Here’s a first proposal for benchmarking egov 2.0.
Traditional benchmarking is done by CGEY with a consolidated methodology (http://tinyurl.com/243rn6).
It still focuses on making services available online: a vision still based on the e-commerce bubble of the late nineties. Very much detached from web2.0 trends. And it is still the only widely recognized way to measure e-government achievements across countries.
The methodology works as follows: a) select 20 priority services (such as tax declaration, change of address); b) assess how much you can do on the web from 0 (no information available) to 4 (full electronic transaction including payment); c) calculate the average across the service for each country.
The NEW benchmarking could address instead other issues:
- web transparency;
- privacy;
- users engagement;
- simplification.
A first proposal on measuring web transparency:
a) select 5 key type of data such as:
- beneficiaries of public funding (agriculture, EU structural funds, etc);
- draft legislation;
- planning applications;
b) assess to what extent these information are available on the web
- 0 (no information available)
- 1 (information available in non reusable, non-machine readable format)
- 2 (information available in reusable and machine readable format such as good html, xml, dbase)
What do you think? Does this make sense?
What are the most important public data which should be available and measured?
Are the proposed level of transparency right?
Thanks a lot for your answers! let’s make this a collaborative effort towards an open benchmarking method!
February 1, 2008 at 1:32 am |
Have you seen the work of the International Budget Project on budget transparency rankings?
http://www.openbudgetindex.org/
February 1, 2008 at 8:19 am |
many thanks Jack. Looks very interesting, I’ll look into the methodology.
February 12, 2008 at 6:20 pm |
[...] open budget index following Jack’s suggestion , I had a look at the Open Budget Index. Very interesting: they developed a system to measure the [...]
March 26, 2008 at 11:08 am |
[...] the ideal format of government bills 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. [...]