another thought on italy’s partial transparency

In addition to the previous post about partial transparency: it is quite strange that the same ministry that publishes the full list of consultants of public administration, does not provide any data on the costs of its activities.
For example, checking the projects to fight digital divide, only very general information is given. Look at this example: one hundred words to explain a project to build public Internet points worth 80 Million Euros, with no mention of its cost (I found the information in this report).
I really hope that soon we will find also this kind of information on the Ministry website, as well as the status of implementation, not to mention the take-up.

The drawbacks of transparency

Italy presents now an interesting case on transparency, with its recent government change.
The old government, as mentioned before, just before leaving office published all data on income declaration of Italian citizens in 2006. These data are public by law, although the law of course (of 1973) did not envisage the impact of the Internet on information publicity. Data have then been taken down from the website following a request of the Privacy authority.
The new government, particularly the new Minister for Public Administration, puts large emphasis on transparency. It has therefore published (on the website as indigestible pdf, and an extract on the largest national newspaper) the full list of consultants paid by public administration, together with their salary, at national and local level.
Several friends of mine, temporary workers working full time for the public administration, were “named and shamed” on the largest italian newspaper.
Of course, the newspaper did not mention the length of the contract, so that you could not understand if 50K Euros was for a few days work or for a year’s work. Also, the publication on the newspaper only focused on one body (the national agency for public administration).
So, very partial transparency indeed, and going mainly against many the temporary workers of public administration. Anyway, I think it’s a false step but in the right direction (it would be stage 2 in the methodology I proposed for benchmarking eGovernment 2.0). The problem lies in the fact that there has been not enough transparency, and selective, not too much.
What do you think?

Follow-up to the Power of Information review

“The Power of Information” is the title of a review carried out by Ed mayo and Tom Steinberg for the UK Cabinet. It is highly recommended reading, it can be considered as “the classic” on web2 and government.
So it is highly recommmended to follow the developments after the review - through this blog.
Power of Information Task Force

another commandment on eGov 2.0

I liked a lot alorza’s commandment for eGov 2.0: “don’t create web2 applications in vain”
I would suggest another one: “never present and eGov project in a public meeting without mentioning its COST and its TAKE-UP”
I am fed up with presentation of idea and projects, indicating objectives and potential benefits.
Cost and usage are two essential data, which are ALWAYS available to the project manager - no data collection required. And they address the 2 critical points of eGovernment (high cost and low take-up).
Of course data on real impact would be more important, but they require additional effort for data collection and analysis.

open method of coordination: ideal policy field for web2 applications

The Open Method of Coordination is a voluntary collaboration method between government. In the EU, it is used especially in policy fields where the EU has no competence.
Key tools for Open Method of Coordination are benchmarking, peer pressure, exchange of good practices, institutional learning.
Well, all these are perfect application fields for web2 tools. Not only on eGovernment policies, but on any policy.
If I were a web2 consultant/developer, I would look at these as possible “customers” of web2 solutions in public administration.
One of the problems is: can there be such a thing as institutional learning? or only individuals learn?

encouraging signs from italy as well

Off I went to Rimini for an event organised by my friend Claudio Forghieri of Modena municipality.
I must say I am quite negative about the Italian situation on e-government, and I didn’t change my mind this time. It seems we continue to repeat the same things as 9 years ago, when we I started working on this. The atmosphere is quite pessimistic, and somebody proposed half-jokingly that we should start thinking about an “EXIT STRATEGY” from e-government!
But there are some interesting individuals and project which I discovered this time. There are reasons for optimism.
There is no italian public blogosphere such as the spanish or UK one, but I managed to meet Paolo Subioli of “Cronache di e-government” which I will now add as second Italian blogger on these issues, along with Alberto Cottica - whom I will meet tomorrow. It appears that many Italian public administration are more resistant to civil servants blogging than other European administrators.

I found an interesting project: it’s like FixMyStreet, but launched by an Italian Public Administration: the municipality of Spinea. Citizens can complain online, and the follow-up to the complain is published as well. This appeared to have a great impact on quality of service, and on citizen satisfaction. Plus, it gave managers in the capacity to better control the quality of internal work, and the work of subcontractors. They are thinking about extending this to schools maintainance (I also proposed FixMySchool just two days ago!). This is an administration that really gets it.
Do I have to add that the project costed 6500 EUROS?!?!? To give you an idea, I read in an article that 6 BILLION EUROS were spent since 2000 on eGovernment in Italy.
This fits perfectly with the visualization I made in a previous post: public data such as citizens feedback can be a lever for actual change in public administration.

This is really changing the rules of the game, and from what I heard it is not just one project, other municipalities such as Venice have similar projects. We shall make sure that software is shared and re-used by the widest number of bodies for managing feedback.

Why don’t we try to establish a common standard for feedback/ratings on public services? Maybe a microformat? Anybody interested?

very interesting people at UOC in Barcelona

In Barcelona I attended the IV congress on Internet Law and Politics at Open University of Catalunya.
Highlights: Eben Moglen of Software Freedom Law Center illuminating us on the privacy risks linked to capitalism and technology. Although I was even MORE impressed by the debate visualization sw used to discuss the new revision of GPL. It seems to me VERY effective and interesting also for the discussion on FP7.
Monica Arino of OFCOM gave a very articulated and impressive description of OFCOM approach to regulating the Internet. I think their answer to the review on child protection could be kept as a key reference for government approach towards the Internet. I hope she’ll send the speech to me because it was impressive.
Helen Margetts of OII gave an overview of the status of eGov in the UK. Impressive and surprising to hear her thorough criticism to the almost mythical efforts of the UK government to reduce the number of website.
Two catalan Members of Parliament gave hands-on speeches on how they use blog and the Internet: they really get it.
Ismael blogged about this event at ICTlogy.
Then I met Marta Continente of the Generalitat de Catalunya: she illustrated the nice work done on communities on their websites, and we were very much on the same line on pointing to transparency as killer aspect of web2.0.
Finally I had a great conversation with Alorza, Carlos Guadian, Roc Faces and Agusti Cerrillo. Hope something will come up.
Great to see such a concentration of interesting people in one place. And it’s a time that web2 people have to come together and make critical mass or web2 will just become another passing trend.
Thanks Barcelona, thank UOC!

