Brian Lenihan, the Minister for Finance, will bring proposals to cabinet in the coming weeks aimed at modernising and improving e-government services in Ireland.
The Department of Finance assumed responsibility for e-government in recent months, and Lenihan intends to make detailed proposals for the area before the summer recess. Officials in the department are reviewing progress made in the area, and deciding what areas of e-government need to be given priority.
Lenihan said e-government was ‘‘one of the key tasks’’ for his department. The department is also working on new proposals for implementing Reach, the so-called ‘public service broker’ established by the government to integrate specific e-government services.
On 10th June the World Wide Web Consortium launched a new forum aimed at discovering how technology can best be used to improve both governance and citizen participation.
The group is open to governments, citizens, researchers, and any interested parties.
“Open Standards, and in particular Semantic Web Standards, can help lower the cost of government, make it easier for independent agencies to work together, and increase flexibility in the face of change,” said Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director. W3C invites participation in the new eGovernment Interest Group, which is open to the public. The group will identify best practices and guidelines in this area, document where current technology does not adequately address stakeholder needs, and suggest improvements via the standards process
The eGovernment Interest Group kick-off teleconference is scheduled for 25 June 2008
Cambridge, Maryland recently played host to a panel discussion involving the United States, the U.K., New Zealand and Canada (at the Interagency Resources Management Conference) , countries that it should be apparent from reading this blog, are all leading the way in the adoption of new technologies in improving government and enabling e-democracy.
From the FCW article
“It is Government 2.0, not ‘Web 2.0,’” said John Sullivan, the United Kingdom’s chief information officer, at the conference
The reason to make the distinction, is that the collection of tools that people think of as being part of the Web 2.0 family are tools, he said. Government 2.0 is a business approach revolving around the idea of opening the workings of government more directly to citizen involvement and input. How a government organization accomplishes that might or might not involve Web 2.0 technologies, he said.
All of the countries involved in the discussion have taken significant steps. In the U.K., citizens have the right to petition the prime minister’s office on any issue, Suffolk said. Now they can do it online. In New Zealand, the government created a wiki so that citizens could offer their opinions on the rewriting of a longstanding law, said Laurence Millar, New Zealand’s CIO.
The wiki drew much larger response than earlier efforts to solicit comments on social networks Facebook and MySpace, he added. The ability to build directly on what others have said seemed to make the difference.
Karen Evans, administrator of e-government and information technology at the Office of Management and Budget, said the overriding goal of Government 2.0 should be “taking government back to the citizens.”
However, there remain some difficult issues, Millar said. One is the trend toward incivility among Internet posters. Shielded by the anonymity of an alias, some people choose to launch profane personal attacks rather than contribute to reasoned debate.
“You can get some fairly vicious comments made,” he said. “We’re seeing maturity on some sites, but we’re still seeing a lot of the infantile invective that bedevils us.”
The New Zealand Government have just released their Draft Digital Strategy 2.0 the consultation period runs from April 14 to May 12 2008 at www.digitalstrategy.govt.nz There is also a wiki at this site which invites public collaboration on the strategy. http://wiki.digitalstrategy.govt.nz
Here are some excerpts from the draft:
“In the few years since the 2005 Digital Strategy, we have seen changes in the ways people communicate, interact, do business and experience their histories and cultures,” the draft strategy says.
“Today’s digital technologies are enabling new expressions of New Zealanders’ sense of identity and community on screen and online. New business models are emerging, disrupting the old. Citizen-centred transactions have the potential to transform government. Smart digital technologies are enabling us to do things faster but with fewer resources.”
The Strategy focuses on issues such as the emerging net-generation, the read-write web, digital broadcasting, digital culture,and legal issues.
(I note also that the public consulation wiki is using Screw Turn wiki which is the wiki solution we have decided to use here in Ireland for our own public consultation wiki- coming soon.)
Here is an outline of the NZ Digital strategy from the strategy website:
Vision Creating Our Digital Future
New Zealand will be a world leader in using information and technology to realise its economic, social, environmental, and cultural goals, to the benefit of all its people.
