Tony Blair’s outgoing chief strategy adviser fears the internet could be fuelling a “crisis” in the relationship between politicians and voters, writes Brian Wheeler on BBC News Online.

Matthew Taylor – who stressed he was speaking as a “citizen” not a government spokesman – said the web could be “fantastic” for democracy.

But it was too often used to encourage the “shrill discourse of demands” that dominated modern politics.

He was speaking on the day Mr Blair carried out an online interview.

Mr Taylor said Mr Blair’s online grilling from voters – and other initiatives such as environment secretary David Miliband’s blog and Downing Street’s new online petition service – showed the government was making good progress in using the internet to become more open and accountable.

But he said more needed to be done by the web community in general to encourage people to use the internet to “solve problems” rather than simply abuse politicians or make “incommensurate” demands on them.

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An online ideas store to help cultural websites stand out from the crowd has been launched by Culture Online, part of the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), reports the eGov Monitor.

Called ProjectsETC, the new site aims to encourage information-sharing between institutions and focuses on the overlapping areas of education, technology and culture.

The site – www.projectsetc.org – includes case studies, practical guidance and comment pieces about real issues facing the cultural sector in the digital age.

Subjects covered include the truth behind web statistics, search engine optimisation and how to make websites accessible. The new site – part toolkit, part confessional and part advice centre – aims to help professionals working on interactive projects.

A series of podcasts has also been launched, exploring the issues behind the creation and management of digital resources.

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“Seeking new ways to engage with voters, European politicians have taken to blogging and podcasting to get their messages out,” writes Kerry Capell in Business Week.

“David Cameron, Britain’s Conservative Party leader, launched his own video blog (www.webcameron.org.uk) on Sept. 30.”

“The artfully staged clips—the first one shows Cameron in his kitchen cleaning up after breakfast, explaining that he wants to “clean up” British politics—are drawing a mixed response from voters.”

“A gimmicky ploy to reach voters? No doubt, but Cameron and the growing number of European politicians who are finally following voters into the world of Web 2.0 should be commended for trying to engage the public in a two-sided debate instead of just talking at them.”

“Though still in their early days, new media tools such as blogs, video blogs, and podcasts are fast becoming the 21st century equivalent of stump speeches, allowing politicians to reach a younger, more Web-savvy generation of voters. These tools also help keep the pols in the spotlight—in a way that the pols themselves usually can control. [...] Another big lure of the Net is that it enables politicians to circumvent strict limits on media time.”

Politicians featured: David Cameron (UK), Ulster Unionists (UK), Dominique Strauss-Kahn (France), Nicolas Sarkozy (France), Laurent Fabius (France), Jan Peter Balkenende (Netherlands), Wouter Bos (Netherlands), Jan Marijnissen (Netherlands), etc.

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(via Loïc Le Meur)

(see also the “Participative” democracy and Webcameron posts by Bruno Giussani)

Comhairle, the Irish national agency tasked with supporting the provision of information, advice and advocacy on social services, yesterday unveiled a substantially upgraded version of its information website. The new site, renamed www.citizensinformation.ie, takes the place of the existing e-government initiative known as Oasis as well as Comhairle’s online Citizens Information Database (CID).

The site covers a variety of subjects, including employment rights, buying a home, moving abroad and education. The information is sourced from many different service providers and agencies and is divided into 14 categories so that users can readily access the topic relevant to them.

Each category addresses a series of frequently asked questions on the topic, backed by more in-depth information, supporting documents and downloadable forms. This additional material is just one of the changes that people will notice about the site, said Catherine Hughes, Citizens Information project manager. “There’s more detailed information,” she told siliconrepublic.com. “One of the benefits of Oasis was its simplicity but it was also a drawback. It had a simple structure so you couldn’t add additional documents. Now we can add case studies, work sheets and more detail around the legislation.”

Oasis was originally set up in 2001 and last year clocked up 2.5 million unique visitors. The decision to rename the site was instead prompted by the wish to make a clearer connection between the physical Citizens Information Centres — there are 240 located around the country — and the phone service along with its online equivalent.

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(via E-Government News)

A new social-networking Web site, aimed at “opinion leaders” in politics and other issues, will launch Thursday with a roster of members including former U.S. President Bill Clinton, U.S. senators John McCain and Hillary Clinton and former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, writes Grant Gross of IDG News Service in MacWorld.

