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2. December 2011 – 15:02 by John Heaven (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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Protecting citizens' data (photo by jaime.silva, Flickr)
The Region of Hanover (yes, that’s the correct English spelling) has dropped its Facebook page due to data protection concerns. Kommune21, an E-Government magazine, reports that recent statements from some of Germany’s regional Data Protection Commissioners (the best known example coming from Schleswig-Holstein) led the region to take drastic steps, despite the advantages of the Facebook page in reaching younger users.
As Berlin celebrates its millionth Facebook fan, this will continue to keep concerns about data protection protection high on the agenda. The Schleswig-Holstein Data Protection Commissioner’s controversial findings earlier this year ordered all organisations in his state to drop their Facebook pages and cease to use the Facebook ‘like’ button on their websites. This is because data about users is sent to servers in the US and, according to the Commissioner, not enough is done to inform users about what data are collected and what happens to them.
The Commissioner also raised concerns about the use of the Facebook “Like” plugin, which allows users to recommend a page to their Facebook friends by clicking on a button on the website concerned instead of pasting a link onto Facebook. It would appear that information about users, even those who do not have Facebook accounts, are sent to Facebook and logged-in users of the social networking site can be tracked across websites.
At the start of September, Heise, a German publisher, got itself into trouble with Facebook for developing a ‘Like’ plugin that first has to be activated by the user, in order to avoid sending any data to Facebook without the user’s consent. The dispute appears to have been resolved since Heise developed an alternative logo and only shows the Facebook logo once the user has clicked on it to activate the sharing function. You can see it in action on heise.de (the ‘Empfehlen’ button at the end of each article).
Posted in News, Trends | No Comments »
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5. July 2011 – 11:48 by John Heaven (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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Photo by xaibex on Flickr
Starting today (5th July 2011), citizens in the German city of Ulm are invited to take part in a discussion on the redevelopment of the central station. The online discussion platform, developed by DEMOS Gesellschaft für E-Partizipation mbH, will be online until 29th July.
The first building block of the Citybahnhof concept will be the development of a new concept for the central station itself, which will involve the participants in discussing which aspects they feel are important in terms of design and transport connections to the city centre. As well as the more detailed subject matter, there are more wide-ranging issues which citizens can discuss and make suggestions about; for example the organisation of the new central station, the public transport hub at the station, getting to and from the station as well as spatial planning aspects.
The basis of the disussion will be nine draft designs. The redevelopment of the central station is possible in the medium term and the rest of the area will follow in subsequent years and will be the subject of further consultation exercises.
How’s your German? You can take a look at the site at: www.ulm-citybahnhof.de
Posted in Events, members, News, Projects | No Comments »
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7. June 2011 – 11:44 by John Heaven (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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Photo by Wrote on Flickr
Like their counterparts worldwide, local authorities in Germany are working out how to surf the web in something that is more like a huge ship than a surfboard, and how to provide something that surfers want instead of intruding on what they are doing and making them flee for the safety of the beach. As one PEP-NET Member, the City of Hamburg, publishes its social media guidelines, I review social media in German public administration.
The current issue of Kommune 21, a German E-Government magazine, gives a good overview of the social media landscape in Germany. There is a piece on Stuttgart’s comprehensive strategy for integrating several social media tools to ensure that their message gets to its target audience whilst remaining open to feedback; the City of Moers is also trying out several social media tools and has developed social media guidelines; and the City of Braunschweig reports how it has helped create a community of equals, Facebook users who exchange insider tips on which restaurants and cafés to go to.
However, Germany is well known for its suspicion of anyone who attempts to collect their data, whether the state’s pre-emptive collection of telephone records or Google’s photographing people’s houses for Street View. (Try taking a tour of a German residential area on Google Street View and you will see that many people have had their houses blurred out.) This issue will not go away, what with the increasing importance of cloud computing and the wealth of online applications that we use day to day. So Datenschutz, or data protection, is high on the agenda and warrants a place in all social media guidelines, including Hamburg’s.
