E-government Tightrope

February 21, 2012

Whilst the US, UK and European governments struggle with their finances we  may forget that others are in the same boat. Darren Greenwood in New Zealand reports in ZDNet 16 February 2012 on the trials and tribulations occurring in the Antipodes – E-Government is a Dangerous Tightrope. Whilst ‘Digital by Default’ is the buzzword in the UK, New Zealand, it would appear, is looking to a similar approach without the safety net for those who can’t or won’t use digital access.

There is also a great fear of offshoring of call centres and IT development, and even of ‘Google government’. With its similar climate to our UK one I would have thought ‘cloud’ might have caught on in NZ but there was no mention. Perhaps its time to look to a compromise situation where a local but national ‘cloud’ can constrain the push to offshore systems or developments. Offshoring has been tried in the UK without great success but Google is successfully able to offer a government ‘cloud’ service for a number of local authorities along with a bit of the Cabinet Office.

No island can afford to be insular in technology terms and it’s probably better to look to the future and what can be achieved by starting to embrace ‘cloud’ and how much public money it can save, and at the same time employ some of those savings in building the safety nets for those citizens for whom digital isn’t default currently.

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Linked Open Data

February 16, 2012

Having promoted the Open Data Manual, it’s now the turn of ‘Linked Open Data – the Essentials’  (64 page PDF, 3 Mb) by Florian Bauer and Martin Kaltenböck. It’s described as ‘A Quick Start Guide for Decision Makers’, which it justly deserves. It provides both the background to Open Data for e-government purposes and then explains why the next steps need to be linking it.

Another source of information on linked data, particularly in the context of local government may be found at the UK Local e-Government Standards Board (LeGSB) page on Publishing Local Linked Data. LeGSB has also recently been involved with the UK National Archives in collating a whole load of information and links about Information Principles for the UK Public Sector.

What this does mean is there is plenty of advise and guidance out there as to generally go about doing it, but what we need still are the people to do it, and the standards to do it by. We are getting nearer but with so few out there being able to be involved it’ll be a long time before open linked data becomes de facto in local government in the UK or I suspect anywhere else in the world.

Meanwhile, let us not forget the efforts of the Open Knowledge Foundation and their new project the School of Data - so little time, so many worthy projects!

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Acronym wars

February 9, 2012

Two EU projects, two challenging acronyms! The OCOPOMO Open COllaboration for POlicy MOdelling website and the COCKPIT. The first is described as a European research project developing an agent based model with the support of stakeholders, the latter is modelling service delivery.

I tried to register on COCKPIT but it s limited to those living in Greece, Italy or the Netherlands and a utility bill may be required as proof of residence. Another ‘seventh framework programme’ is the MOSIPS one, which is given the aim of Modelling and Simulation of the Impact of Public Policies on SMEs and so to develop a user-friendly policy simulation system allowing forecasting and visualization of the socio-economic potential impact of public policies.

So many acronyms, so many programmes…I certainly can’t keep track of them but hope someone is?

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Open data manual

February 2, 2012

Whilst I’ve blogged more than 40 times on the subject of open data, I don’t believe I’ve covered the Open Data Manual. A hat-tip to jacques.raybaut at europa-eu-audience.typepad.com! The manual outlines what one should expect of open data, either presenting or using it.

Coincidentally, the UK Government published the summary of the feedback on its open data consultation on the 30 January 2011. The consultees include Socitm which was rather critical of the proposals. A key point that was made in the response was that “Socitm believes that open data issues need to be treated within a broader approach to information management and evidence-based decision-making”, unfortunately this general (and very important) point does not appear to be captured in the report.

So, we’ll see what comes next…

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Up down under

January 29, 2012

In apparent contrast to the Pitney Bowes short study of UK users of e-government Australians are much more satisfied, to the extent that they prefer doing things online! The new Australians’ use and satisfaction with e-government services—2011 review makes an interesting comparison against the unwillingness of the 1000 Brits interviewed. One must of course assume the bias on either side – PB sell white mail handling equipment and the Aussie government would, for financial reasons, prefer their citizens to go electronic.

In the PB study “half of respondents (50%) prefer to respond to communications through the post and a third (33%) opt for email when replying. In third place came web-based responses with 8 per cent of the vote, followed by phone (7%) and text (1%)”, which may not be surprising depending upon how the question was phrased.

In the Australian report it should first be noted that the telephone is still considered a part of e-government (Section 5 – “Two in five (38%) people contacted government by telephone in 2011″), much in the way it was used as a ‘get out of jail free’ card in the UK 2005 targets – but I think it’s time that approach to defining e-government was dropped, it makes comparisons very difficult. Other than that the document identifies little change since 2009 – not really much to crow about then…

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