Hotsoup.com aims to give an online voice to the millions of U.S. residents who keep up with the news and influence the opinions of their friends, family and coworkers. The founders of Hotsoup.com, including Internet entrepreneurs and Republican and Democratic consultants, hope the site will contain information that’s “not filtered, not spun,” said co-founder Ron Fournier, a former chief political reporter for the Associated Press.

The goal is to create smart, civil debate, said three of the site’s co-founders during a preview Wednesday. “Americans are tired of yelling at their TV screens,” said Allie Savarino, a Hotsoup co-founder who also helped start the Sisterwoman.com social-networking site. “They want a voice of their own, and they want someone to listen.”

Hotsoup will include video- and text-based commentary from top political, entertainment and sports figures, and it will allow users to start their own discussions about issues important to them. Like other social-networking sites, Hotsoup also will allow users to create detailed profiles.

Hotsoup will also poll users for their opinions on issues and ask them how likely they are to tell friends about a particular debate they’ve participated in on the site.

The concept has drawn significant interest, even before the site’s official launch. Since July, 22,000 people have preregistered for the site, Savarino said. Members include cyclist Lance Armstrong, Republican strategist Mary Matalin, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and politically active rock musician Jon Bon Jovi.

Hotsoup’s founders said they hope the interaction between their opinion-leader members can influence public policy. “Our nation’s public, business and religious leaders are realizing they need to listen and engage with this community,” Savarino said.

Asked if they’re concerned that the debate on Hotsoup will devolve into something less than civil, the co-founders said editor-in-chief Fournier will attempt to steer discussions that get off track, although they don’t want to cut off debate.

Patient Opinion is all about enabling (UK) patients to share their experiences of health care, and by doing so help other patients — and perhaps even change the NHS.

Patient Opinion is a revolutionary online system which allows anyone to share their experiences of receiving specialist treatment on the NHS.

Funded jointly by the Department of Health and South Yorkshire Strategic Health Authority, Patient Opinion is a new non-profit company led by experienced GP and social entrepreneur, Dr. Paul Hodgkin. Based on his experience, and the service improvement requirements of the NHS, Dr. Hodgkin identified two major communication gaps which Patient Opinion will address:

• Patients and carers are now being provided with greater choice of specialist treatment options and locations – but they have little information on which options are best for them, without which choosing can be a lottery.
   
• The NHS has put in place lots of reporting and rating systems – but this formal ‘performance’ data seldom records the real experience of patients and carers.

Envision Solutions has published a new e-book that explains how to communicate about healthcare successfully in a world where social media is becoming increasingly influential. From Command & Control To Engage & Encourage focuses on how innovative healthcare industry players can integrate social media in their communications efforts:

“Currently, companies like Dell, Microsoft and GM are using social media technologies such as blogs to engage and communicate with their stakeholders. These corporations understand that social media has given the masses the power to significantly influence their economic fortunes.”

“Despite this shift in the communications landscape, many in the healthcare industry have been hesitant to do more than dip their toes into the social media ocean. They fear that engaging social media will require giving up control of their messages. However, the masses are already shaping perceptions of the healthcare industry. Individuals and organizations in this sector will have no choice but to develop a strategy for communicating effectively in a social media world.”

The e-book is available as a free download from the Envision Solutions web site.

(via the Business Innovation Insider)

A few progressive [public authorities in the USA], such as VA’s Memorial Affairs, have taken a step beyond early e-gov programs, using the Web as a platform for delivering interactive services, aka Web 2.0. These new services, or Web applications, make better use of an agency’s data and other resources, including human resources, by creating bridges from public-facing Web sites to back-end databases. And increasingly, thanks to a slew of new open-source and commercially available tools, government Web applications can be as rich as software run on a PC.

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Prévu pour fin 2007, mon.service-public.fr devrait proposer un portail personnalisé pour les usagers intégrant tous les contenus de Service-Public.fr et un accès simplifié aux téléservices. Ce nouveau portail devrait également disposer d’un coffre-fort de données personnelles permettant de stocker des documents administratifs en format électronique, de manière à accomplir les démarches en ligne plus facilement.