Hamburg’s recently published guidelines explain some of the most common tools, describing social media use by German local authorities and providing examples of scenarios in which social media could be used. The case studies come from across Germany and indeed from across the world: from San Francisco’s activities on Twitter to the Stadtwiki Karlsruhe via Maerker Brandenburg, the Fix My Street-like service that allows citizens to report problems to their local authority and view status updates online.
On top of that, the suggested scenarios illustrate what can be achieved with social media, and how to go about it. These fictional scenarios are: a directorate uses Facebook, a district office publicises times for vaccinations on Twitter, the Culture Directorate posts videos of cultural events on YouTube, the HR department uses XING to acquire new staff, a senior official blogs, and a directorate conducts a survey with SurveyMonkey.
Each of these scenarios is accompanied by a flowchart which really nails down the procedure that has to be gone through when setting up something as simple as a WordPress blog: the departments that have to be consulted, the problems that have to be anticipated, the extra work involved and issues that have to be considered. I found this part especially interesting because, although it may seem onerous to go through such a long procedure for setting up a Twitter account, I think it is right to be honest with the public and employees about the reality of social media within a large public sector organisation like Hamburg.
So there is a lot going on in Germany in the field of open government, which thanks to projects such as Apps 4 Berlin and Munich Open Government Day, which open data to the public and encourage enthusiasts to develop apps that make use of them, is not limited to social media use. Maybe more on that in a later blog post …
Posted in good practice, members, News, Projects, Trends | 1 Comment »
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1. December 2010 – 14:40 by John Heaven (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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Screenshot from MOGDy website
They say a week is a long time in politics, and in eParticipation a day is just as long: Munich Open Government Day (MOGDy) is lasting, er, several months.
Starting today, the City of Munich is asking citizens to answer three questions using its dedicated online platform:
- what online services should the local government provide?
- what eParticipation initiatives should the city engage in?
- what apps could make use of the data that the city will shortly release?
Any citizen can suggest ideas and rate other people’s ideas. The five people with the top ideas will get tickets to the Oktoberfest. At the MOGDy Camp on 21st and 22nd January 2011, the city will launch its open data programme in which it will be releasing data and encouraging developers to get stuck in and create useful apps out of them. The best apps will be awarded prizes and the City will present them online.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
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17. September 2010 – 15:45 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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One of the first steps in trying to open up the budgeting process is to present a communal, regional or even national budget into in way that is accessible for the average citizen. In most cases budgets are published as documents with hundreds of pages and enormous tables with number containing a bunch of zeros – which might be a hurdle for many people to join into a discussion about this important topic.
The German website OffenerHaushalt.de (in German), built by Tactical Tools (“a network of enthusiast and experts”), tries to address this problem by presenting the federal budget of Germany in an interactive and intuitive fashion. The picture below shows the front page with each ministries budget presented in a different colour.
After clicking a budget (like in this case defense) the allocation of the budget to different areas and activities is shown in an easy to understand way. This way you can drill down into the budget to get a sense of its structure and how funds are used.
All data presented can also be exported in different standardized formats (JSON and XML among them) and all source data is also accessible. However there is also a sign for the need of more structured open data as the site is asking its visitors for hints to a machine readable version of the 2011 federal budget.
In summary this website is a great example of how to display complex numerical information in an accessible way. The ideas presented here could be integrated into eParticipatory budgeting processes to lower the barrier to entry for citizens or to help to introduce new audiences to these processes.
Posted in Tools | 1 Comment »
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16. June 2010 – 11:21 by John Heaven (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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Photo by boliston on Flickr
Whilst in hospital here in Hamburg over the weekend, I realised something that should have been obvious: Germans are masters in customer-led service design. If you had asked me last week, I probably would have said that the UK was the originator of the idea that customers and citizens can design their services to suit themselves. Now I’m not so sure… Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
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1. April 2010 – 10:30 by John Heaven (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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By kotofoto1 on Flickr
Every morning, on my way to the underground station, I walk down a nice tree-lined lane. I think the trees feel a little taken-for-granted, though: almost all of them have some kind of banner crying out to the world how valuable they are. Slogans like “night-time owl sanctuary”, and “I filter the air!”
