the government’s foreign policy priorities should be. Several hundred comments were received on the site.

The UK Parliament’s Procedure’s Committee is now hosting an online forum to gather the views of the public on whether they (the public) would use an e-petitioning system to petition the Parliament.

The forum will remain open until Friday 15 February 2008 with a report on the outcome to be released after Easter.

These two forums represent the beginnings of a participative read-write-web where government organisations invite collaboration and participation from engaged citizens. This makes a refreshing change from the normal jargon-laden ‘fait accompli’ published daily on government websites around the world.

As mentioned in a previous post the office of the UK prime minister already hosts an online E-Petitions facility.

I have been reviewing some of my research, undertaken over the past year or so, so please bear with me as I add both some current and some older material to the site.

On October 7th, 2006, Anthony Williams, co-author of the excellent ‘Wikinomics’ published an article on his blog entitled:

Is government ready for the Web 2.0 era?

He opens it by relating how the UK’s then deputy prime minister John Prescott had recently proclaimed, with some measure of smugness, that he didn’t really know what a blog was and was only just getting accustomed to reading his snail mail.

He goes on to say that in his view since the beginning of the Internet era government leaders have struggled with cultural inertia, complex legacies, and political wrangling, that Getting government services online is hardly an election issue and many of the agencies that deliver government services are led by a generation of political bureaucrats that think of the Internet in much the same way that John Prescott does.

The promise that engaging the citizenry in setting policy could renew democracy is even further remote than the more business-like job of public administration. Citizens already feel, with considerable justification, that government leaders blatantly ignore their views. So many citizens rightly cast a skeptical eye on efforts to engage in them in online consultations that appear to be more about public relations than policy-making. At the same time, governments leaders who genuinely care about democracy often lament the fact that the majority of people seem to care more about the next episode of Desperate Housewives than they do about the local planning commission or even issues of national importance. This in turn means that many political debates are monopolized by activists who tend to lean to either the left or right-wing extremes.

Deeper citizen engagement is further frustrated by elitist policy-makers that would rather rely on expert opinion than allow so-called laymen to weigh-in on issues for which they have little expertise or training. Whether the average citizen is adequately equipped to judge the consequences of various economic policy options in an increasingly complex and interdependent world (for example) is debatable indeed. But in such circumstances the onus should be on government officials (and other third parties) to inform the public, because when citizens are well-informed they will collectively make decisions that better reflect the values, views, interests, and aspirations of the majority than an elite group of experts could possibly hope to.

He goes on to give the opinion that he firmly believes that

digital technologies–especially the latest generation of user-friendly tools like blogs, wikis, and podcasts–are moving all institutions in society (whether in government, the economy, or the community) in the direction of greater democratization. Governments must follow or risk losing power, authority, and relevance in a world where citizens are increasingly empowered to act collectively. Link to full blog post

And finally he provides some links to some research papers that are in my view essential reading for government policy makers around the world.
The Governance Web

Digital-Era Policy-Making

Government Encounters the Hypernet

In my opinion IT decision makers in government organisations in Ireland probably need to plan a little further ahead, and perhaps need to take a more strategic view of the future of the “ICT services” they facilitate and provide. The focus often seems to rest on ‘in house’ issues or on external physical infrastructure, and there seems to be very little debate around E-Government, let alone E-Democracy. Hopefully some of the papers listed and linked above could serve as part of the foundation for a new debate?