Rialtas.net - Government 2.0

I have just returned from attending (and speaking at) the ‘Seminar - Citizen Participation in the Wiki and Facebook Era ‘ at the IPA in Dublin. An interesting and worthwhile day..

All of the presentations were very interesting and will all be online shortly. I will update you on their availability and provide a full report on the event in a subsequent post as soon as the remaining presentations go online.

In the meantime here is the presentation I gave on
‘Working with Web 2.0 (Social Software in the Workplace)’

View fullscreen

 I  met Krishna De at the recent eGovernment Symposium held in Dublin. We did not get a chance to talk properly at the event but Krishna interviewed me about the Kilkenny County Council Wiki project over Skype the following day.

The Interview is online as part of Krishna’s hour long podcast at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/PodcampIreland

You can also download an MP3 version of the interview, which is excerpted from the podcast, the interview runs approximately 20 minutes.

In the interview we discuss the recent Kilkenny County Council planning wiki project.

From an article by Peter Nowak from CBC News Canada.

Quebec’s open-source software association is suing the provincial government, saying it is giving preferential treatment to Microsoft Corp. by buying the company’s products rather than using free alternatives.

The lawsuit by Facil was lodged with the Quebec Superior Court on July 15 and made public on Wednesday. In it, the group says the provincial government has refused to entertain competing bids from all software providers, opting instead to supply public-sector departments with products bought from proprietary vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle Corp.

Government buyers are using an exception in provincial law that allows them to buy directly from a proprietary vendor when there are no options available, but Facil said that loophole is being abused and goes against other legal requirements to buy locally.

“It shouldn’t be the rule,” Facil president Mathieu Lutfy told CBC News. “It goes against the public markets policy of the government, which requires them to stimulate competition and look for local alternatives. It’s really an absurdity.”

Between February and June, the Quebec government spent $25 million on software from Microsoft, Facil said. The group estimates the government is spending more than $80 million a year on licences for Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system alone…

…Facil said the provincial government, as well as its federal counterpart, is woefully behind the rest of the world in terms of adopting open-source software in the public sector. Governments around the world are looking to lower their costs and reliance on specific software makers. France, for example, migrated more than 400,000 public-sector employees to open-source software in 2006, while the Netherlands recently banned the use of proprietary products in government.

“A strategic free software utilization in public administration could create thousands of jobs as well as a significant decrease in software licensing costs,” Facil said in a press release. “However, Quebec’s public administration refuses to even consider and evaluate these options.”

Read entire article..

The EU Competition Commissioner, Neelie Kroes, publicly supported the use of open source software in eGovernment, in a public speech at a seminar hosted by OpenForum Europe in Brussels on 10 June 2008.

The Commission must do its part. It must not rely on one vendor, it must not accept closed standards, and it must refuse to become locked into a particular technology – jeopardizing maintenance of full control over the information in its possession.

This view is born from a hard headed understanding of how markets work – it is not a call for revolution, but for an intelligent and achievable evolution.
But there is more to this than ensuring our commercial decisions are taken in full knowledge of their long term effects. There is a democratic issue as well.
When open alternatives are available, no citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to use a particular company’s technology to access government information.
No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to choose a closed technology over an open one, through a government having made that choice first.

These democratic principles are important. And an argument is particularly compelling when it is supported both by democratic principles and by sound economics.

I know a smart business decision when I see one - choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed.

Read the full text of the commissioner’s speech..

IBM announced new technology to secure “mashups,” web applications that pull information from multiple sources, such as Web sites, enterprise databases or emails, to create one unified view. Mashups are attractive for business use, as they allow non-technical users to gain insight on complex situations in minutes, but as with all Web-based initiatives, security has been a concern.IBM is helping businesses realize the value of these situational applications without all the risk, through a new technology created by IBM researchers, codenamed “SMash.” Short for secure mashup, this technology allows information from different sources to talk to each other, but keeps them separate so malicious code cannot creep into enterprise systems.

In order to give consumer and business users the opportunity to take advantage of mashup technology, IBM is contributing the SMash technology to the OpenAjax Alliance. The OpenAjax Alliance is an organization of vendors, open source projects and companies using Ajax that are dedicated to the successful adoption of open and interoperable Ajax-based Web technologies. A founding member of the OpenAjax Alliance, IBM continues to work with the industry to create standards that will support innovation and wide-spread adoption of Web 2.0 technologies.

“Web 2.0 is fundamentally about empowering people, and has created a societal shift in the way we organize, access and use information,” said Rod Smith, IBM Fellow & Vice President. “Security concerns can’t be a complete inhibitor or clients lose out on the immense benefit mashups bring. The same way you wouldn’t buy a car and then later decide to have the seatbelts or airbags installed, as an industry we’ve learned how to build security into business operations from the ground up instead of tacking it on after the fact.”

Read more on http://java.sys-con.com/read/518524.htm

My Society.org is a UK Charitable organisation with two missions. The first is to be a charitable project which builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives. The second is to teach the public and voluntary sectors, through demonstration, how to most efficiently use the internet to improve lives.

The organisation currently has seven projects live two examples are outlined below:

Fix My street a site which allows members of the public to report problems to their local council such as graffiti, illegal dumping, broken paving slabs, or street lighting.

E-Petitions Petitions have long been sent to the Prime Minister by post or delivered to the Number 10 door in person. This site now allows UK residents to both create and sign petitions on the web, giving them the opportunity to reach a potentially wider audience and to deliver their petition directly to Downing Street.

Users can view and sign any current petitions, and see the Government response to any completed petitions. If you have signed a petition that has reached more than 200 signatures by the time it closes, you will be sent a response from the Government by email.

All petitions that are submitted to this website will be accepted, as long as they are in accordance with its terms and conditions.

A full list of their projects is available here and all of the source code is open source and available by reuse for government organisations across the world to use and adapt.