26. November 2010 – 13:38 by John Heaven (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
PublicDecisions, the US-based online academy for stakeholder engagement, is holding an online conference on online interactive games and mobile applications (or “apps”) that support public engagement. You can submit proposals for presentations until Wednesday 12th January 2011.
23. November 2010 – 16:51 by John Heaven (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
Photo by gumtau on Flickr.com
I recently heard about Hamburg’s scheme for composting biodegradable rubbish that the waste management service collects from households, and selling the resulting compost.
I’m sure Hamburg isn’t the only city that does this, but isn’t it a great example of citizen participation? Citizens know what they are being asked for and why, and they can see clear results when they buy compost to put on their gardens.
11. November 2010 – 18:51 by John Heaven (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
A Birmingham councillor has been arrested for allegedly inciting violence against a newspaper columnist. As reported on Davepress, the BBC and the Guardian, and also discussed on Jon Hickman’s blog, in response to Yasmin Alibhai Brown’s appearance on Radio 5 Live Councillor Gareth Compton wrote:
“Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death? I shan’t tell Amnesty if you don’t. It would be a blessing, really.”
Compton has since apologised and deleted the offending tweet.
As I commented on Jon Hickman’s blog, I think this shows the unpredictability of Twitter, and how the public’s reaction can abruptly swing from ignoring a flow of mildly offensive or banal chatter to multiplying thousandfold the one tweet that a politician wishes they never wrote. It’s not easy to identify that threshold, but politicians cross it at their peril.
Brussels, November 2010 –The Flemish Government and a host of European local government partner organisations have launched an open online consultation to encourage local eGovernment practitioners across Europe to help identify practical solutions to combat working barriers to eGovernment at the local level such as bureaucratic red tape, cultural resistance and divergent privacy and data protection laws.
The objective of this effort is to produce a pan-European ‘Call to Action’ – known as The Citadel Statement – that will help local government deliver on the key objectives of the Malmo Ministerial Declaration by identifying the top things that national and EU decision makers can do by 2013 to better support local eGovernment. Initial research shows that despite numerous policy documents and ‘how to’ manuals on local eGovernment, nearly one year on the ‘Malmo Vision’ is still not being translated down to the on-the-ground, local level.
The online consultation will close on November 5. Join in the consultation now and help ‘Make Malmo Real’ at the local government level: http://egovstatement.wordpress.com
The Citadel Statement will be formally launched at the Belgian Presidency’s forthcoming ‘Lift Off Towards Open Government’ Conference on December 15-16. The Flemish Government invite practitioners from across Europe to the site of the old Ghent Citadel on December 14 – the perfect place to launch an ‘Ideal Cities Statement,’
There is no official repository of all the available public data in Italy.
Nothing like data.gov or data.gov.uk. Nor it seems there will be something even resembling it in a distant way, at least in the next few years.
And no, that’s not because our Public Administration lacks qualified or motivated managers and employees, or because of a diffused cultural attitude of ignorance and suspicion towards the new technologies in an ageing country ruled by an ageing political class. Both statements are prejudicial and false. We do have many greatly motivated managers (many young ones) in our PA, that understand perfectly the competitive advantages and moral appropriateness of putting public data, in standard and exchangeable formats, back in the hands of their owners: us the citizens.
Maybe it’s just that the subject is not ranked so important, as to trigger an organizational effort at a national level, comparable to data.gov.
The way to go with public data here seems to be the Do It Yourself way.
That’s exactly how the Spaghetti Open Data initiative was born a few weeks ago.
A small community of about 50 Public Administration employees and bloggers started assmbling links to sources of public data and to open software tools that can operate on them.
In a couple of weeks, the web site has been set up and it has just been launched today (nov, 3rd 2010). It contains links to 34 sources and 9 tools. It is open, it has been developed in an open standard, ready to be integrated into the italian CKAN.
It’s just a small seed, but it has the potential to grow fastly into a big tree of interconnected persons and projects. Maybe it will then be able to win a bit of attention and change the inertia of the central government with respect to this subject.
3. November 2010 – 17:40 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
In July 2010 David Bismark presented an innovative eVoting approach at the TED conference. This approach does not get rid of voting booths or ballots but improves on the efficiency, transparency and accountability of the voting process.
The general idea is to encrypt the vote by separating the list of options from the actual vote and adding a unique identifier to each ballot. Even being critical of eVoting myself, I think the idea is pretty clever and well described in the 7 min TED talk:
The long awaited CIP project ‘Puzzled by Policy’ developed by 21c kicked off in Athens this October with our team represented by Susie Ruston. Project partners from across Europe including Slovenia, Portugal, Hungary, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Ireland and the UK met at the offices of GRNET (Greek Research NETwork) to discuss how to end general citizen detachment and disillusionment in policy making processes using innovative policy profiling and argument visualisation technologies. The aim of the project is to provide all citizens – regardless of their literacy skills or subject matter knowledge – a unique platform/portal to learn about immigration policy at the EU level and find out what particular policies mean to them on a national level, so they can contribute to the drafting of a common EU immigration policy. Equally important, Puzzled by Policy will help decision makers at both the national and European level better understand the impact of their policies on constituents by feeding citizen reactions back to them. Further information about the project will be provided here soon.
