A new report published jointly today by the British, Danish and Dutch governments challenges the way European institutions make decisions and argues that smart EU regulation must mean that businesses and citizens are put at the heart of all European policy-making.

“The report, “Smart Regulation: A cleaner, fairer and more competitive EU” addresses this and shows how smart EU regulation — that improves consultation with “end-users”, such as businesses and consumers, throughout the legislative process — will support growth and recovery in the current economic climate, maximise the European Union’s social and environmental benefits, while reducing burdens and costs.”

Note the use of the term “end-user“:

“We use the term ‘end-user’ to capture everyone who is affected by regulation – both those who incur costs as a result of compliance and those who receive its benefits. In many cases, these groups can often be the same. People who ‘use’ regulation should be able to understand why it is needed, what its benefits are and that the costs it may impose are necessary and proportionate.

We believe that making end-users central to the policy-making process – by being aware of their needs, seeking their views, using these views and demonstrating the value of their contributions – is the best way to achieve this aim. End-users are best placed to provide relevant, up-to-date information, which can improve the quality of the evidence on which decisions are based.”

The Commission, state the authors, should reinforce and apply user-centric approaches when developing new legislation. This will help ensure that the legislation is well targeted and effective and increase the likelihood of compliance.

USER-CENTRIC APPROACH TO IDENTIFYING REGULATORY BURDENS

There are many examples across the EU where Member States and the Commission can draw inspiration on how to seek views and communicate with end-users:

Kafka (Belgium) – Belgium’s Kafka initiative introduced an online contact point, www.kafka.be where citizens can submit comments on existing regulations and make proposals for their improvement and simplification. The proposals received on the website have formed the basis of a reform programme – the Kafka Plan – for the entire Federal Government. Over 200 specific simplification projects have been implemented under the plan, ranging from the abolition of paper accounts to the improvement of home-working regulations.

Burden Hunters Project (Denmark) – The Burden Hunter project applies user-centric innovation techniques to allow users themselves to identify the red tape that causes them most irritation. Civil servants have conducted visits to businesses to see first- hand the regulatory challenges they face. The user-centric approach allows businesses themselves to set the agenda for regulatory action and help develop solutions to cut administrative burdens. Work is ongoing to deliver results on a range of problems within nine areas perceived as particularly irritating, including government inflexibility, lack of mutual obligation and complexity. The Burden Hunter project has led to identifying a number of new initiatives to cut red tape.

Simplifying Together (France) – France has developed a framework that focuses on ‘life-events’ in order to better understand the burdens faced by businesses. These include key points in the life of a business, such as starting up, moving premises or hiring an employee. Using this framework, and through a broad process of consultation with the users of regulation, they have developed a programme to reduce the number of processes, the cost and the time to navigate these events.

- Read press release
- Download executive summary
- Download report

UK government plans to roll out e-petitions across the country could offer people a real say in the democratic process, a conference has heard (as reported by the BBC).

The legislation to make e-petitions compulsory for all councils in the UK comes into force in April 2010.

It could result in a national e-petition scheme and force Westminster to take more notice of people power, thinks web guru Tom Steinberg.

Read full story

Lawrence Lessig discusses the perils of openness in government in a long article in The New Republic.

“How could anyone be against transparency? Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement–if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness–will inspire not reform, but disgust. The “naked transparency movement,” as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.”

Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Society. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was the Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and a Professor at the University of Chicago.

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danah boyd, researcher at Microsoft Research New England and Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society, serving as a Commissioner on the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities (in the USA).

She just announced the release of the report, entitled Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age.

We begin our report by asking, “What are the information needs of communities in a democracy?” Following this reflective analysis, we outline findings and recommendations, centered on three objectives:

• Maximize the availability of relevant and credible information to all Americans and their communities
• Strengthen the capacity of individuals to engage with information
• Promote individual engagement with information and the public life of the community

The report concerns itself with journalism, open government, broadband access, digital/media literacy, skills, civic engagement, local communities, socioeconomic and sociotechnical inequality, education, free speech, etc.

