Hamburg already publishes some data online and is planning to release more, according to the Senate’s (Hamburg’s Cabinet’s) answer to an enquiry from Hansjörg Schmidt, the SPD parliamentary group’s representative on media and online policy.

Schools performance data, information on cancer patients, air quality and water quality are all available online and in many cases downloadable in Excel format. I had a quick look through these websites and it does appear that information in Excel format is relatively easy to get at, although it is questionable whether this is really raw data since it is presented in a non-standard format and appears in some cases (for example the schools data) to have been pre-crunched. In the case of water data, making this data open is a technical challenge — at the moment, only a description of the data is available due to its size.

The city will  also release geographic data at some point, including the location of play areas and police stations. There appears to be no promise that this will coincide with the launch of the portal and no cast-iron guarantees about exactly what data will be made available.

The Senate’s response does not make a clear commitment to launch a portal, but NDR reports that the City has officially announced its intention to do so by the end of the year.

Alongside talk of an open data portal, the campaign for a Transparency Law is making much greater demands. The backers of the law want to go much further and are pushing for a law that will oblige the local government to open all of its data unless there is a compelling reason not to do so. A comment on Hansjörg Schmidt’s blog suggest that some backers of the Transparency Law may see this as an attempt to diffuse their campaign by opening some data. I am sure this will be a hot topic at the next Open Government Stammtisch on 9th May and the PEP-NET Summit on 14th May.

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).

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

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 …

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.

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.

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…

Take one of the guys I shared a room with: from the moment he arrived, he was checking the bathroom to make sure it was clean (which in his opinion it wasn’t), asking whether he should have a wrist-band and compression stockings. “When will I get to talk to the surgeon?” “How does the television work?” … and so on. As a Brit this comes across as a bit pedantic and annoying. My instinctive reaction was that it would all get sorted in the end, so it’s pointless fussing too much. Incidentally, I only got the compression stockings when I arrived because my (German) fiancée asked the nurse whether I should have some, and did a bit of chasing around to make sure I got everything I needed. In hindsight, there are a few things that I should really have mentioned to the staff.

When I got talking to my room-mate, he was a very nice bloke; so it’s not that he was a grumpy old man who enjoys bothering nurses. He told me that, when he shared a hospital room with people whom he didn’t get on with in the past, he had asked to be moved.

At risk of overgeneralising, we Brits tend to rely on a customer service model, where the service deliverer somehow knows what we want without us having to say; we think it’s a bit rude to complain when something isn’t quite as we would like it. In Germany, it’s up to the customer to say when something isn’t right. And by doing so – as my room-mate did – Germans at times seem to be tailoring services to their individual needs one complaint or question at a time. My room-mate certainly did, and good on him.

Based on my experience (having lived in Germany for two years before moving back to the UK for three years, and now being back in Germany) I think this applies to service-delivery generally, including restaurants, rented accommodation, shops, public transport and even saunas. And, in my opinion, they often have better results and cheaper prices to show for it.

So the question to the German eParticipation scene is this: how can technology help German service-users tailor services to their needs in this very bottom-up manner?

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!

***

“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.

The German ministry 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.