26. October 2010 – 14:23 by John Heaven (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
Photo by mythoto on Flickr
Hands up if you’ve heard the term “Living Lab” and wondered what it means. Now is your chance to find out: PEP-NET has invited some living lab experts from across the continent to take questions on the topic.
On 1st November at 11.00 CET, there will be a one-hour live chat with representatives of Turku University in Finland, Ulster University, Northern Ireland, and Jesse Marsh, special advisor to the President of the Council of the European Living Labs Network.
All panel members (see the list below) are partners in the European Commission-financed PARTERRE project, which is assessing the viability of existing spatial planning consultation services in several European countries outside their countries of origin, and which is adopting a living lab approach to integrate them into one spatial planning consultation service.
So we are lucky to have our Living Lab aficionados in the project, and I have been kind enough to share them with the rest of PEP-NET!
When the chat starts, you will see a box on the “live chats” page (see the tab at the top of the PEP-NET blog). You will be able to participate by entering your questions there. Please note that your questions and comments will not appear immediately, as they are all approved before being published. This enables us to structure the conversation a little bit, ensuring that similar topics are discussed together.
Tiina Ferm, Senior Lecturer (software engineeering),Turku University of Applies Sciences (TUAS). Tiina is coordinator of TWICT living lab within TUAS and founding member of Turku Innovation Corner (TICo) that coordinates living lab activities in Southwest Finland, founded by Turku University, TUAS, Åbo Akademi (Swedish speaking university) and Novia (Swedish speaking university of applied sciences) and local Science Park.
Brendan Galbraith, Lecturer, Department of Management, University of Ulster
Patrizia Hongisto, Senior Researcher, Aalto University School of Economics, Helsinki
Jesse Marsh, Atelier Studio Association, Italy. Jesse is founder and co-ordinator of the Territorial Living Lab in Sicily, and Special Advisor to the President of the Council of the European Network of Living Labs. He has also published several papers on the topic of regional living labs and territorial innovation.
Suzanne Martin, Reader, School of Health Sciences, University of Ulster, Belfast
Maurice Mulvenna, Professor of Computer Science, Faculty of Computing and Engineering, University of Ulster, Belfast
Olli Ojala, Lecturer, Turku University of Applied Sciences, Turku. Olli has participated in the TWICT living lab and living lab networks in Turku.
Johnny Wallace, Director of Knowledge and Technology Transfer, Faculty of Computing and Engineering, University of Ulster, Belfast
The initiative’s website states that progress towards achieving the Malmö vision has been limited because it has not been translated into on-the-ground progress. By submitting suggestions for ways in which national and EU-level decision-makers can help local government achieve the Malmö objectives, or voting on other people’s suggestions, users will contribute to the Citadel Statement to be presented at a special pre-conference on 14th December, in advance of the Flemish Government’s “Lift Off Towards Open Government” conference on 15th and 16th December.
The Malmö Declaration was signed unanimously in November 2009 and outlines a vision of eGovernment to be achieved by 2015. The three main objectives are:
to empower businesses and citizens through eGovernment services designed around users’ needs, better access to information and their active involvement in the policy making process;
to facilitate mobility in the single market by seamless eGovernment services for setting up business, for studying, working, residing and retiring in Europe;
to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of government services by reducing the administrative burden, improving organisational processes of administrations and using ICT to improve energy efficiency in public administrations, which will result in a greater contribution to a sustainable low-carbon economy.
Let’s hope that the project is so successful that they make a film out of it. Well I’d watch it …
15. October 2010 – 14:27 by John Heaven (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
Photo by ianfuller on Flickr
Greater Manchester Police have been using Twitter to demonstrate how many incidents are reported in a day, and showing the variety of things they have to deal with, according to this article on BBC News.
Interestingly, the justification for the project — in which the force tweeted every incident it was involved in over 24 hours – was not transparency per se, but to give an insight into what police officers do, and counter the public’s perception that policing is about “cops chasing robbers and locking them up”. So clearly it has a strong campaigning element it, in this case aimed at changing the indicators against which police performance is measured.
Is it acceptable for public bodies to determine which information to release according to the message that they would like to put out about themselves? Put in those terms, probably not. If we want people to be active participants in public services they need to have access to quite comprehensive information that is ready when they need it and not released only when it suits the public body concerned.
However, I think it is perfectly legitimate for public services to promote understanding of the realities that face them as this is fundamental to ensuring that political participation is meaningful and yields results that are useful to policy-makers (as Paul Johnston suggested in his speech at the PEP-NET Summit). Sites like theyworkforyou.com are great for promoting scrutiny of public officials (in TWFY’s case elected representatives), but anybody who is serious about making a contribution to public life needs to gain an understanding of the realities that public officials are up against, too. If they work for you, you have to be a decent manager and be realistic in the tasks you set them!
So yes, it’s fine for public services to do this kind of public awareness work; but it must go hand in hand with real transparency and always with an eye on how it can increase understanding of public service in a way that empowers citizens.
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