As a quick internet search reveals, this is all part of a protest against the local government’s plan to fell the trees. You can see a video of “Tree Night” (Nacht der Bäume), which took place on 30th September last year, on YouTube.
It seems that trees are an issue that not only Hamburgers care about: I noticed a recent article about trees that have been removed and not replaced on the Bournville Village community website. The article also contains a YouTube video, this time of a resident explaining the situation.
Both cases are examples of concerned citizens using social media, on their own initiative, to highlight local issues that are important to them and campaign for change. If you have any more such examples of “hyperlocal” media, let us have them!
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“Nacht der Bäume” has a website all of its own (in German), as does the “Bürgerinitiative” (citizens’ action group) for Emil-Andresen-Straße. All in German, of course — that’s hyper-local for you!
For information on what “hyperlocal” means, including links to many example sites, take a look at the UK-based talk about local website.
You may also be interested in this comment piece by Jeff Jarvis in the Guardian.
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15. October 2009 – 11:38 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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Climate change is one of the biggest scientific, political and social problems of the 21st century. All nations of the world are challenge by the threads and to a lesser degree opportunities climate change brings with it. Consequently this topic is discussed among world leader in forums like the United Nations Climate Conference later this year. But all these efforts to mitigate the change of climate, even if there was agreement among countries on the necessity to mitigate it, will not stop the impacts of the change immediately. Therefore there is a need to look for ways to adapt to climate change and to protect humans and the environment from its negative effects.
The German ministr
y for education and research has set up a series of large scale projects to research the possibilities of different urban and rural areas to adapt to climate change in the next 50-100 years. The Klimzug-Nord project will undertake this effort for the metropolitan region of Hamburg, which is influenced both by the nearby North Sea and the river Elbe. The project duration is 5 years, has an overall volume of 25 million Euro and it incorporates dozens of Universities, research centres, governmental bodies and companies. This region has 4.3 million inhabitants which will be affected by the changing climate. As the adaptation to climate change does mean major decisions in urban development and other political areas there is a need to get the cities involved in this process. This is where eParticipation meets climate adaptation.
The Klimzug project does include a governance strategy which makes use of eParticipation and other participatory
approaches. The use of eParticipation in this context has two major goals: Firstly to get citizens actively involved in the development of adaptation strategies and secondly to test how participatory tools and processes have to be designed in a context that covers a highly complex topic which stretches an extremely long time period. The DEMOS eParticipation approach developed by TuTech will be used in Klimzug-Nord to discuss possible projects, activities and policies to adapt to climate change as well as to gather the ideas and views of the people living in the region on how to best adapt and which priorities to be set. The different issues to be addressed by eParticipation in this project range from “how to organize water irrigation in agriculture” to “how to prevent major floods in the densely populated city area of Hamburg”.
It will be interesting to see how eParticipation can help to open up a research project to the general public especially with such a complex topic at hand. We will report back on the problems and successes we encounter as we go along in this interesting and challenging project.
Posted in good practice | No Comments »
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13. August 2009 – 08:42 by pol-di.net e.V / politik-digital.de
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For the upcoming German Federal election 2009, politik-digital.de, in a joint project with pro-bono TV production, published a video clip which shows various celebrities telling not to vote. You can watch the clip here (sorry, I couldn’t embed the clip):
Geh nicht hin!
For those of you who are non-German speakers, find an english article about the project on DW-World.de. This article comes along with a radio interview including a statement by politik-digital.de executive director Stefan Gehrke.
Posted in Interview, members, News | No Comments »
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8. May 2009 – 11:43 by Renate Mitterhuber
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It’s almost exactly a year ago since I was at the “Neue Verwaltung” (“new administration”) conference in Leipzig and described my impressions here of how eParticipation was faring in Germany’s public administrations. The verdict in a nutshell was: there’s a fair amount on offer to executive staff from German administrations – the conference’s main target group – but the take-up has been pretty slow to date.