The Digital Strategy is about how we will create a digital future for all New Zealanders, using the power of information and communications technology (ICT).
The Digital Strategy was launched on 16 May 2005 and is made up of three key enablers.
Find out more about the sections of the Digital Strategy Content
Information made available through digital networks. “Information” is a broad concept that encompasses national heritage collections, government information, Māori language resources, research databases, traditional cultural products such as literature and history and new cultural products from the creative industries and entertainment, as well as relationships that can be conducted through online facilities (e.g. e-learning, online GST returns or Internet banking). The term also includes the information generated by government, businesses and community organisations. Confidence
Developing the necessary skills at all ages, in all parts of society, to use and participate in ICT effectively. Such skills include functional and digital literacy and the ability to take part in an interactive electronic environment. Confidence also encompasses the dimension of trust in using ICT and addressing the challenges that may slow ICT uptake such as spam and electronic crime. Connection
Affordable access to viable ICT infrastructure such as telecommunications networks, computers, mobile phones and other devices.
The Digital Strategy is about considering these three components together. Content provides the reason, confidence provides the skills and trust, and being connected provides the means. The Digital Strategy also recognises that businesses will have different drivers and needs from those of Government and wider Community groups. Our evolving Action Plan takes these differences into account.
I think that this might be the first government statement on eGovernment in Ireland in several years…..
Some Excerpts..
Developing an Inclusive Knowledge Society
Taking that “end-user” perspective as my starting point I see the main requirement of ‘quality’ as the degree to which technology meets the expectations the demands that people have.
The development of an inclusive Knowledge Society in Ireland is fundamentally important to our societal and economic future and I know that it depends on quality infrastructure quality applications and quality content. These have been central to our ASC Initiative which has been on-going over the last couple of years and which this year will see us spending about 3 million Euro.
Technology in Government
Essentially, e-Government has been about the challenge of providing public services using Internet technologies providing services in different and more convenient ways to meet the needs of citizens who are generally more informed and need to have a more responsive service.
This, of course, means that we in government have to be innovative in making government more responsive we have to be very aware of what our customers see as quality in terms of outputs and expectations and we have to manage our IT resources to ensure that we get maximum return on the considerable investments that are being made right across the public sector. This points to another perspective on quality quality of development and investment in both hardware and software.
Importance of Innovation
I saw an interesting article in the Economist recently which spoke about how governments generally have now embraced Web 1.0 –
“with the online world largely mimicking the offline world. E-mails replace letters; websites make publishing speedier and more effective; data are stored on the user’s computer”
and
“that all this has been overtaken by “web 2.0”, shorthand for the interactivity brought by wikis (pages that anyone can edit) and blogs (on which anyone can comment). Data are accessed through the internet; programs are opened in browser windows . . . . ”.
This is pointing to the need to move beyond where we are now to re-assess the demands of citizens who live in an increasingly individualised world and have access to limitless resources of information. We also hear frequent calls for more “joined-up thinking” and “joined-up services” because there is an expectation that the public service should be taking a more rounded view of the predicaments and the circumstances of citizens and should be more effective in making the impacts that they require of us.
The focus, therefore, has shifted somewhat from simply putting things on-line because we can put things on-line. We now need to examine why we are in business at all the impacts we hope to achieve through intervention or compliance and how the outcomes of those actions can be improved either through the delivery or the design of the services concerned.
Indeed, this also holds for the democratic processes themselves where simply facilitating those who want to be heard is not good enough where we need to ensure that we are not overly swayed by obsessive bloggers where we have to make sure that those who do not have the time or the inclination to voice their views and opinions in public, can still get continued democratic representation.
A signal of that changed approach is set out in the Social Partnership agreement, “Towards 2016” - which speaks of a life-cycle approach to service delivery - and refers to the need for greater levels of flexibility involving greater cross-organisational coordination – through “the removal of unnecessary demarcations, the adoption of more modern approaches to work and the promotion of innovative ways of meeting the demand for services. It is also necessary that managers have the flexibility to adopt procedures to respond to particular pressures, which may vary from sector to sector, and to ensure that work methods are suited to the efficient delivery of services”.