Entre avril et juillet 2006, 500 expérimentateurs testeront le portail Mon.Service-Public.fr. Cette expérimentation est destinée à vérifier l’adéquation du portail avec les besoins des usagers. Ce dispositif encore expérimental permet à l’usager d’accéder à un ensemble de services mis en place par un nombre encore limité d’organismes : CNAF, ANPE, Documentation française/service-public.fr, et Éducation Nationale. Pionniers de l’administration en ligne, les expérimentateurs recevront une carte à puce “mon.service-public.fr” ainsi qu’un lecteur de carte afin de tester ce nouveau moyen d’identification. Ils utiliseront la version provisoire du portail et feront part de leurs remarques aux responsables de l’expérimentation. Les résultats de cette expérimentation seront analysés puis une synthèse sera rédigée et communiquée en juillet 2006.

Translation:

At the end of 2007 2007, mon.service-public.fr will be the address of a personalised portal where users can integrate all the contents of Service-Public.fr with a simplified access to online services. The new portal will also contain a virtual personal briefcase where users can store administrative documents in electronic version, thus allowing them to handle their online tasks more easily.

Between April and July 2006, 500 users tested the Mon.Service-Public.fr portal, which allowed us to verify if the portal was adequately addressing the needs of the users. The prototype version of the portal allows users to access a range of services provided by a still limited number of entities, including CNAF, ANPE, Documentation française/service-public.fr, and Éducation Nationale. As e-gov pioneers, the test users received an electronic card “mon.service-public.fr” as well as a reader to test this new identification card. After submitting their remarks to the project leaders, we expect that a synthesis of the results will be available in July 2006.

Démocratie 2.0 – La prochaine révolution sur internet sera politique…

Démocratie 2.0 – The next internet revolution will be political…

Government 2.0: Using Technology to Improve Education, Cut Red Tape, Reduce Gridlock, and Enhance Democracy
by William D. Eggers.

A well-written, lively, optimistic book that calls for the transformation of technology in government from lipstick on a bulldog to total information awareness. This book is proactive in nature (see what these governments are really doing), does not call for a wholesale and costly transformation, and employs a subtle shaming of those governments that have not yet joined the 21st century. William Eggers’s argument, conservative in nature, states that the world of politics would quickly and markedly benefit from this digital transformation in terms of a fiscal payoff, but a more profound change would result as governments become more transparent, more democratic, and more efficient.

- Amazon link
- Book website
- Article by the book author

CityCita is a free service that lets people join or create local groups and organise meetings, all within an open classification system. The service offers a convenient way to connect with others who share similar interests and ideas and live locally. There are thousands of groups that people can join in an easy-to-use, privacy-protected and spam-protected environment. The CityCita service can be accessed via its web site or through any email program.

The non-profit service is specifically designed for associations, social groups, political groups, alumni groups, membership groups, conferences and events, and has been developed by a Paris and London based company.

La incorporación de nuevas herramientas, denominadas de software social, a la administración pública no está haciendo más que empezar. Desde hace muy poco la nueva página de la Generalitat de Cataluña se está implicando en aplicar nuevos conceptos de web al desarrollo de su presencia en Internet. Un concepto de web llamado 2.0 y que se caracteriza por utilizar elementos que la diferencian de lo que hasta ahora se ha venido realizando tal como utilizar Ajax en sus desarrollos, crear canales de sindicación mediante RSS, implementación de Google Mini como buscador, generación de blogs, proyecto de redes sociales (e-Catalunya)…

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Wikis, blogs and other interactive tools are making it easier to find out what people really think of their government and its services.

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Is Web 2.0 in government an oxymoron? It would seem that Uncle Sam in particular could easily fall out of step with a “new” Web of blogs, wikis, podcasts and RSS. Yet last week’s “Gilbane Conference on Content Technologies in Government” in Washington, DC, suggests that federal Web managers are indeed exploring Web 2.0 technologies.

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The participation sector has spawned a large amount of research, methodology, and consulting services, but remarkably little new thinking about how to get better results from consultation and participation exercises. In the late 90’s, the Internet and related technologies were seen as a potential solution to these problems, but the majority of early e-government and e-democracy initiatives have been little more than old thinking disseminated using new media. However, the outlines of a new approach are beginning to take shape that draws on recent thinking in online social networks and the emerging culture of the World Wide Web to offer some lessons for the future.

