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Weekly eParticipation News digest “October 25t – 31st 2009″30. October 2009 – 13:25 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH) |
In an interesting move the Obama administration new media time decided to switch WhiteHouse.Gov to the open source content management system Drupal. Drupal is one of the most mature and well received open source CMSs. This week the new German majority coalition also published its coalition treaty which also includes the reference to open source software as a tool for governmental organisations. These two examples are landmarks for the move of governments to open source technology and definitely help to boost its credibility.
blog.eparticipation.com
Clay Johnson over at the Sunlight Labs has a great post on how proprietary formats, such as Adobe PDF and Flash, are bad for government transparency. His main point is that they are not machine-readable and that it is therefore much harder to build any projects and services around them (e.g. count the use of specific terms, geo-location services etc.).
sunlightlabs.com
David Briggs published his talk on Web2.0 and its impact on the public sector this week. It is a great overview and first step into the world of social media as its influencing governmental and administrative work.
davepress.net
The Personal Democracy Forum published a good interview with Tom Watson (British MP) who talks about his effort as the “blogging minister” and the possibilities and challenges social media and Gov 2.0 bring with them. He sees the bureaucratic culture as the biggest hurdle for the adaptation of new media ideas in government.
personaldemocracy.com
It seems dry at first but the UK Data Standards Catalogue is an important step towards opening up government data for use by third parties. The question remains whether we will have a Europe wide standard for government data publishing any time soon.
cabinetoffice.gov.uk
