Category: eGovernment

UK Cabinet Office Minister of State, Douglas Alexander MP, has announced a new Policy on Open Source Software Use Within UK Government.

As The Register, I also found it slightly amusing to find that the policy is available for download in Microsoft Word format only on the OGC-website (for other formats, go to the e-envoy).

But rest assured, this is potentially powerful stuff!

The key decisions of this policy are as follows:

• “UK Government will consider OSS solutions alongside proprietary ones in IT procurements. Contracts will be awarded on a value for money basis.
• UK Government will only use products for interoperability that support open standards and specifications in all future IT developments.
• UK Government will seek to avoid lock-in to proprietary IT products and services.
• UK Government will consider obtaining full rights to bespoke software code or customisations of COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) software it procures wherever this achieves best value for money.
• UK Government will explore further the possibilities of using OSS as the default exploitation route for Government funded R&D software.”

These five bullets are potentially an explosive cocktail, but there is room for interpretation. For example, what does “… will only use products for interoperability that support open standards and specifications in all future IT developments” mean? More concretely,
does this mean that the e-GIF4 SOAP/UDDI lock-in will change in e-GIF5, allowing for RESTed as well as SOAPed methods?

On this point, there seems to be some confusion between Open Source and open standards, but who cares 🙂

At any rate, as leader of the GOL-IN Open Source effort, I am pleased to see this initiative, and will make sure the people working with the policy gets an invitation to an upcoming conference about Open Source in eGov, I’m involved in organising.

Oh my: www.govtalk.gov.uk
: The site is currently being updated.
Site down since 19th July 2002.

A few more words on the conference I mentioned below. The Call for Participation for the conference Open Source: A Case for e-Government is out there as you see, although we are yet to send out the formal announcement. But it is no secret … So, the essentials:
Where: Washington, DC
When: Oct. 17 – 18, 2002
Whom: Everyone 🙂
Organisers: World Bank/infoDev, the UNDP, the Cyberspace Policy Institute of The George Washington University, GSA and GOL-IN.

Along with the Call for Speakers, I would also on behalf of GOL-IN like to invite writers for a special publication on these issues. For acceptance, at least one co-author must be a government employee, but we are open for other contributions if they are high-quality and original. I need abstracts by August 20 and final chapters by late September. Drop me a message if you are interested in submitting a chapter.

Besides e-Government at large, run by Alan of the UK’s Office of the e-Envoy, I know of few GovBlogs, much less eGovBlogs.

But there are a few out there. Here are two, from Utah:

David Fletcher’s Government and Technology Weblog

Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog – “Organizations usually get the IT they deserve…”. Phillip J. Windley is Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the State of Utah. Windley has an interesting white paper, BTW: eGovernment Maturity.

Know of any other GovBlogs out there?

Today’s argument: Communities of practice is something e-government and e-democracy at large needs. Or, there will be no good e-governance without strong communities of practice.

I’m considering writing a book on this, and am looking for a publisher. Anyone out there?

This coming week’s activity on this theme – the Dragør-seminar with Wenger, Smith and White – is overbooked now. Quite good, especially considering it is held in the middle of the holiday season.

Anyone want to come to Wonderful Copenhagen this summer? Well, here’s a good excuse …

On 4-5 July, I’m organising a seminar in Dragør (near Copenhagen):

On
knowledge, innovation and learning
in the network society
and on
Communities of Practice
in and for eGovernment
or something like that …

I’ve invited Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John D Smith, and really look forward to the dialogues.

Politicians won’t like this:

VNUNet: “E-government will not deliver better services to businesses or the public until 2010, according to analyst Gartner.”

Gartner is always good for these wildly precise predictions, which in many’s opinion are just about as useful as Nostradomus or astrology (and sadly, thus very popular).
Well, if we have until 2010, I think I’ll go on holiday soon …
Seriously though, of course it is a long process to “realise” eGovernment in any meaningful way. In fact, 8 years is far from enough. It’s a long revolution.

Gartner also argues that most of the government portals being constructed now are irrelevant in the medium and long term. Like in South Africa, where the electronic filing of tax returns is done through the big banks and insurance companies. “That’s the way of the world. The private sector already has these relationships with citizens,” the Gartner researcher concludes.

There is certainly something to that, and we’re not talking about 2010, but now and here. Partnerships and new channels, some of which are commercial, are something we in Denmark are pursuing these days.

We are yet to see the private sector taking this new agenda seriously though. My consultants still charge me by the hour. Maybe I should start charging them for a change …

Financial Times quotes our roadmap!

FT’s Louise Kehoe writes: “The council’s report is aimed at governments in the developing world that are beginning to adopt e-government, yet much of its advice is equally applicable to governments in more advanced countries that are reviewing and renewing their online activities – and even to businesses. Just as e-business technology frequently fails to return the expected results unless it is accompanied by radical change in business processes, governments can achieve little by duplicating paper forms on a website.”

She quotes Mauro Regio of Microsoft, and writes that he “advocates “virtual networks of government services” that span government agencies and the private sector. Such networks might create internet portals providing a range of related information. While government agencies would originate the information and services provided, third parties might package this information, add syndicated content and present it to consumers.”

She concludes: “Yet the evidence to date suggests that these virtual networks may be a long time in the making. Government – with or without the “e” – moves at its own pace.”

In Denmark, we call such virtual networks service communities, and they are an important ingredient in the national eGov strategy. I wouldn’t say that our pace is that high, but we are getting there.

I’ve just discovered another eGov-weblogger, Alan, who runs e-Government at large. Great, now we’re two doing this! Maybe we should start a club or something? …

Alan, since I can’t find your email address and I know you read this: I think I’ve fixed the browser problem you mention. Does it work now?

New publication from Crossing Boundaries: Donald G. Lenihan of Centre for Collaborative Government’s Realigning Governance: From E-Government to E-Democracy.

Lenihan builds up a storyline, which begins with a view of e-government that focuses on simple tasks like paying a parking ticket online, and then moves through three aspects of e-government in steps, ending with a discussion of e-government as a tool for democratic consultation and engagement.

According to Lenihan, e-government “is shifting conventional government toward an organizational model that is more collaborative in style and in which decision-making could become more distributed —a concept that should be distinguished from decentralization.” Good point, so I’ll quote more, in length:

“Decentralization involves the transfer of authority from one command-and-control centre to another, such as from central agencies to line departments, or from federal to provincial governments. In decentralization, the transferred authority remains centralized, but is moved to a new centre (or a series of new centres). By contrast, distributed governance takes some of the centralized authority and spreads it around the system.
Conventional government, with its management system of paper filing systems, fax machines, top-down planning committees, hierarchical reporting relationships and departmental silos is too hierarchical to permit a significant deconcentration of authority and too slow and mechanical to ensure that, if it were attempted, it would remain responsive, transparent and accountable. As a result, conventional government could only decentralize. Not surprisingly, since the beginning of modern government, debates over government reform have usually been framed in terms of centralization vs. decentralization. Perhaps the most exciting and far-reaching feature of e-government is the prospect of creating a communications and management infrastructure that could support a more distributed approach to governance. Such a development could be as momentous in the history of liberal-democratic thinking as the revolutions of the late 18th century.