I think that one of the big challenges facing us today is the identification of what sort of innovation is needed where it is possible and how it can be managed. It requires having a focus on the impacts or outcomes of what we do in our respective areas as politicians, policy makers, administrators and deliverers of service and then looking at how we can enhance the outcomes of our labours, delivering better results for the citizen and the business community.
Very interesting article by Florence Olsen (FCW) on the District of Columbia’s adoption of Web 2.o technologies. I have excerpted some highlights here but please read the full article
The District of Columbia’s 33-year-old chief technology officer, Vivek Kundra, wants to bring government procurement into the world of wikis and YouTube videos
The test case is fairly straightforward. The city needs a vendor to build a 100,000- square-foot evidence warehouse for the police department, so as always, it issued a request for bids. But then it gets more interesting.
The city also created a wiki to host the solicitation documents. Along with the request for bids, the wiki has an interactive question-and-answer section and a link to complete video coverage of a presolicitation conference for potential bidders. The video link takes bidders to social-networking Web site YouTube…
..Kundra belongs to an emerging generation of government leaders who want to make government more transparent and are comfortable with a collaborative management style. Policy experts say that solutions to major national and global challenges cannot be found without collaboration among federal, state, local, nonprofit and private organizations…
…Should other CTOs and chief information officers worry about Web 2.0 and the increasing irrelevance of traditional government bureaucracies? The answer depends on how leaders respond to those trends, said Frank DiGiammarino, vice president of strategic initiatives at the National Academy of Public Administration.
“I cannot conceive of a single traditional government function that won’t be affected,” said Lena Trudeau,NAPA’s program area director for strategic initiatives.
…NAPA’s initiative will create a community of government leaders at all levels to share new collaborative approaches to governing.
The Environmental Protection Agency is a founding member; the Office of Management and Budget and CIO Council are also involved.
…Public policy experts at NAPA and Government Futures view Web 2.0 technologies as necessary, though not sufficient, for solving some of those national and international problems. And they agree that CIOs should not be afraid of the interactive Web, which includes technologies such as wikis, blogs and social-networking sites such as YouTube.
“There’s no controlling it, and if you’re spending all your time and energy trying to control it and centralize it, you’ve already lost,” Trudeau said.
NAPA officials want the Collaboration Project to be a proving ground for using the interactive W eb for innovative approaches to governing. The project will try to answer questions that government leaders should be asking, DiGiammarino said….
…By bringing together leaders who are experimenting with the interactive Web, NAPA can accelerate its adoption among other government leaders, DiGiammarino said. “We think that leaders who aren’t looking at this are missing out and are not leading.” …
New Paradigm’s (a Toronto think tank) leaders see four converging trends with the potential to transform government as we know it.
The availability of Web 2.0 technologies as a platform for institutional collaboration.
The coming of age of the Net generation, the first generation to grow up using digital technology.
The nearly universal use of social-networking sites by college-age students.
An organizational revolution based on collaboration that extends beyond traditional organization boundaries…
…Washington’s chief technology officer said CTOs and CIOs should play a leading role in the transformation of government. “Part of a leader’s job is to find an innovative path,” Kundra said.
Traditional CIOs will think they must establish a new security policy and a new governance body to oversee their agency’s use of interactive Web technologies. “We did the opposite,” Kundra said. “We asked, ‘Which policies need to be changed to enable this?’”
The Webcast Windows Media Player service is available on the Internet, and on educational and research networks, provided in association with HEAnet. The IPTV Web MPEG2 service is available on the Internet, where service providers permit multicast IP, also provided in association with HEAnet. The IPTV Gov MPEG4 service is available to Government Departments, Offices and agencies on the Government Networks, provided in association with the Department of Finance. The RF cable service is available in Leinster House and nearby Government buildings, provided in association with the Office of Public Works.
Would it be an interesting enhancement if there was an opportunity for members of the public to submit questions or to participate Live in some of these sessions? Perhaps even the facilitation of a public ‘back channel’ using Twitter or similar as is becoming so prevalent at many conferences and seminars today (or perhaps require user registration and do it on a subsidiary website)? This would allow members of the public to engage with each other on the issues being discussed rather than interacting directly with the speakers, and perhaps the TDs and Senators could be given the backchannel transcript at the end of the session for their own reference? This could represent another step toward true e-democracy.
