Category: European Commission

Mapping the Amsterdam Declaration

by David

The World Congress on Information Technology 2010, which began in Amsterdam earlier today, brings together over 2,000 leading figures from industry, government, and academia from over 90 countries to address the global challenges of economic, environmental and social development.

The speakers include: Paul Otellini(Intel), Stephen Elop (Microsoft), Pierre Hessler (Capgemini) , Michael Fries (Liberty Global), Neelie Kroes (Commissioner Digital Agenda European Commission), Martin Lees (Secretary-General Club of Rome), Francisco Ros Perán (Secretary of State for Telecommunications, Spain),  Tony Clement (Canadian Minister of Industry), Datuk Seri Ongkili (Federal Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, Malaysia), Kumar Parakala (KPMG), Peter Sondergaard (Gartner), Virginia Rometty (IBM), Sachin Pilot (Ministry of Communications and Technology, India), Maria van der Hoeven (Minister of Economic Affairs, Netherlands), Sylvia Roelofs (ICT-Office), and William Kennard (US Ambassador to the European Union).

The conference is building towards the Amsterdam Declaration, which calls on all participants to pursue ambitious goals for the use of information technology in addressing economic growth, greenhouse gasses, the quality of life, and ensuring the global impact of these benefits.

All organisations supporting the Declaration of Amsterdam are asked undertake at least one major project in the spirit of the Declaration, and to report back on its progress and achievements at WCIT 2012  in Montreal.

As part of this process, Debategraph is working with the conference to map the Amsterdam projects and their relationships to the overarching goals – with the work-in-progress covering around 60 projects from around the world shown below:

You can follow the proceedings of the conference across the next three days live here and on Twitter via the hashtag: #WCIT2010.

Crowdsourcing Public Services 2.0

by David

In November 2009, the EU Ministerial declaration on eGovernment will be published at the Malmo conference.

Building on the Public Services 2.0 workshop in Brussels early this year, and at the initiative of David Osimo and Paul Johnston, we are teaming up other partners to crowdsource an Open Declaration on Public Services 2.0 to sit alongside November’s ministerial declaration.

EUPSbanner

Echoing the Open Government initiatives currently underway at the White House, the process is beginning with an open brainstorming session to identify and evaluate a range of ways in which EU governments can harness the emerging power of the web to transform European public services.

We would love you to participate in this process by adding your suggestions and voting for others here before 15th July.

More details, including the plans for the second collaborative phase and the subsequent public endorsement are available here.

…and, in parallel with the formal process, I’ll be keeping an informal eye on the proposals as they develop via the debate map below:

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Mapping the Power of Information Taskforce Report

by David

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As a follow up to the Public Services 2.0 workshop in Brussels last month, and in keeping with the collaborative ethos and intention of the event, Richard Stirling, one of the Cabinet Office secretaries to the Power of Information Taskforce, asked me to receate the Taskforce’s landmark report in Debategraph.

The initial map (shown in the Debategraph Explorer view above) foregrounds the report’s recommendations—although the full text of the report is also included in the expanded text of the relevant elements on the map (which you can view by clicking on the Green + button above).

Once in this format, anyone can comment on, support or oppose, and rate the individual recommendations—and also begin to increase the granularity of the analysis by, for example, breaking out the arguments presented in the report in support of the recommendations by the Taskforce.

This Explorer view of the report (above) can also be shared and embedded on blogs and other websites using the following code:

<iframe src=’http://debategraph.org/flash/fv.aspx?r=14255&d=2&i=1′ frameborder=’0′ width=’450′ height=’600′></iframe>

As ever feedback about the work-in-progress, either directly on the map, or in the comments below, will be very welcome—and, in the meantime, for a quick insight into the way that the ideas articulated in the Power of Information Taskforce’s report are percolating in the US, check out Ellen Miller’s Sunlight Foundation blog.

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Public Services 2.0

by David

Thanks to David Osimo‘s pioneering energy and imagination (and the enabling support of FutureGov and Headshift), I was privileged to have the opportunity to outline some of the thinking behind Debategraph at the European Commission’s Public Services 2.0 workshop in Brussels last month.

As David described in the agenda for the workshop:

“Over the last 3 years, we have seen a dramatic rise in user driven, web 2.0 style initiatives in and around public sector service provision. Initiatives such as Patient Opinion, Farmsubsidy and Theyworkforyou all seek to challenge, disrupt and improve on traditional models of public service delivery from the outside, built on the web 2.0 principles of openness, transparency and sharing.

Against this background the workshop “aimed to bring together the best experiences from all over Europe” to: share experience and knowledge between the people running the web 2.0 initiatives; promote a surge of collaborative initiatives; and raise awareness and better understanding between government officials about why and how to promote web 2.0 in government.

The workshop was a great success across all these dimensions, and the slides and videos for all of the presentations are worth exploring in depth.

On a personal note, one of the joys of the event was the chance it afforded to meet people whose work I have long admired from a distance including James Munro, Lee Bryant, Anna Maybank, Dominic Campbell, Justin Kerr-Stevens, Emma Mulqueeny, Richard Stirling, Ivo Gormley – whose highly recommended film Us Now features Debategraph briefly and tantalisingly on screen at a key moment – and Søren Duus Østergaard.

In the aftermath of the workshop it has been delightful to see the same sense experimental adventure bubbling up elsewhere, and in the European context, the next collaborative step, emerging as spontaneous initiative from the workshop, is to imbue the European Commission’s imminent consultation on the i2020 strategy with more of the same spirit.

Of which more later.

ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling

by David

Thanks to David Osimo’s highly recommended blog on eGovernment 2.0, I was in Brussels at the end of last month to present our work-in-progress on Debategraph to the European Commission’s ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling Consultation Workshop Framework Programme VII.

It was a fascinating day, exploring the Information Society Directorate’s long-term research agenda in this field, against a background, outlined by David Broster Head of Unit for eGovernment and CIP Operations, of the movement of web 2.0 tools from the social and professional domain into the political and policy domains (see slide below).

ICT for Participative eGoverance

Among the many excellent and thought-provoking presentations to the workshop, Anthony D. Williams’s (co-author of Wikinomics) on Wikinomics and the Future of Government and Governance, and Andy Mulholland (Global CTO of Cap Gemini) on From National Citizen to Web Citizen, had a particularly powerful resonance from my perspective.

The full set of presentations is available here.

The cluster of institutions working on interrelated projects and arriving at similar conclusions from different angles signalled strong validation for the approach that we are implementing and the goals that we are pursuing, and the enthusiasm with which Debategraph was greeted on the day was tremendously encouraging and much appreciated.

The next big event on the calendar, in Lyon, 25-27 November 2008, is highly recommended to everyone with an interest in eGovernance and eParticipation in Europe.