I was recently invited in Prague by Irina Zalisova to speak at the Eastern European EGovernment days.
A good conference with very high level speakers from the New Member States of the EU.
My presentation was largely about a study we did on eGov in the New Member States.
I noticed that eGov policies are becoming more “home-grown”, rather than simple copycat of international policies such as eEurope focussing on putting services online.
Examples of this home-grown development are two projects launched by the Bulgarian and Hungarian governments to fight corruption. They solicitate anonymouys denounces (posted on the web) from citizens about corrupted behaviour of public officials, especially in relation with structural funds.
Of course not everybody might agree on such initiatives, but it is interesting to see how governments in these countries are trying to develop new ways, sometimes risky, to address real government problems. And they start to stimulate citizen involvement for this goal.
This is huge. Today the Italian Tax Agency published the tax declaration of all Italian citizens online.
Then it was withdrawn because of the protests for privacy reasons.
Apparently the Data Protection Officer authorizes this in 2001 and 2003. Here is the interview with the then Data Protection Officer, and privacy guru, Stefano Rodota’ (in Italian).
What is really interesting is that the argument he puts in favour of this is that it allows a “widespread control” (controllo diffuso). This is the crowdsourcing of the Tax Inspections!
If this is allowed for tax declaration, then almost every data can become public with this argument.
Technorati Tags: transparency, privacy, italy, PS20
UPDATE: even more interesting - the 2 biggest newspapers made an online poll, with each already 20K votes, and in both cases the majority of votes is in favour
!
For all of us waiting for some real evidence that web2 is more than a hype, here is some more solid evidence from peer to patent.
“BNA published an article today in which it noted the early positive results seen in conjunction with Peer-to-Patent.” Peer to Patent: Peer-to-Patent in BNA
I arguesd in a previous post that “online services” as a flagship goal was able to catalyze IT investment, while transparency requires less IT investment but could leverage real change in government (and require further IT investment as well).
Here is how I would visualize it:
I prepared a paper which sums up all the issues discussed so far in this blog.
It contains a first proposal for benchmarking eGov transparency. It is aimed at both eGov and web2.0 practictioners.
I just put it on GoogleDocs, you can find it here.
Look forward to your feedback.
Very relevant initiative by the Sunlight Foundation. Of course, legal enforcement is not the only way to obtain transparency. There are also “soft” measures, such as the open method of coordination and benchmarking
This blog argues that transparency could be the driver of e-government, in the same way as putting services online have been driving e-government since the dotcom era.
But transparency has a long and important tradition. Why would it be important NOW? What is NEW that makes it so much more important than it was before?
I have 2 answers, very much correlated.
a) the wide AVAILABILITY OF WEB TOOLS to elaborate on public data, makes the impact of transparency much bigger. Just think of publishing platform such as blogs, of mash-ups such as GoogleEarth, of visualization tools such as ManyEyes, plus all the free and open source software used in web2.0 projects.
b) the concept of MANY-TO-MANY changes the power relationship. Transparency was before an issue of the individual citizens versus the government, and the interpretation and impact of the information obtained was limited by this. Now, the first thing a citizen which obtains interesting information out of a Freedom of Information request, is to post it on the web - see for example what happened in Italy with the information on the cost of the Tourism portal: the refusal by government to disclose the information became a boomerang once published on the IT blogs, and the bureaucratic answer became a monument to inward-looking government.
Furthermore, as mySociety shows, even the very FOI request can be managed collectively, and become a public data worth publishing in order to monitor government response.
There is a great debate going on in the UK on the possibilities of Internet to improve democracy. It all started from the idea from Gordon Brown of having a large-scale debate about a “british statement of values”. OpenDemocracy responded to the challenge and launched a discussion on how to have a National Conversation. Why is this important? Because it spells out clearly the difference between web2 and its perception by government. The questions posed by the government were:
- how to make sense of large numbers of web contributions (if they occur) ?
- how to ensure both that there is a good input and that it is fairly representative and is secure from ‘capture’? Most of the public blogosphere feels distance from these questions. Anthony Barnett of ourkingdom says here : “while the Minister’s fears are understandable they may be misconceived.
The web is not just a version of ‘The general public’. Voting does
indeed disaggregate everyone into private, anonymous individuals, whose
‘x’s are then counted.” He then suggests some very important points on “How to use the internet to assist a national debate” which I recommend to read and keep.
Paul Johnston of “The Connected Republic” says here: “it is also clearly wrong to think that any conversation however
brilliantly managed is going to generate consensus. So I do not think
online conversation is going to deliver a perfect set of answers.
Rather much of the value has to lie in the process itself.”
The PodNosh blog says here: “I agree with Paul about the web being a great place to generate ideas,
but these ideas will come from those who choose to join the debate.
they won’t reflect public opinion and in truth a wide ranging debate on
all areas of public policy can already be found on the web. All the
government would need to do is to seed it with some key (and
rasnparently from them/it) questions and stay in the conversation, not
aloof from it.”
I share this distance from the questions, which are however very common from policy-makers. We (web2 people) still failed to convey what this is all about. This discussion and disagreement is a good place to merge the gap.
Finally, I think that for supporting large-scale discussions, VISUALIZATION tools are very important. Tools such as debatemapper , gapminder.com or the bbc project for sensitive debate.
For your information: a new community has been launched (in beta) about the impact of web 2.0 (or social computing) on public services.
It is hosted in the EU epractice portal. It aims at exchanging experiences, knowledge and opinions on the topic, and it will benefit from early releases of content from studies by IPTS (the institute I am currently working in), such as cases studies and foresight analysis.
I am currently moderating it and posting more institutional content, while this remains my personal blog.
I would be very happy if people reading this blog would join the community.
You need to register to ePractice first, it’s a very useful information site on EU eGov related issues. I know the platform is not perfect, but let’s see if we can make it work.
MySociety.org just launched a campaign to make bills available over the internet in a standardised format. This could be very well applicable to other government data, e.g. the planning applications. An that is also what private companies ask government to do, for example Google Transit with public sector data. So, this described format could well be the stage 4 of the benchmarking model we are trying to discuss here.
