European Commission has a first blog written by officials

In the last months, I have been helping the EC DG Entreprise in improving their blog in relation to innovation policies. The EC is launching a new European innovation strategy this year and they fully understand that the key point is about doing things differently, in a more open way.
The EC already has blogs, but they are mostly institutional blog by Commissioners. This blog instead is the first where actual civil servants directly write. They use it as a lateral conversation alongside their official workshops, studies and consultation.
It’s a small change, but I really like the genuine attitude. On top of that, it has been very interesting to understand the internal working of the government when it comes to blogs and platforms.
Please have a look at it and provide your views. For example, there is a good post on public procurement for innovation where I am sure the gov20 community can contribute.

innovationunlimited

UPDATE: I’ve had comments pointing to the fact that it’s not the first, as for example Representation officed have many. It’s not important being “first” , the substantial novelty here is that these are “normal” civil servants, whose primary job is not communication.

What research should government fund on gov20?

I am working quite a bit for the European Commission on defining the research priorities in the field of ICT for governance and policy modeling. This includes what we call government 2.0, but also harder concepts such as policy modeling (agent-based modeling, forecasting).

(Note: research funding is one of the few ways the EC can stimulate eGovernment, as it has no competence on this. i know we all think innovation is government is about implementation and not research, but we here deal with research policies.)

First, I am working on the Crossroad project, which aims to define the agenda for research in this field for the next 5 years. It’s a great challenge, I worked a lot to get the project out and I will dedicate a lot of my time to it.

It is not easy: we need to reach out to the academic, industry but also to the practitioners in order to get a shared vision on where we want to get and how we can get there. And we don’t have to identify the current best ideas to be implemented, but we really have to make a futuristic leap: what kind of collaborative governance can we envisage for 2020 and what are the new IT applications that we have to create in order to get there.

I obviously will reach out to the community for key ideas. However I put a lot of trasnparency on this project, so you will be able to follow it from the outside.

Secondly, tomorrow I am invited to speak at the consultation workshop where the key priorities for research funding 2010-2011 on the topic of governance and policy modeling will be discussed. To give you an idea, in the previous 2 years the total funding was about 15 millions Euros.

So here is my presentation. I am not sure I am allowed to publish it, let’s see what happens. I only have a few minutes, so I decided to focus on augmented reality and visual analytics, two topics I am fascinated about.

Please let me know: what research should government fund on government 2.0? not only in terms of IT, but in general.

Thanks!

Let’s start taking stock of gov20: call for papers

I was invited to edit the forthcoming edition of the European Journal of ePractice, focussing on government 2.0.

I think it is a good time to start taking stock of government 2.0, distinguishing between fulfilled and unfulfilled promises. I see the great progress being made, with countries like UK and US putting gov20 at the heart of their modernisation agenda, and the EU Ministerial Declaration putting transparency and participation as first point.

However, as always, when things go mainstream they tend to loose their original spirit and be transformed into something else. In particular, I share the impression of Andrea di Maio about gov20 being at the top of the hype, although I am positive about mash-up contests. In other words, I am afraid of a major backlash in the coming years. As I said at the Personal Democracy Forum, we web20 evangelist have the responsability to set expectations right and avoid the backlash. Government will realize that it is only few people who have both the intention and the quality to give meaningful insight. I am doubtful about the idea of mass participation and wikinomics, I do not share the view proposed by “Us Now” – which is however a great initiative. I think web20 is mostly about relevance and significant input, rather than mass participation.

This is not to say that I became skeptical about gov20: on the contrary, I am more convinced than ever of its disruptive power. But we need to set the expectations right. It’s about relevance and not about representativeness, as I often say in my presentations.

Regardless on whether you agree or not, I think the forthcoming edition of the Journal of ePractice is a key opportunity to take stock of government 20, distinguishing hype from reality. The journal is not important from the academic point of view, but it is very influential in the practitioners’ world, which is also my world. After I wrote an article on measuring gov20 last year, I was invited to write for the US General Service Administration.

So please submit your articles (2000-6000 words) by February 8th (full guidelines here). Let’s start taking stock of government 2.0 and distinguishing hype from reality.

Italy is stuck in 9-11 mentality when it comes to Internet

I already wrote about how Italy is worsening its delay on Internet take-up by forcing users to authenticate before using any wireless network. It is much more difficult than in other countries in Italy to find a cafe with wifi. Cafes should ask people the ID card and register them before giving them the wifi password. Andrea di Maio blogged on this as well.
The Pisanu law was made in the aftermath of 9-11 as a way to track down possible terrorist activities. Italy was the only country to have such a law and the most unbelievable thing is that it has been renovated every year since then.
This is why I joined the facebook group fighting against this (hat tip alberto cottica).

so long… catching up with the blog

Due to the intense activities for the Open Declaration, I had to leave the blog sleeping for a while. But many things happened recently which I would like to blog about in forthcoming entries:
- presented in Malmo: my write-up and videos available here
- spoke at pdf-europe: audio file available here
- published the report of the workshop on public services 2.0: available here
- book State of the eUnion came out where my paper is featured together with Tim O’Reilly, Lessig, Weinberger… (wow!) – free download
- moderated the Create round table on creative policies in Europe

Sorry for self-promotion. I sometimes use the blog to keep track of myself!

Endorse the open declaration

Draft declaration published – and to be presented in Malmo!!!

As planned, we prepared a draft declaration trying to summarize all the good ideas submitted in a short and readable text. Obivously we had to sacrifice some points for making it short and to the point, but we hope that it is good enough.

It is now your time to provide feedback and input. We published the declaration on a specific page: please provide comments and input to make it better! Furthermore, if you have specific suggestion that you want to include, you can directly edit the supporting document which contains all the most important policy recommendations we received!

