eParticipation News digest “March 6th March 19th 2010″

19. March 2010 – 09:00 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)

In this article I would like to mention a few interesting posts related to eParticipation in the last two weeks. The goal is to give an overview of what was going on in the eParticipation realm over that time. The full articles are always linked to under the short summaries.

Andrea DiMaio over at the Gartner blog network discusses two reports by the US Government Accountability Office which state that the OpenData and Transparency websites (Recovery.gov, USAsepending.gov) are far from perfect. His take on the issue is that critic at this point in the development towards more transparency and participation to much criticism could be harmful.
Blog.gartner.com

The BBC conducted a world wide survey with over 27.000 participants and found that almost four of five respondents see internet access as a fundamental right. A majority of those questioned believe that the internet improved their freedom. On the flipside several concerns and dangers where mentioned: fraud and easier access to violent and explicit content being among them.
News.bbc.co.uk

mySociety lays out their vision for the twelve months and promises both a new citizen-facing project (FixMyTransport aiming at “connecting and empowering people who share transport problems of different kinds”) and a improved backend system called Project Fosbury (aimed at making the whole process of civic engagement simpler by breaking it down into single steps).
Mysociety.org

The Swiss canton Zug has published its eGovernment and intranet platform iZug as an open source tool which can be used by other public administrations. This is interesting for two reasons: Firstly the iZug tool seems to be feature-rich and may be of interest for other (especially Swiss) administrations and secondly this is another example of the how attractive open source in general and specifically the Plone framework (Python based CMS) has become for public administrations.
Move-online.de (German original)
Google Translation (English)

The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) plans to connect 100 million additional American homes to high-speed broadband (up to 20 times faster than today) over the course of the next years. These plans are laid out in the national broadband plan presented on March 16th. Now the plan has to be adjusted to the roughly 200 recommendations the FCC got from different players. Some of these adjustments will need involvement of Congress which might slow down the process.
Latimes.com

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