The US General Services Administration (GSA) has just released its Intergovernmental Solutions Newsletter.

Entitled “Engaging Citizens in Government“, all of the articles in the current edition should be of interest to those working on the use of ICTs as a means to enhance citizen participation.

Table of contents
- Increasing citizen engagement in government
- By the people, for the people
- Citizen engagement
- National dialogues build communities
- Believable change: a reality check on online participation?
- Reinventing We the People
- Data is not democracy
- Could citizens run the White House online?
- E-petitions preserves an old British tradition
- My better Estonia
- Participatory lawmaking in Brazil
- Brazil and Argentina: from participatory budgeting to e-participatory budgeting
- Pew: well-off and well-educated are more likely to engage
- Public engagement on Fairfax County’s budget
- Citizen engagement in Oakland County
- Washington goes to Mr. Smith: the changing role of citizens in policy development
- Ohio redistricting competition
- Planning for citizen engagement
- Potholes and PDAs
- New media makers pioneer novel forms of news
- Putting your audience to work: EPAs radon video contest
- A millennial model of civic engagement
- Emerging themes for effective online citizen engagement
- The importance of open web standards in the move to open and transparent government

Tiego Peixoto, a researcher on participatory budget, sat down with MobileActive recently to discuss the use of mobile technology for citizens to participate in decision making about city budgets. This new and interesting field is showing some promise in several cities in Brazil.

Tiego also wrote an article recently for the GSA Office of Citizen Services and Communications that makes the case for using mobile tech in involving citizens in budget decisions in their communities.

Read full story

Watch this excellent 1 hour documentary film about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet.

“In his student flat in Colchester, Jack Howe is staring intently into his computer screen. He is picking the team for Ebbsfleet United’s FA Trophy Semi-Final match against Aldershot . Around the world 35,000 other fans are doing the same thing, because together, they own and manage the football club. If distributed networks of people can run complex organisations such as football clubs, what else can they do?

Us Now takes a look at how this type of participation could transform the way that countries are governed. It tells the stories of the online networks whose radical self-organising structures threaten to change the fabric of government forever.

Us Now follows the fate of Ebbsfleet United, a football club owned and run by its fans; Zopa, a bank in which everyone is the manager; and Couch Surfing, a vast online network whose members share their homes with strangers.

The founding principles of these projects — transparency, self-selection, open participation — are coming closer and closer to the mainstream of our social and political lives. Us Now describes this transition and confronts politicians George Osborne and Ed Milliband with the possibilities for participative government as described by Don Tapscott and Clay Shirky amongst others.”

CONTRIBUTORS: Don Tapscott, Ed Miliband, William Heath, Martin Sticksl, Lee Bryant, Tom Steinberg, Charles Leadbeater, George Osborne, Saul Albert, Mikey Weinkove, Sunny Hundal, Sophia Parker, JP Rangaswami, Paul Miller, Becky Hogge, Matthew Taylor, MT Rainy, Giles Andrews, Clay Shirky, Paul Miller, Sane Kelly, and Liam Daish.

- Us Now project website
- Us Now blog
- Us Now video (Vimeo)

A long article by PBS’s Mark Dupreau:

“It’s easy to see governments as nameless, faceless monoliths, something impersonal or, even worse, untrustworthy. Much of that is because government culture remains steeped in traditional ideas about public relations and outreach work, notions that have become archaic in an Internet-enabled, hyper-connected world. Just as private companies are learning to embrace social media to manage brand reputations, governments must adapt if they wish to effectively communicate with their “customers” — a.k.a. their citizens and stakeholders.

I propose that using authentic and transparent personalities as public outreach ambassadors can help transform “government for the people” to “government with the people.” This should also have an indirect positive effect on the government organizations — the brands — they represent.”

Read full story

Citizen participation and the internet in urban planning

In this final paper for the Masters of Community Planning degree at the University of Maryland, Rob Goodspeed decided to focus on the history and theory of participation to guide the development of a new model. How have urban planners engaged with the public in the past? What academic theory and professional values guide conventional (offline) participation processes? He then use his findings to describe both why and how the Internet should be used by urban planners. He also translated the paper’s ideas into a series of blog posts published Summer 2008.