The second great news, it that we have been accepted for presenting the declaration officially at the ministerial conference. This was our main goal and it is a great achievement, due mainly to the high level of participation that we achieved in the different phases. So thank to you for supporting us. And thank to the European Commission and to the Swedish presidency for being so open-minded. This is a promising sign for the future of public services in Europe.

Please share your views on the Open Declaration. We have a chance to really make a difference!

[CROSS POSTING FROM eups20.wordpress.com]

Back from ENISA summer school on security and privacy

Monday I presented at ENISA (European Network and Informaton Security Agency) summer school
It was very interesting to be mixed with the security community – while I know very little of it. I presented how differently security and trust are managed in government 2.0 applications, basically emphasizing the importance of self-regulation and soft governance. I also referred to the recent decision of the US government to allow third party authentication (e.g. OpenID) on government websites. This was perfect, because just before me, a representative of the Austrian government presented their eID system, super secure, available to all the population but used only by 3%
So I thought about the following visualization – which I did not have time to add in my presentation

Anyway here is my presentation

And here are 2 articles commenting it, on ITPRO and ComputerWeekly

it’s not about small or large government, gov2.0 is augmented government

CROSS POSTING FROM Open Declaration Blog

I see many metaphors on government 2.0 around. It’s a good sign we’re doing an effort of self-awareness and shared understanding – very much in line with the Open Declaration. We need to structure our thinking and to communicate it better to government. We need to go from cool project to policy proposals, as we write on the eups20 workshop report.
Here are 4 different visions I came across:
- no government scenario: Andrea Di Maio argues that government should give up building interfaces, and concentrating on releasing public data and web services. Private sector will take care of interfaces and identity management. On the same line, Robinson argues that government “rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet end-user needs, it should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that «exposes» the underlying data”. Similarly, Sunlight Foundation argues that government should not visualize but only expose the data.
- government websites as public goods: Tom Steinberg argues that citizens should be able to use public websites to connect to each other
- Tao government: with my colleague Cristiano Codagnone we proposed the metaphor of the chinese symbol “Tao”. We recognize that private – community initiative is not a substitute of government: government has a subsidiary role to play to ensure that all citizens benefit from public services. On top of that, these are not alternative, it’s not a zero sum game. Just like the Yin and the Yang are necessary to each other, and permanently changing, government and civil society should both invest in providing services and continuously collaborating to innovate and provide better services and to address the complex societal challenges of our times. The idea has been taken up by the European Commission in its Orientation paper
- Government as a platform: the metaphor of Tim O’Reilly suggests that government should imitate what Facebook, Google Android, and the iPhone AppStore are doing: to become a platform for value-added initiatives by developers. This is a powerful metaphor: it is appealing to government as it refers to similar initiative in the private sector where a mutual gain is realized (for the platform and the developer). Secondly, it reminds me strongly to a classical theoretical notion that sees private/nonprofit initiative as the “extension ladder” of the public welfare state, which was first proposed in 1912 by the Webbs

In summary: just as social software is not about replacing human intelligence with software, but augmenting it, government 2.0 is not a matter of substituting government with bottom-up initiatives, but augmenting its innovativeness and its impact by letting third parties build on top of government data and services.

And this is the point I emphasize in my latest version of the Open Declaration, entitled “what we expect from public services 2.0“.

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Digital and media literacy is key for public services 2.0

CROSS POSTING FROM THE OPEN DECLARATION BLOG

My manifesto (author “osimod”, title “second version”) has a specific priority on skills and education, which is missing in others. I also wrote here on the topic. In my opinion, public services 2.0 can happen only with educated citizens and civil servants. Why?

On the supply side, you need educated people to create web-based services: technically savy, but also entrepreneurial with strong communication skills. In other words, a blend of soft skills which comes from a strong education basis. Only people with this mix of skills will be able to generate and benefit from collective action. To put it bluntly, web developers are in a position to generate services and influence policy much more than normal citizens. On the other hand, people with these skills are now able to gain influence, regardless of their financial capacity.

But the importance of education is even higher on the demand side. Conversation and collaboration require strong analytical and communication skills: this is close to what the EU defines as “media literacy“. Using public services 2.0 requires more sophisticated critical skills, in particular for managing trust and reputation. Understanding if the comments on your hospital posted by users on PatientOpinion requires good analytical skills in order to understand if the information is relevant for you, if it is genuine or driven by personal interests. Using Twitter to look for suggestions and tips on childcare requires the capacity to formulate clear questions and to select the information received. Looking at the different visualisation provided for example by Maplight requires sophisticated analytical capacity.

This is true not only for individual citizens, but for private and public organisations as well. Civil servants need to be equipped with the skills to use web-based application in a creative way for solving daily problems. Familiarity with web2.0 tools and culture is necessary.

In other words, the lack of digital and media literacy poses serious risks of:

- more divide: only skilled people will be able to co-produce and to efficiently use these services. Citizens and organisations lacking digital and media literacy will effectively become second-class citizens.

- populism: open discussion on governments can easily turn destructive or based on prejudice. While transparency opens the way to better accountability, there is a permanent risk that information is used for opportunistic and populistic reasons. This can be avoided only by a well educated population.

- less efficient services: public services 2.0 rely on users in order to self-regulate the services and filter the content. A good critical mass of users is needed for this self-regulation to work effectively.

While this calls for increased investment in training on web 2.0, it is clear that the required skills are not mainly technological, but refer to general education. Without a good, universal education, providing critical skills and civic sense, public services 2.0 are unlikely to have a positive impact. However, much of this learning happens by-doing: therefore the continuous emergence of new projects and services is in itself already providing a learning experience.

In conclusion, education and training are a fundamental requirement for public services 2.0 to have a positive impact in terms of quality of services and social cohesion, and should be part of the manifesto.

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