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Your London (www.yourlondon.gov.uk) has received a prestigious Government Computing BT Award, winning the ‘Best Shared Services’ category for the portal’s ‘Report It‘ facility. It’s one of the first and best ‘Web 2.0′ local authority user interfaces, with an AJAX/Local Google implementation to access council information.

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Gencat.net (the Internet website of the Catalan Regional Government) is an example of a radical redefinition of the e-Government portal concept, the first real implementation of Web 2.0 philosophy in Public Administration, fully backed by an explicit policy-driven political strategy focused on a personalized and integrated citizen-centric approach.

Gencat.net is the result of a global strategic refocus based on Web 2.0 of the role of ICT as an enabler for e-Government.

It consists of an impressive reorganization effort to transcend an already implemented “classic” institutional Internet presence: Gencat.net integrating 270 departmental portals and the transactional-oriented Gencat.serveis-cat365 (200 services) as part of a complex interoperability model involving all Public Administrations.

To remove the inherent limitations of such conventional model the Catalan Government decided to heavily rethink the overall e-Government conceptual approach, reconsidering the role of the citizen as contributors and flexible adopters.

After a rigorous multi-dimensional diagnostic and coinciding with the relevant Web 2.0 discussions, the decision was to explore the eventual liaison with the latest technological advances attached to this emerging concept.

A substantial reengineering of the main portal (Gentcat.net) was faced, involving the complete integration (by syndication) of the existing sub-portals and embedding the most advanced searching engine (Google).

The adoption of Web 2.0 philosophy involved rethinking all existing services in terms of the related technologies (such as RSS, wiki, blogs, social networks software) resulting in a radical change of the citizen’s interaction model.

The portal is operational showing an important growth in use and opening a stimulating framework for further innovations.

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voi siete qui è il primo strumento del progetto openpolis, per una politica liberamente accessibile, modificabile e migliorabile dalla comunità degli utenti.

Un intervento permanente nella cosa pubblica, di controllo e influenza sulle scelte politiche.

L’idea è dare uno strumento che permetta a tutti di confrontare i programmi dei partiti su 25 temi fondamentali.

I prossimi strumenti saranno progettati per permettere il monitoraggio comunitario, per ognuno dei 25 temi, delle posizioni di tutti i partiti nel corso della prossima legislatura (prima delle elezioni hanno detto questo, dopo hanno fatto…).

Tutti i progetti di openpolis sono geneticamente open publishing, open content, open source creati e moderati dalla comunita’. Per saperne di piu’ vai su openpolis.

L’idea del progetto openpolis, di cui voi siete qui è il primo strumento, parte dai soci dell’associazione democrazia elettronica e partecipazione pubblica.

Poi si e’ allargata a un gruppo di persone che si interessano della politica e di nuovi media. Alcuni lavorano da anni nel campo delle nuove tecnologie, altri stanno nelle universita’ e nelle scuole. Tutti condividono i principi del progetto. Siamo una comunita’ che vuole crescere, in fretta.

Il sito Voisietequi.it nasce come nuovo strumento per un’azione attiva sull’amministrazione pubblica

Di quali strumenti dispongono i cittadini che intendono monitorare e valutare la politica del proprio paese? Da tempo due siti britannici, Theyworkforyou.com e Opendemocracy.net, lavorano per consentire alla popolazione inglese un controllo più attivo della pubblica amministrazione. Queste esperienze segnalano dunque internet come un valido sistema per avvicinare le masse alla politica favorendo il coinvolgimento trasversale degli individui.

Adesso, attraverso il sito Voisietequi.it, è stato avviato anche in Italia un simile percorso per incentivare la partecipazione. Tramite questo nuovo progetto i cittadini avranno la possibilità di confrontare le posizioni dei partiti sulle questioni più importanti della campagna elettorale, di comprendere quale formazione politica è più in sintonia con le proprie idee e, soprattutto, di conservare un archivio di tutte le promesse dei partiti per poi verificarne in seguito il mantenimento. Questa iniziativa nasce come strumento di lancio di un progetto più vasto, che si svilupperà sulle pagine del sito Openpolis.it.

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