The paper contains four parts.

First, Goodspeed describes public participation in urban planning in the context of e-government, or “the use of information technology to support government operations, engage citizens, and provide government services.” The use of the Internet to engage citizens in urban planning has been constrained by the limited availability of suitable technical tools and concerns about digital inequality, as well as a lack of a clear understanding of how technology can meet the needs of citizens and professionals. He describes how new Internet technologies and expanding Internet access addresses these concerns, and why urban planning requires a distinct technological approach from other e-government initiatives.

Second, he reviews the history of participation in American urban planning in order to describe an early, expansive approach to public involvement useful today. Before winning government powers over private actions, early planners communicated directly with citizens in order to build the political support necessary to achieve their plans. Model enabling acts adopted widely by many states as the framework for planning and zoning defined the legal context for official participation practices. Contemporary outreach can build from these early models using Internet tools to achieve consensus about and coordination of new urban development.

Third, the paper describes the theoretical framework of professional planning for participation. Since the late 1960s the definition and rationale for public participation in planning has been intensely debated in professional literature. In recent years, new models of participation have been proposed and professional approaches solidified. The theoretical debates and professional practice of offline public participation can provide perspective and values for a new Internet-centered model.

The paper concludes with a description of a new model of the use of Internet technology for public participation. The Internet is a powerful tool for planners to expand the base of participants in planning processes and enhance traditional engagement approaches. Although Internet technologies are new, the practice of engaging citizens in urban development processes is not. This study contains a critical re-evaluation of planning participation history and theory in order to propose ways Internet tools can be used to realize more inclusive, democratic, and equitable planning processes.

Internet tools for e-democracy in urban planning

This page describes how planners could use internet tools to enhance the practice of planning. Used efficiently, Internet tools could enhance the quality of public debate about planning issues, engage and mobilize previously apathetic citizens, and facilitate the planning process. While face-to-face communications and traditional public engagement methods like public meetings and published reports will continue to be important, they can and should be supplemented with online information and communication.

(via cityofsound)

The BBC is to launch a political webcasting platform known as Democracy Live, Helen Boaden, Director of News at the BBC, told delegates at Headstar’s E-Democracy ‘08 conference in London this month.

The site “will offer live and on-demand video from all the main UK institutions and the European Parliament. Users will be able to search across the video for representatives and issues that are relevant to them. They will be able to find out more about their representatives in the institutions and follow their contributions,” Boaden said.

The site will also provide information on how the institutions of UK government work and what powers they have, as well as providing a resource of must know information concerning the issues in the news. “And while this will make for a compelling mix on the site, we also want it to be a shareable resource, with video and text content that users can take and place on their own sites or blogs,” she said.

In her keynote speech, Boaden focused on the role of citizen journalism enabled by new technologies in a modern democratic free press.

“Today, and increasingly in the future, audiences want the news at the time they want it; on the platform most convenient to them and tailored to the subjects or agenda they find most appealing…and for audiences who want to join in, that means including them in the process of making the news.

“The London tube bombings of July 2005 brought the realisation that news gathering had changed forever, she said. It introduced citizen journalism on an unprecedented scale fuelled by the use of mobile camera and video phones. Within 24 hours of the attacks, the BBC had received 1,000 stills and videos, 3,000 texts and 20,000 e-mails.

The technology also gives organisations like the BBC footage that would be difficult to obtain otherwise, for example the BBC is barred from entering Burma but when the protests erupted last year they were bombarded by emails, pictures, texts and video from citizens observing the events.

The importance of user-generated content (UGC) is now reflected in the creation of the UGC Hub -”a seven-day, 24-hour operation at the heart of our newsroom”.

Boaden’s speech is available in full on the BBC editor’s blog.

(via e-Government News)

Over the past ten years, the Granada locality of Jun has become a cybernetic laboratory for the whole of Europe.

