Rialtas.net - Government 2.0

From the Sunday Business Post 22nd June 2008

Responsibility for E-Government has moved from the Department of the Taoiseach to the Department of Finance.

From the Sunday Business Post:

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.

More..

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.

 Link to Irish Times Article

(Requires paid subscription)

See also some of my earlier posts:

E-Democracy , E-Petitioning and Local Government

MySociety.org E-Petitioning System

Communities of Practice Website for Local Government Employees.

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.

Read the full speech..

From the Register:

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.

The Report ‘Models of Public Sector Information Provision via Trading Funds’ is available online.

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.

The Joint Committee on Broadcasting and Parliamentary Information has arranged Webcasting of Dáil Éireann and Seanad Éireann. Live and archive Webcasting may only be viewed in accordance with the Rules of Coverage.

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.

Link

The UN E-Government Survey 2008: From E-Government to Connected Governance assesses the e-government readiness of the 192 Member States of the UN according to a quantitative composite index of e-readiness based on website assessment, telecommunication infrastructure, and human resource endowment. ICTs can help reinvent government in such a way that existing institutional arrangements can be restructured and new innovative arrangements can flourish, paving the way for a transformed government.

The focus of the report this year, in Part II, is e-government initiatives directed at improving operational efficiency through the integration of back-office functions. Whilst such initiatives, if successful, will deliver benefits to citizens, the primary purpose is to improve the effectiveness of government and governmental agencies. Models of back-office integration, irrespective of the delivery mode, fall into three broad categories: single function integration, cross functional integration, and back-office to front-office integration. The level of complexity, expressed in terms of the number of functions within the scope and number of organizations involved, is the primary factor influencing a successful outcome - with a tendency amongst the more ambitious projects to fail to deliver the full anticipated benefits. The key variables involved in the delivery of back-office integration are the people, processes and technology required.

Here are some excerpts from the report:

E-Consultation

The Survey clearly indicates that few countries are implementing e-consultation applications and tools. Only 7 per cent of the countries surveyed received a score of more than 50 per cent. One way to improve these results is for governments to implement online applications to engage and include citizens in a dialogue.Web 2.0 has generated a class of online individuals and groups that want to share their views through blogs and/or online community networks such as MySpace, YouTube,Facebook and LinkedIn to name a few. As of October 2007, the blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 108.6 million blogs. This recent explosion in online blogging and publishing tools underscores a significant interest of web users in creating and consuming user-generated content. A few governments are beginning to acknowledge this phenomenon.

Countries that Use an Open Web Forum for Discussing Topics

Bhutan, Botswana, Brazil, Cameroon, Congo, Denmark, El Salvador, Estonia,France, Ghana, Hungary, Japan, Lebanon, Mauritania, Mexico, Mongolia,Mozambique, New Zealand, Norway, Qatar, Republic of Korea, Russian Federation, Singapore, Sweden, Ukraine, and United States of America.

E-Decision-Making
E-decision-making evaluates the extent of a government’s commitment to eparticipation,as evidenced by the definitive acknowledgement of an individual citizen’s input and by a stated commitment to take it into account when making decisions. The Republic of Korea is the leader in this assessment, followed by Denmark and France. With a number similar to e-consultation, approximately 66 per cent of the countries surveyed received a score in this section. To balance the heavily quantitative scoring, a few qualitative questions were still included to allow researchers to rate the general edecision-making performance. Only 11 per cent of countries surveyed committed themselves to incorporating the
results of e-participation into the decision-making process. This figure clearly indicates that the majority of not in position to directly involve citizens into the decision making process.

Governments that Publish Findings/Results of Citizen Opinions,including e-Opinions, on Websites

Australia, Bhutan, Canada, Cape Verde, China, Denmark, Estonia, France, Israel,Japan, Latvia, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Mozambique, Netherlands, New Zealand,Republic of Korea, Thailand, Ukraine, United Kingdom,United States of America and Viet Nam.

Of Interest to Irish Readers

Ireland ranked 19 (out of 35) in the e-government readiness index and 17th out of 35 for web measurement assessment.

The web measurement assessment looks at how governments are providing egovernment policies, applications and tools to meet the growing needs of their citizens or more e-information, e-services and e-tools. It measures the online presence of national websites, along with those of the ministries of health, education, welfare, labour and finance of each Member State.

One Irish Government project was identified as a Regional best practice, this was the Etenders website: http://www.etenders.gov.ie/

“Ireland has implemented a single portal to centralize government procurement. As a one-stop shop for businesses to work together with the Irish Government, this portal handles tender submissions and vendor registration. The portal provides businesses with a simple two-page set of instructions in its “Suppliers-Getting Started page. Subscribers to this website receive e-mail alerts as new opportunities are published, access to business opportunities with the public sector, and clear and concise information on working with the government.”

Also on a positive point, Ireland listed as 1 of only 20 countries that use RSS to update and involve citizens, the total list included was:
Australia, Austria, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, ElSalvador, Estonia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Republic of Korea, Switzerland, Thailand, Togo, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates and Venezuela.