Let’s walk the talk: Web2 opening up the consultation processes of the EC

Just came back from Brussels, Barcelona, Rimini, where I met some nice people/projects.

Brussels: I had the traditional consultation meeting of the EC on the research priorities. I blogged on this before, looking for feedback. Well, David Price of Debategraph commented that post; he learned about the event from this blog; he provided useful information; finally he came to the event in Brussels; and he provided the best presentation of all. So what happened is that by blogging on a public consultation, and reaching out outside the usual audience, much better information/ people was found. Web2 and opening up the process (just a little bit) hugely improved the results of the public consultation: not by ensuring “representative” large scale consultation, but just a little valuable input. This reminds me of the previous post on eDemocracy and mass collaboration: web2 is not about everybody collaborating with everybody (quantitative improvement), but about connecting the most relevant information / people (qualitative improvement). As Tom Steinberg said, it’s about finding the “small cracks in the armour”.

I gave a short presentation which I am not really proud of, but I put it here just in case anyone’s interested.

barcamp egov netherlands on 7th June

BarCamp wiki / BarcampNLGovweb

It’s a kind of spin-off of the UK barcamp, or rather inspired by it. Hope it goes well.

Government 2.0 and wikinomics at the Lisbon Council

I just attended a very interesting seminar, organised by The Lisbon Council, a nonprofit association based in Brussels.
I really liked the approach and attitude of the people running the project, Ann Mettler and Paul Hofheinz. Passionate, concrete, ambitious and approachable. I suggest to follow their activities.

This time, they invited Anthony Williams, co-author with Don Tapscott of the book Wikinomics, to talk about “government 2.0″. He gave an interesting presentation, and the audience was composed by key people in the European Commission. We also had a lunch which I cannot comment in detail as it was under “Chatham House rule“.
The vision proposed in the presentation was systematic, quite compelling, and very well put. I recommend you to look at the example mentioned, probably the most interesting projects around. As usual, when talking about web2, it did not capture all the important aspect (this is mission impossible, I know it very well).
What I missed was:
- more details on the cases: we need to go beyond the cool experiences and anecdotes if we want to convince senior people
- too much emphasis on “mass collaboration”. Web2 is not only about involving large amount of people, but ensuring the most relevant people are involved.
- weaker forms of involvement beyond co-production were overlooked. I am a big fan of collaborative filtering and recommendation systems, and I think the role of users in commenting/rating content and in providing attention/taste data is crucial because it allows us to “exploit” tacit knowledge and weaker forms of involvement.
- the dilemma individuals vs organizations was not elaborated on. I think this is key to understand web2 (think of consumerization of IT, and of the main recommendation by Don Hinchcliff to companies about implementing web2 in business: do nothing, get out of the way).
Also, I couldn’t help noticing that many of the examples were the same we provided, which shows there is not much more going on. Beyond Intellipedia and Peertopatent, it seems there is no strong. important experience of web2 in government.

A lot of the discussion afterwards focussed on two key questions:
1- how do we ensure equal representation if we open up government processes, so that not only the voices of the elite are heard?
My view is that these tools are not for full representation of the society, but to add value, to leverage unique knowledge, to help government do a better job. It is not about making everybody collaborate on everything. As Lee Bryant often says, it’s about “intimate context”. Also, there are different levels of user engagement. And the process is made transparent for all to watch.
2- this is very time demanding, and we are already swamped with work, information, e-mail.
My answer is that this is true, web2 applications are not making you saving time. In some cases yes, they help reduce e-mail: like in the Allen and Overy case described in our report, RSS feeds are used instead of newsletters, and group blogs instead than e-mail to project members. In the PeerToPatent case, there is some evidence that time-to-patent is reduced. But the greatest impact is not on EFFICIENCY, but on EFFECTIVENESS. You have better, more relevant and more complete information to support decisions and to innovate. In the Allen and Overy case, there is better knowledge of who is doing what inside the company. In the PeerToPatent case, there is better information on the novelty of the patent application. Not to mention the impact on innovation capacity of firms by involving users in the design process.
So the initial cost can be high, but the benefits are higher. Web2 has a different philosophy about technology, it’s not about process reingeneering and top-down planning. As Pang (2005) puts it, “the brilliance of social-software applications like Flickr, Delicious, and Technorati is that they recognize that computers are really good at doing certain things, like working with gigantic quantities of data, and really bad at, for example, understanding the different meanings of certain words, like ‘depression.’ They devote computing resources in ways that basically enhance communication, collaboration, and thinking rather than trying to substitute for them” (link). They AUGMENT human capacity, they don’t substitute human work with computer work.
On this, I will later blog an anecdote that happened at the FP7 consultation workshop.

My final take: still so much work to do to transmit the value and importance of web2. Presentations are probably not effective enough, we need hands-on work on the daily activities of government.

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