Based on the premise that ‘everybody has the right to the internet’, the city council of this 3, 500 strong town is a perfect example of the optimisation of resources and effective administration: no more mile-long queues to fill out endless official documents.

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Council of Europe Forum for the Future of Democracy hosted by the Government of Spain and the City of MadridMadrid, Spain, 15–17 October 2008

Conclusions by the General Rapporteurs

The UK government is keen for local government to harness technology to revolutionise its services; but a culture change is needed first, says The Guardian newspaper.

The government is providing ever more pilot schemes and opportunities to engage but increasingly fewer people believe that “getting involved” is a good use of their time.

This results in the same people who are already active citizens being offered many more opportunities to engage, whereas the individuals who have not engaged are not benefiting from these new opportunities. So just because new channels of engagement are built, they will not necessarily be used by new participants.

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Last week, the UK think tank Demos launched the Everyday Democracy Index (EDI).

The EDI is an original and innovative tool for assessing the democratic health of European countries beyond the ballot box and across many different dimensions. That includes the formal dimensions of democracy, like procedural rights and election turnout. But it also includes more everyday features of democracy – how important democratic principles and practices are to the cultures of workplaces, to people’s community life, to the way they interact with public services, and even to the way they talk to their friends and family.

The first index covers 25 EU countries.

To see the results and read the pamphlet, visit the interactive website.

Government websites are organization-centric, complicated and confusing, according to a survey of government web professionals in the United States, New Zealand and Canada, writes Gerry McGovern on his blog New Thinking.

Governments are addicted to proving that they are doing their job properly. Many government websites are politics-centric. They talk about the 5-year plans they have just launched, rather than using the website to help implement the 5-year plan.

Too many government websites tell us about what their political masters did. With soft focus pictures we are told that the minister has just arrived down for breakfast. Oh, look, he sat down and is reaching for the toast. I wonder will he have marmalade or honey this morning. (I really care about his diet.)

Too many government websites tell us about the legislation they are enacting. We are victims of a tsunami of policies, procedures and publications in a language that is often meaningless.

Read full story

Every year, the EU Benchmark Survey assesses the quality of online public services in Europe. For the first time, the survey also looked at the users experience when accessing on-line public services, in recognition of the growing importance of this topic, and found mixed results.

From the press release:

“The survey examined three elements which are important to the user experience: the provision of a legally recognised, secure electronic identity, whether the service could be accessed via alternative channels such as call centres, kiosks, mobile phones and TV, and compliance of the websites with the International Accessibility Guidelines. The overall result for this indicator is more mixed and reaches 19%, with Austria, Bulgaria and Norway scoring above 30%. The most striking finding was that only 5% of websites make a specific reference to their compliance with international accessibility guidelines (WAI).

National portals fared much better. The report looked at the number of basic public services which can be accessed from the portal, the existence of personalised options, ease of navigation and whether its presentation is targeted at different kinds of users (businesses vs. citizens, around life events or around the structure of the administration). The overall score of 75% demonstrates that national governments consider the national portal as one of the cornerstones of their eGovernment plans.”

However the report itself puts some further qualification (page 27) on the above optimistic assessment of the user experience of national portals:

“We conclude that the national portals are well developed as user-centric gateways to public service delivery points.

However on the level of the transactional services itself, the agencies, the e-services delivery is still primarily organised around the needs of governmental organization more than around the needs of the users, being citizens and business. [My emphasis]

The survey, carried out for the European Commission by consultants Capgemini, examined over 14,000 web sites offering 20 basic public services in the 27 EU Member States plus Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Turkey. In 2007 the online sophistication of public service delivery reached an overall score of 76%, while 58% of the measured public services are fully available online.

Austria stands out both on sophistication and full on-line availability, with scores of 99 and 100% respectively. Portugal has made major progress since 2006 and Malta and Slovenia stand out as countries that have embraced eGovernment and advanced online service delivery and therefore top the charts in 2007.

- Read press release
- Download report (pdf, 15 mb, 123 pages)

Management guru Don Tapscott, the co-author of best-seller “Wikinomics”, wants to teach governments to harness the power of the Internet to reinvent democracy.

