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 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.
This Federal Times Article describes how the US EPA, in trying to better share information with the public, industry, the media and its own employees, took an ‘unusual’ tack: It set up a Web site and asked for ideas from those who rely on EPA’s data in their work and lives.
“A lot of issues we deal with are global in nature and require collaboration,” EPA’s chief information officer, Molly O’Neill, said in an interview. “We need to figure out how to use these [Web] tools to be more transparent and collaborative.”
With the public demanding more and faster access to government information, “we need to change that model a little bit and get back to rebooting the public square,” said DiGiammarino, who spoke at a Web 2.0 conference June 3. This is a challenge for leaders because “when you think of government, you don’t necessarily think of speed, agility, reach and efficiency,” which is what the Web 2.0 world demands, he said.
Using discussion boards and e-mails, EPA’s new social Web site, called National Dialogue on Access to Environmental Information, has pulled comments from across government and the country to help O’Neill as she fashions a new information-sharing policy.
Since O’Neill came on board last year, EPA has embarked on four such projects that integrate blogs, wikis, discussion boards and other social networking Web tools, which are collectively referred to as Web 2.0, into EPA’s business.
“The technology is not complicated, it’s just a different way of doing business. And getting people to do business in a different way is culture change and that’s a challenge,” O’Neill said.
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
The Connected Rebublic is a community website, developed by Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group. The aim is to create a space where people with ideas can meet, share their thinking and link up with each other. The site is open to anyone who wants to get involved.
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.
Harry McGee Reports in the Irish Times today that John Gormley, the Minister for the Environment, last night unveiled some of the key components of the Green Party Paper on local government which will be published in 10 days’ time.
Speaking at the opening of the Green Party’s annual convention in Dundalk, Co Louth, Mr Gormley said it would deliver the biggest reform of local administration since 1898.
Some excerpts..
Mr Gormley said the new measures, when implemented, would allow citizens to be centrally-involved in decisions taken at local level. “I want to see citizens given a say in budgetary decisions. There is no reason why the people should not decide what the spending priorities should be in their communities. I will be examining the increased use of plebiscites which would allow people shape major decisions to be taken by town, city and county councils.”
Turning to his plans for a petition system, he said it would allow people gather signatures on pressing local issues and present them to the local council. The council would then be compelled to debate and decide the issue.
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?’”
Top boffins have given economic backing to a campaign to relax access restrictions on government-collected databases, such as the Ordnance Survey’s unrivalled stash of UK mapping information.
The Department for Business, Employment and Regulatory Reform (BERR, formerly DTI) released the analysis, commissioned from a team at the University of Cambridge, last week. It refutes the oft-cited government line that allowing free access and reuse of national data assets would harm the economy.
The Free Our Data campaign has been arguing against that line for two years, and now has the sums to back up its smack talk.
In fact, 147 pages of number-crunching led to the conclusion that opening up the data vaults at the Met Office, Land Registry and a host of other agencies could benefit the economy to the tune of net £164m. The vast majority of that sum would come from the Ordnance Survey, however.Subject to a policy review, charges for accessing and reusing reams of data should therefore be dropped, they argue.
It would mean developers could freely access mapping data to create their own location-dependent apps, rather than be reliant on Google Maps, for example.
It’s the same situation in Ireland with the OSI ‘owning’ all of the governments mapping data and licensing it at substantial cost to other government agencies and to private industries.
One can only imagine the amount of innovation that would be unleashed were this data to be made available free of cost to businesses and entrepreneurs.
Another immediately obvious benefit would be public safety.
In Ireland all Counties have a ‘Major Emergency Plan’ in place (The Plan provides for a co-ordinated response to major emergencies arising, for example, from a major road, train, air or river accident; a serious fire; violent storms; flooding or a dangerous incident) , and for all counties GIS assets and mapping data are an essential element of this plan.
In an emergency the emergency personnel may need relevant map data which also displays things like the location of gas pipes , power cables, water hydrants etc. In addition to basic maps of the area.
At the moment it is not clear if a major emergency occurred on a border between two counties, how this would be handled, as each counties mapping assets (licensed from the OSI) literally stops at the county boundary.
This could give rise to a situation where emergency workers have only half a map or two half maps of the emergency area. There is also the possibility that the two adjacent county councils have different (and incompatible) mapping systems, so there may not even be the possibility of easily creating a compound map.
Were OSI mapping assets readily and cheaply available however, each county could also store relevant mapping of adjacent counties, ensuring that in an emergency mapping resources would be readily available.
Oxford Internet Institute : Webcast, University of Oxford.
For over a decade UK government has been busy moving online. This has made some progress, for example in driver and vehicle licensing, but is yet to take off in terms of usage in the way of some spectacular contemporary Internet examples like Facebook and iTunes.
Is this inevitable? Are there good reasons why government and public services do not engage people in the way music, shopping and social networking do? Or is government not yet going about this in the right way, and does the success of the contemporary Internet have important lessons for the design of public services and public engagement? How can we improve value for money, and achieve higher returns on investment, better services and improved operational efficiency? How can the government build public trust and protect privacy?
Over 10 hours of video presentations and panel discussions are available for viewing or download here:
* Dr Ian Brown (Oxford Internet Institute)
* Professor David Cope (Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, POST)
* Professor Jim Norton (Institute of Directors)
* Martyn Thomas (Visiting Professor, Oxford University Computing Laboratory)
* Professor Ross Anderson (Cambridge University Computer Laboratory)
* Alun Michael, MP
* Jerry Fishenden (Microsoft)
* William Heath (Ideal Government)
* Tom Steinberg (mySociety)
* Simon Davies (LSE)
* The Earl of Erroll (House of Lords)
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:
Self organisation
Youth
What should governments do?
The Body Politique
Open APIs for Government
Levels of Government.
Past technological paradigms
What does geo-spatiality mean to government?
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)
