Category: eGovernment

Delivery is not a valued skill in government. That’s why public sector IT projects fail, Alan Mather argues. Techies are geeks, delivery people are mavericks and policy people are wonks. Good one, Alan!

Phil Windley blogs the eGovOS-conference. I should have been there, but had to stay at home 🙁 Therefore, it is a treat to read Phil’s blog (as always, but a special thanks to Phil for blogging the conference).

Liberty Alliance Project has just announced their Federated Network Identity Architecture Whitepaper. “This isn’t just about building specifications and technology … it’s about addressing business issues,” said Simon Nicholson, Liberty Alliance’s chair of the Business and Marketing Expert Group.

Scott Loftesness, who first pointed to this, yesterday pointed to Reinventing PKI: Federated Identity and the Path to Practical Public Key Security by Jamie Lewis, Burton Group. Jamie has some good points about PKI.

I guess I need to study Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) …

Who’s going to be my new boss? The position is open: Vil du som chef være med til at sætte den IT-faglige dagsorden?

Also, we’re looking for a good IT-architect: Lyst til at udvikle it-arkitektur i det offentlige?

I hope some good candidates show up, and would be happy to talk to anyone interested.

The Danish Infostructurebase, which opened this week, provides information about data interchange standards for the public and private sector. The development and publication of standards is supported with four different tools:

• An Infosite delivering information about the standardization initiatives and communities.
• A communities groupware tool supporting communities of practice in their standardization work
• An international standards repository containing XML schemas, schema fragments, interface descriptions and process descriptions
• An UDDI repository containing information on web services with public sector data.

It is the vision that it will be possible from this website to look up all public data interface descriptions, and gain information about what data are available and how data are accessed. The gain of a central location for public data will be easy access to already collected data and the re-use of these.

The Infostructurebase is a part of the Danish XML project. The Infostructurebase is established by the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (my employer) and is open for public use, also for non-Danish users.

I’m so happy with the new web service implementation I tonight have managed to make on the GOL-IN Web Services and Enterprise Architecture Resource Portal. Not that I’m unhappy with the other web services I use there, but this one has a lot of potential. It’s an eGov news service, providing the latest news from a variety of sources, such as FCW, GCN, KableNet, GovTech, and more.

I have been running a news service for a while, and can see that it is being used by a handful of people. These, and hopefully a few more, can look forward to some great new services.

I’m indebted to Mike Krus and his Newsisfree, which provides all the content in the new service. Mike has magic powers – he can turn any webpage into a news feed. And has done so on my request for a number of sites out there. And he aggregates existing news feeds out there – I’m sure he’ll add your feed, if it’s not already there, if you ask him nicely. If you’re on my blogroll, I have taken the liberty to ask Mike to add some of your blog feeds, so chances are you’re there even if you didn’t know (so blame me, not Mike if you don’t want to be there).

I have used Mike’s RSS-feeds for a while. But Mike doesn’t stop there; he also provides what I have discovered is a great XML-RPC-interface. It allows me to create a “news module” (as used on the portal) , or an expanded blogroll (which right now shows a problem Mike is working on; that all the HTML in descriptions is escaped.)

In technical terms, XML-RPC is yet another way of doing web services – an XML-RPC message is an HTTP-POST request for an XML-based reply. So, it violates Phil Windley‘s Fourth Principle (Data queries on existing resources should be done with a GET), but I still think it’s a “real” web service. Most importantly, it’s a great service … Thanks again, Mike.

Just for fun … I have created a qiuck poll: Would you be willing to pay for an advanced news service? If yes, start by support Mike’s work!

There’s a lot at stake, at the end of the day:

In News feeds to reshape the web Carolyn White writes: Journalists and web experts in the US are predicting that news feeds will re-shape the way online news is published, despite several European court rulings outlawing the practice of deep-linking. and quotes JD Lasica, senior editor of Online Journalism Review for saying that “… perhaps the biggest potential impact of news readers is the prospect that they will further level the playing field between Big Media and individual content creators.”

Living in on of the most extreme countries when it comes to court rulings about deep-linking, I have a good old sense of disobedience as I write the above …

GOL-IN is launching a new project about web services. The resource portal I mentioned is part of the project.

One of the most exciting things about web services is that we can implement open-door policies, i.e., that web services can be used to create transparency and openness. By exposing our information and data as services, we can allow other to integrate our data into their applications. For example, the Google Web APIs service and Amazon Web Service API allow software developers to query Google’s more than 3 billion web documents and Amazon’s huge book database directly from their own applications.

For an example, see the GOL-IN Web Service and Architecture Resource Portal. In this example, three different web services are used (twice each) directly online (hence the page loads a bit slower than normal web pages). These three web services are:

• The Google API, which uses SOAP and WSDL, and has been implemented on practically all programming platforms.
• The Amazon Web Services works through an XML over HTTP (RESTian) or a SOAP interface
• The two lists of links are two RSS web services, i.e. XML/RSS-feeds that are fetched online from my GotzeLinked, the same database that powers the links directory on the Danish eGov Architecture portal.

On 21 February 2003 the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation published a public draft of a national white paper on enterprise architecture [Read the executive summary]

I have just translated and published a summary of our white paper about enterprise architecture. I hate doing translations (and am probably bad at it too), but I’d be happy to take questions and talk more about what we’ve written. I’m sure I can’t help doing so anyway …

On related news:
The UK Office of the e-Envoy has published a draft e-GIF ver 5. No major changes, but need-to-read.

Living in glass houses: good governance and how to achieve it

Johannesburg, 2 March 2004 (yes, so it says):

In the current deluge of corruption sweeping South African business and government, the need for good governance is stronger than ever. The most effective way to create and sustain integrity is by implementing internal checks and balances, as an ongoing principle.