Tapscott is an evangelist for Web 2.0, the second-generation Internet based on participation through social communities such as Facebook and MySpace, participatory sites like free encyclopedia Wikipedia, and blogs.

In “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything,” published this year, he and co-author Anthony Williams dared big companies to reveal their trade secrets on the Web in a gamble to collect the ideas they need from people outside the firm.

Now their thinktank, New Paradigm, is starting a project to involve governments, non-governmental organizations and citizens around the world to revitalize the public sector.

Read full story

Tiago Peixoto sent us a link to this report presenting the results of a joint OECD-World Bank stocktaking of social accountability initiatives in OECD countries. The report which was written by Peixoto, together with Joanne Caddy and Mary McNeil is part of OECD’s efforts to identify emerging trends and develop policy lessons for countries seeking to build more open, accountable and responsive government.

OECD countries have done much to enhance government openness and encourage citizen engagement and participation throughout the past two decades.

Although countries now understand that a whole-of-government perspective is necessary to ensure that system-wide impacts are considered, planning and implementation issues remain. This stocktaking of social accountability initiatives aims to collect information about existing initiatives and country experiences, in an effort to help countries meet these challenges while building more open, accountable and responsive government.

This exercise generated 40 templates detailing social accountability initiatives in 27 OECD countries, and the European Commission. Cases were selected based on focus, level of government, and transferability of policy lessons. The group as a whole illustrates the wealth of innovative practices currently available, and provides a rich resource for practitioners.

Several cases explored the use of online tools to enhance public scrutiny and engagement:
- Canada: Online Pre-Budget Consultation (p. 44)
- Denmark: Danmarksdebatten [currently part of Borger.dk] (p. 55)
- Germany: Online Dialogue Participatory Budgeting (p. 72)
- Hungary: e-Games (p. 81)
- European Union: e-Agora (p. 164)

- Full abstract
- Download publication (pdf, 1.2 mb, 196 pages)

The method of selecting representatives for presenting the view of a constituency was deployed at the time when internet and mobile technologies were not available and there was no method of making a collective decision on policies to government the society.

In today’s times , most of the population have mobile phones that can be used by the citizens to communicate their opinion on important policy issues. Should not we therefore relook at the ways of people representation and amend the democratic processes accordingly?

m-GovWorld is an Indian initiative to create an observatory for mobile government developments and developing a community of stakeholders with the aim to enable acceleration of adoption of mobile technologies by government agencies.

The comments from readers are welcome to suggest innovative ways of making democracy more vibrant using mobile technologies where citizens can be continuously involved in policy decisions rather than voting once in five years.

(via MobileActive.org)

From climate change to social care, innovation will be critical to meeting the public service challenges of the future. But traditional approaches to generating new ideas will not be enough. Rather than focusing on processes and pipelines, policymakers and service deliverers needs to harness the potential of citizens to be innovators in their own right.

Unlocking Innovation: Why citizens hold the key to public service reform is a publication by the UK think tank Demos that collects essays and analysis from a wide range of public sector experts and practitioners. The pamphlet’s chapters offer lessons on how public services can better engage their users based on examples of best practice in the public and private sectors.

It argues that the public sector must embrace new forms of ‘user-driven innovation’ that use the needs and potential of service users as the spur to radical service redesign.

The publication also presents a series of case studies that showcase citizen-focused innovation in action, including:

• ‘In Control’, a social enterprise that provides social care users with easy and flexible access to individual budgets, making it simple for them to choose their own package of services.
• Hammersmith and Fulham council using detailed survey data to redesign their customer contact centre to better serve local people.
• Public private partnerships for tenant management organisations using deep dialogue with local residents to improve levels of service in social housing.
• ‘Innovative ecosystems’ that have allowed educationalists, academics and artists to come together to build ‘mediascapes’ that allow pupils to enter a virtual world of sights and sounds in order to learn in an interactive and cooperative way.

Download report (pdf, 525 kb, 186 pages)