Download the full report here:

http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un/unpan028607.pdf

We are now looking at Evan Miller’s Google Map Extension for Mediawiki as a solution for the mapping element of the public consultation project. Essentially we want visitors to be able to mark a point on a map and add a comment, this extension is pretty close to what we need, however at the moment it requires users to copy and paste co-ordinates, we are looking at ways to work around this.

We would also like to keep the new co-ordinates in a specific database table rather than in the general wiki article. There is a modification of Evan Miller’s extension here that seems to address this , I will implement and test this on our Intranet tomorrow.

We had our second meeting regarding our public consultation process and it is confirmed that we are planning to use MediaWiki as the basis for a public wiki seeking feedback from the public on a development plan. My demo wiki is up and running on our Intranet and staff will be invited to ‘explore’ and contribute to the test wiki on Monday next.

I also demonstrated some ‘tag cloud‘ images to the plan’s authors showing the top 100 words used in a previous plan and they really liked the visualisation and hope to inlcude something similar for the new plan on the wiki , in addition to perhaps using it on the cover of the printed plan. As we get a little more advanced in this process I will put up some screenshots and additional information.

I have also been in contact with the New Zealand Policing staff responsible for their own public wiki and have received some useful guidelines from them around moderation and configuration etc. They used PM wiki for their project.

Lots of organisations are starting to clamp down on Internet usage within the organisation. It should be remembered however, that heavy handed IT security policies can demoralise and demotivate staff. The old adage, ‘treat people like children and they will behave like children’ comes to mind.

I know some people whom have had experience working in organisations where very strict internet access policies were implemented and where staff that would have formerly chosen to work late or perhaps whom would have worked through lunch if they could have just checked their personal email or priced a holiday or booked a ticket on ticketmaster etc.. instead went home. And not only went home in order to book their ticket or check their mail, but now also went home because their loyalty to the organisation was diminished and their motivation to work harder reduced.

Many young internet users are growing up using social networking sites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook, they are messaging each other with messenger or Gmail chat, they are talking and video conferencing with Skype or perhaps even ‘meeting’ in Second Life. Very soon many of these young ‘net-genners’ will be in the work force and will expect to be able to communicate with Government and with business using the tools with which they grew up. If these tools and technologies are not available to government employees they will not be able to communicate effectively with their customers, the public. Similarly as ‘net-genners’ have grown up communicating through these ‘Web 2.0′ tools they are not likely to find working for a government organisation appealing if that organisation prohibits all of the technologies that constitute the infrastructure of ‘net-genners’ social and professional communications.

In addition to this many employees now already have broadband Internet access on their mobile phones and as laptops get cheaper (a brand new laptop in Ireland can be purchased for about 330 Euro at the moment) many employees will soon have an always-on internet enabled device available to them. An organisation today trying to restrict access to the internet is akin to King Canute commanding the tide not to come in. Rather than restrict, it would be wiser for organisations to create practical and realistic policies that enhance people’s working lives and make their jobs and communications easier and better.

For a practical starting point see the Irish Data Commissioners website:

Use of the Computer Network, E-Mail and Internet.

Private use of the Internet in the workplace and the monitoring of private emails pose certain challenges. A workplace policy should be in place in an open and transparent manner to provide that:

• A balance is required between the legitimate rights of employers and the personal privacy rights of employees
• Any monitoring activity should be transparent to workers
• Employers should consider whether they would obtain the same results with traditional measures of supervision
• Monitoring should be fair and proportionate with prevention being more important than detection.

The Data Commissioner’s Website lists their own policy in addition to providing guidelines on data protection and privacy on an organisations network.

The Director of Public Prosecutions has published a discussion paper on the DPP website. He is asking the public to provide feedback on the current policy of the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions not to give reasons either to victims or to the public generally when a decision is made not to prosecute or to withdraw a prosecution.

From the DPP website:

The purpose of this discussion paper is to examine It is hoped that the discussion paper will stimulate debate and, in particular, responses are invited to the following questions:

• Should the current policy be changed?
• If so, should reasons be given only to those with a direct interest, the victims of crime or their relations?
• Should reasons also be given to the public at large?
• If reasons are given, should they be general or detailed?
• Should they be given in all cases, or only in certain categories of serious cases? If so, which?
• How can reasons be given without encroaching on the constitutional right to one’s good name and the presumption of innocence?
• Should the communication of reasons attract legal privilege?
• How should cases where a reason cannot be given without injustice be dealt with?
• By whom and by what means should reasons be communicated?

That this document is published on the web and the public consulted in this matter is a good thing and I am glad to see it. However the response to the 77 page discussion paper is invited by email (to reasons.project@dppireland.ie) or by letter. I think this is a lost opportunity to utilise some Web 2.0 technologies to interact and collaborate with the public in this new decision making process. The benefits of inviting participation using a wiki for example could have fostered not only feedback usefully related to individual sections of the discussion document, but could have also allowed for individual engaged citizens to discuss issues with each other in addition to any submission they might have made directly to the DPP.

There are  similarities in intent to this invitation to the public to shape this specific DPP policy, with the New Zealand Governments own Police Act Policy Review wiki, which invited public feedback over a wider range of issues. It would be nice to see future consultations of this type also providing some additional mechanisms for the public to provide input and feedback.