Today, even though the year’s still relatively young, the invitations and advance notifications for the major administrative conferences in Germany in 2009 are already fluttering one by one into my inbox. Is eParticipation in all its facets on the agenda more often or in other ways than it was last year? I’ve had a look at the four biggest German eGovernment congresses with that question in mind. After all, that’s where you’re likely to find a throng of representatives – important ones, too – of all of the German administrations, whether at national, federal state or small local authority level.
Let’s start with CeBIT 2009, which took place in early March in Hannover and which 43% of respondents in a survey of representatives of public administrations said was the IT exhibition they visited most. It was certainly interesting to see with my own eyes how, against the backdrop of the financial crisis, the Public Sector Park was experiencing an upturn that the public administration sector itself would never have thought possible, considering how it’s struggled for years to present its services from – to put it diplomatically – a less than favourable corner of the whole CeBIT site.
This year, visitors walked through many of the so-called “business halls”, where there was lots of empty space and exhibitors with plenty of time on their hands, to reach Hall 9, where it was really buzzing. So there was a good audience for a presentation of the eParticipation activities of the German public sector. But you looked in vain for anything from the federal states. The Federal Ministry of the Interior had at least allocated two of the slots in its lecture programme to the subject, each with three talks covering various areas.
I gave a talk there on Hamburg’s experiences in the field (eParticipation in Hamburg from 2002 – 2009: from a pilot project to the norm), while Matthias Trenel from Zebralog e.V. spoke about federal and other administrative discourses. PEP-NET coordinator Rolf Lührs chaired a discussion between leading politicians on the topic of “Politics 2.0” as part of the “Webciety” series.
On 5 – 6 May 2009, the “Neue Verwaltung” congress organised by the dbb-Akademie was due to place again in Leipzig. As last year, it was offering practical workshops on the topic of “Web 2.0 in public administration” and at least dedicating one of nearly 40 lecture slots to the topic of eParticipation. Entitled “eDemocracy, eParticipation and Web 2.0 – online public participation”, it promised to offer representatives of public administrations a chance to find out about new ways (to them) of applying IT. That sounds really promising and gladdens the innovative civil servant’s heart.
On 26 – 27 May 2009, the 12th “Effizente Staat” (“efficient state”) conference will be taking place in Berlin under the banner of “Change Requires Exchange”. According to the organisers, the magazine “Behörden Spiegel”, the event “has become an integral part of the transformation discussion”. If that’s the case, German administrations aren’t transforming themselves in the direction of more eParticipation, since the topic isn’t to be found anywhere.
The fourth major administration conference traditionally takes place in Berlin in the autumn: “Moderne Staat” (“modern state) whose partners include the Federal Ministry of the Interior and the KGSt (Kommunale Gemeinschaftsstelle für Verwaltungsmanagement – a federation of German municipalities and district and local authorities of all sizes concerning local management). According to the advance programme, the main focus in the eGovernment area will be on the topics of “the EU Services Directive” and the “Germany-wide common telephone number for public enquires“.
My personal verdict is that the topic of eParticipation is making up a bit of ground in the public administration community, but its significance lags way behind that of topics such as the “EU Services Directive”, IT infrastructure, IT security, IT cooperation or shared services. These are all doubtless important topics when it comes to being well equipped for the future.
Does the dominance of the classical IT topics perhaps have to do with the fact that “the internal IT departments in local authorities (…) frequently tend to fulfil the role of a simple operator, exerting little influence on how departments actually use IT”? This is what emerged from a survey conducted by the market research and consultancy company IDC in the autumn of 2008 among those responsible for IT in metropolitan authorities and rural administrative districts. They add: “In future, however, IT will become even more important for the successful structuring of administrative processes and a greater responsiveness to the needs of the public”. It is to be hoped that the message will not fall on deaf ears and that it will be given enough space.
Posted in Trends | 1 Comment »
