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The First Popular Egovernment unConference’s participatory aspects24. November 2009 – 11:48 by Civil College |
Most of us has at least some opinion around the Ministerial Declaration, which has been adopted before the high level e-government conference of the Swedish presidency: Teaming Up for the EUnion
There is some doubt, wheter this declaration is making change or not. As analyst Andrea Di Maio writes about it :
“If government 2.0 is about discontinuity, enabling bi-directional flows and engaging new stakeholders, the EU declaration has failed on every account.”
Personally - the Hungarian Government’s Electronic Center for Public Administration has not even translated the full text, only published an excerpt , without mentioning Open, Accessible, or Transparency, some criterias of good governance, mentioned in the declaration.
Moving beyond
In my previous article, I have been writing about the participatory based, citizen centric event, which ran paralell to the 5th conference. Surprisingly, some of the guests of this unconference has been also participated in the “main” and the research focus “pre”conference, making the cultural flow rich between researchers, practicioners and businesses.
The openness of this conference has let Mats Odell, the minister for financial markets and local governance to hold a pecha-kucha styled presentation about the declaration - which has gained far more acceptance in this form, than in the official one, although
About 25-30 people - he has come to visit us there. It might be the elections, it might be Magnus Kolsjö’s advice, or some personal drive, or even the way, how Sweden is showing approach to open government. Who knows? But the Minister has missed something, by not staying with us, only for half an hour..
The Pretinent Art award - which has been launced before the unconference - winner has become a project of the Open Rights Group: Statebook.
Runners up included the Woberator from Holland, which breaks Ministries’ resistance to FoI requests by spamming them, and Evasori.info, the Italian mashup which maps tax evaders.
Sir Bonar has addressed unconference participants in a video message, which helped to focus on various aspects of diplomacy: see video here- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVEwajqxtnk&feature=player_embedded
Beside the fact,that the unconference has been an event, run by citizens with the kind support of the local community place, Garaget, has showed some possible new trend of citizens. It was not yet about the first European Hackathon, or eDemocracy Camp, nor about the HackEu event series. But I am quite sure, that this is the direction, where Europe has to follow it’s forerunner examples, Australia, USA and the UK.
In my presentation held at the preconference, I was trying to show not only some good examples of citizen drived development collaboration (with the state) but to highlight the socio-technological innovation behind it.
Photos of the unconference can be accessed here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tonz/sets/72157622843812538/
by the way, the well knowwn P2P foundation’s head, Michael Bauwens has made a great presentation on “Open Everything” in for the TEDx Brussels event at the European Parliament:
http://prezi.com/tlsiltvngctq/
