Gotze.eu

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  • Meta-architecture

    Alan points to FCW’s Feds work on melding architectures, which is about the challenges in aligning OMB’s five reference model Federal Enterprise Architecture – the “meta-architecture” for all the agency efforts – with the enterprise architecture work done at agency level.

    Meta-architecture (slide 7). Hmmm. I like the concept ‘meta-architecture’, which incidentally came up the other day, in a slightly different context – since we’re working a lot with Meta Group, our white paper is influenced by them, and our models and concepts were called “Meta-architecture” by someone. Ah, the joy of language. Ah, the joy of layers of meaning.

  • In Fast Company

    Congratulations to Michael Meotti, who was named one of The Fast 50, Fast Company magazine’s annual readers’ challenge, a worldwide search for ordinary people doing extraordinary things. What Michael did is truly extraordinary:

    Don’t fight City Hall, inform it: Michael Meotti developed the City Scan project, which puts handheld computers, GPS systems, and digital cameras in the hands of citizens to document street-level conditions that need to be fixed by local government. Citizens help inventory everything from potholes to graffiti and then draft a ‘Contract for Results’ with city officials.

    I’ve met Michael a few times, and have much respect for his work. I think one of the times were at the Taking Democracy to Scale conference last year. Speaking of which, I just found out that Lars and Mike have started a blog. Welcome in blogspace, guys! I’ve promptly added you to my blogroll.

    More Fast 50: I was also pleased to learn that Tomoye is there. They’re doing some important work:

    John Mertl’s software is helping “communities of practice” share ideas within the Smithsonian Institute, the World Bank — even the U.S. Department of Defense. In 2002, his company was asked by the United Nations to help rebuild Afghanistan and promote AIDS awareness in Africa.

    Faster, faster.

  • CoPs in standardisation

    I’m afraid I forgot to mention this, but there is still time: My collegues in our XML group have released a public draft of a new Handbook for Standardization. This “cook book” is in English. Comments are invited.

    One of the key issues in the handbook is about communities of practice (CoPs). I personally think the handbook is missing some points about how CoPs work (where is “learning”?).

    On related issues: I would really like to participate in the International Conference on Communities and Technologies to be held in Amsterdam on 19-21 September 2003. Guess I should write a paper …

  • eGov in Denmark, Part 2

    Government Technology’s International Government Navigator has just published Walls of Government Come Down in Denmark by Jeannette Nielsen and Ulrik Meinertz.

  • Architecture in the Service of Business

    I have added a lot of links in GotzeLinked this weekend. Among them a link to Interoperability Clearinghouse (ICH) and the Industry Advisory Council Enterprise Architecture SIG Papers, where I found A Business-Service-Oriented Govt. Architecture. Very interesting read. I especially found the Three Levels of Maturity interesting.

  • e-GIF compliance

    The UK last week announced a new e-GIF Compliance Assessment Service (e-Government Interoperability Framework), which is a subscription-based service that comprises:

    • Up-to-date information and commentary about the developing e-GIF as new versions and updates come through – a news and information service.
    • A downloadable, self-assessment questionnaire tool – to help you perform and record a standardised assessment for your project, product or service.
    • An e-mail help service and FAQ – to help you quickly get up to speed on the e-GIF issues that should concern you.

    Over the coming months, I will be responsible for developing a Danish e-GIF, so maybe I should sign up …

    I am the Danish representative in a new (at least for me) European working group in the IDA-programme which will be looking at a Europe-wide (“federated”) e-GIF. There’s a meeting in this group tomorrow, so I’ll go to Brussels for the day. I wonder how many other countries than UK has a e-GIF? I know France and Germany have similar frameworks.

  • Million-dollar architecture

    InformationWeek – Dire States: Homeland security creates the most pressing reason for standardizing systems and architecture at all levels of government.

    According to the article, Utah is spending $25 million to create a more-integrated, cross-agency enterprise architecture so it can eliminate stovepipe systems that keep agencies from collaborating easily.

  • Blogging together

    I have written about trackback pinging before. My first experiment was interesting, but still needs to be wrapped up. Or maybe I’ll drop it, because there are many other interesting ideas floating around:

    TrackBacks are comments. They are comments left on someone else’s site rather than your own, but they are comments nonetheless. Movable Type makes a distinction between entry comments and TrackBacks that seems artificial, and it made more sense to me to have TrackBack ping data appear within the comments portion of a Movable Type site.

    SimpleComments is a new MT-plugin that puts comments and trackbacks together, so they are merged into a single list/thread. This allows us to have distriibuted debates. If you want to comment on my writings, you don’t have to use my comments form; you can just make a trackback ping.

    There are of course many issues related to trackback pinging. Even though the Trackback system itself is a standalone system, it is as far as I can see only working with Movable Type and a few other systems. But Trackback and Radio doesn’t really work together, or do they? And how about Blogger?

  • XML for democracy

    Can government invoke the Lazy Web? Hmmm. Let’s try. My agency has launched a number of pilot projects in DanmarksDebatten, Denmark Debate, an e-democracy service we offer to all public sector institutions in Denmark, for them to open up for dialogues with their users. The service allows the institutions to do some customisation and simple integration into their own websites.

    The Denmark Debate backend also creates a potentially very interesting XML-feed with links to all the debates, categorised by metadata. The feed is in a home-grown XML-format (see the XML schema).

    I would like to have RSS-feeds, but for various reasons don’t want to ask the contractor to add such. I would rather have a small perl/php script or something. Any ideas?

  • Bowling dilemmas

    It is now more than two years ago Stephen Coleman and I published Bowling Together. Stephen is in Copenhagen for a few days doing a PhD course, but I “stole” him this morning to come and speak to the members of a network of government officials and e-democracy practitioners, and have dinner plans with him tomorrow.

    Stephen recently became the world’s first professor in e-democracy, and now resides at Oxford Internet Institute, which is doing a lot of interesting stuff.

    Although I try to follow the e-democracy debates, I have basically not been actively working with e-democracy since Bowling Together, so I have a lot of catching up to do, because I understand from Stephen that the agenda has moved on, although much slower than even the sceptics assumed. With the exception of e-voting of course (which many sees as central to e-democracy, but I see as the least interesting part of it …).

    On related news: Last week, The Ecomomist ran a special feature called Digital dilemmas, where I found this quote: The biggest decisions about the internet’s future will be political and social, not technological. How true.

    I found the economist.com link in a blog entry by James Crabtree, who has some good comments on the article.