The Dáil and Seanad Webcasting service commenced on Tuesday 11 October 2005.
‘EUtube’, the European Commission’s new channel on YouTube, was officially launched on 29 June 2007. By offering an additional way of communicating Europe to its citizens, EUtube indicates that some of the European Institutions are starting to keep pace with some of the newer developments on the web. EUtube is another example of the use of the ‘Web 2.0’ communication technologies at EU policy level.
YouTube is a popular video-sharing website where users can upload, view, share, and rate video clips. Both the average ratings and the number of viewings are made public. As such, YouTube is a typical ‘Web 2.0’ communication IT tool, allowing viewers not only to receive information but also to publicly comment it, react and confront points of view. About 50 % of YouTube users are under 20 years old.
Following the conclusion of a non-exclusive arrangement between the EU Commission and YouTube, the EUtube channel now offers approximately 50 video clips on a wide range of topics that explain EU workings on main issues from across the 27 Member States. Topics covered by EUtube stretch from the EU’s first post-war historical steps to current environment concerns or even the EU’s ‘Help!’ campaign against smoking.
As for the regular YouTube contents, EUtube users can post comments and rate the video clips. At present, there is content in English, French and German with plans to add more languages wherever possible.
In presenting the main reasons for setting-up the channel, Commission spokesman Mikolaj Dowgielewicz stated: “We have audiovisual material on our own website…but people don’t know it exists… It’s part of our strategy to use the tools that people use,” he added.
This is not the first of the EU’s moves towards ‘Web 2.0’ communication technologies. Already implemented is the practice of blogging, which was adopted by several EU Commissioners.
Excerpt From the editorial of the New York Star Gazette 16th March 2008
The power of public access has moved from using persistence and shoe leather to your fingertips and computer mouse. The transition is a long way from complete, but online databases, record keeping and search capabilities have the potential to open government records — owned by you the taxpayer — to anyone with a computer who wants to see them.
Public access best built around more online connections
The Internet can put records at the tips of taxpayers’ fingers, but only if officials have the will to do so.
Despite the legal right to most documents in New York state, there remains a disturbing attitude among some government agencies that public information is what they say it is. Either out of ignorance or arrogance, there are too many officials who believe the dispersal of public information is at their discretion.
That kind of attitude is wrong, especially when considering the principle repeated by Robert Freeman, executive director of the New York Committee on Open Government. All documents are presumed public unless officials can show that they fall into designated categories that allow the information to be withheld, Freeman says. We like that theory: public unless proven otherwise. More and more local government officials understand that and willingly provide public information even without the need for Freedom of Information requests, which can be time-consuming and totally unnecessary for information that is readily available.
With the ease of the Internet connecting the public to government, officials have seen the power of posting databases online that formerly would have been kept in bulky books tucked in a shelf in some office. Instead, anyone, whether the media or the public, can now access various records that open up government and actually take the burden off public employees by reducing paperwork and disruptive walk-in traffic.
The survey focused on public awareness of the Data Protection Act (DPA) and sought to see if people knew its provisions. Individuals were also asked if they had used subject access requests under the DPA, or an internet or credit search to check data held about them, and, if they had, what their experience had been. In spite of a high awareness of the DPA, and that one quarter of people have made internet or credit searches about themselves, only 4% were subject access requests under the DPA.
Yet the most important issue of those raised amongst adults questioned about the DPA was having the automatic right to correct data about oneself if it is incorrect: 77% said this is very important to them. 71% also indicated that it is very important to them to be asked for their consent if other organisations or Government departments want access to their data originally collected for another purpose. While two thirds claimed that it was very important to them to be aware of the names of organisations or Government departments that hold information about them and what it is.
In the wake of recent publicity regarding government held data loss, 57% of British adults indicated that it is very important to them that the handling of data by Government employees should be on a sliding scale of seniority - the more sensitive the information, the more senior the employee should be.
