Public Services 2.0 – EU Seminar Bruxelles March 16.

The DG INFSO organisation last week arranged a very interesting seminar focusing on the impact of web 2.0 in Government, in particular trying to bring the attendance to the top European politicians to the impact that the new 2.0 technologies could bring to the table.

The main organizers behind the event, led by David Osimo, clearly expressed that their objective is to use web 2.0 as a tool to formulate and expand Europe’s next ICT-strategy and in this way for the first time have the user community engaged in formulating the ‘post i2010’ strategy.

The formal kick off for the revision of the current i2010 strategy will take place in Malmö, Sweden in November, but David Osimo and his colleagues’ aims at setting up a web 2.0 Community already from mid May. The seminar held on March 16. was intended as a show case of what is already going on, best practices from NGO’s, private companies as well as some public cases.

The morning session contained a number of ‘grass root projects’ – typically NGO’s, private persons or small organizations that had developed web 2.0 sites and/or tools to solve specific societal issues: Jack Thurston demonstrated a transparency project on farm subsidies in Europe – Farmsubsidy - as the first results indicated an enormous skew in the sense that all the big land owners obtained the majority of all funds available. David Price, founder of Debategraph, showed an interesting graphical WiKi-tool useful in many public debates.

A very inspiring presentation was made by Emma Mulqueeny – Rewired State – showing a ‘hacker competition’ in UK:

“On Saturday March 7th 2009 Rewired State held "National Hack The Government Day" at the new Guardian offices in Kings Cross. 80 developers created working projects from public sector information between 10am to 6pm, and presenting them to government officials and the media in the evening, before heading to the pub.”

The results was amazing, the top solutions awarded was a complete re-write of the public sectors’ job search solution (Job Centre Pro Plus ) and a site called Fix My Site , where users can suggest changes in public sector web sites to make them easier to use.

James Munro is a director of PatientOpinion by now a sort of icon in the public 2.0 area, originally received a lot of critical statements from the National health Services in UK when patients began rating their experience at the hospitals, but by now a very natural symbiosis between the public and the citizens.

OnRoadMedia is an extremely interesting project aiming at providing social media solutions to educate and train marginalized youngsters, street children, immigrants and homeless. This is a true demonstration on the real value of web 2.0.

Simon Hampton from Google Europe presented an interesting project linking public transportation time tables across Europe to provide a GoogleTransit solution using mash up techniques.

During the lunch break a new movie on the value of web 2.0 and crowd sourcing was shown.

To quote from the film Us Now:

“In a world in which information is like air, what happens to power?

New technologies and a closely related culture of collaboration present radical new models of social organisation. This project brings together leading practitioners and thinkers in this field and asks them to determine the opportunity for government.
This website features all material being created during the making of the film.”

Afternoon session started with a block focusing on experiences with projects and programmes that could stimulate web 2.0 innovation.

Anna Maybank presented the Social Innovation Camp project – an NGO set up collecting all sorts of ideas and suggestions for web sites or web 2.0 solutions for social innovation. Last round was held in December, and after selecting the most promising ideas, the persons with the bright ideas were confronted with hard core developers and during a couple of days their ideas came to life.

Alberto Cottica from Italy presented the Kublai Project. The idea is to stimulate growth and creativity in the southern part of Italy by offering a collaborative design environment using meetings in second life and a sounding board community to discuss and possibly engage with the owners of the ideas. So in fact it is a combination of a number of web 2.0 techniques: crowd sourcing, second life, social networks, peer coaching.

Wim de Waele represents a Belgian organisation called IBBT - Institute for Broadband Technology and has worked with user driven innovation for some years. It seems to be a European ‘Media Lab’ (like MIT) – and seem to have launched a very substantial number of interesting projects marrying creative ideas with technology experts. Also arts and culture has been targeted, and recently also a project inviting open source programmers (Not only in Belgium but internationally) to participate in collaborative creative projects.

I presented the IBM experiences using the innovation jam-technology. Since 2001 IBM has improved and tested a large scale collaborative jam session technique involving potentially all IBMers on a World Wide scale. The technique has been used also for external projects like the UN Habitat Jam as a preparation for the UN global conference on Urban Dwelling in Vancouver in 2005. The most recent Jam was held in October 2008 engaging more than 90.000 individuals including representatives for more than 1.000 IBM customers. The focus areas were to identity new, innovative solutions, mobilisation of customers, new ways of dealing with the environmental and energy challenges and exploiting globalisation in product development and service delivery.

The final session dealt with Government representatives and their views and experiences using web 2.0. Richard Stirling from the UK Cabinet Office talked about the study he has recently finalized for the UK Government and the Power of Information Taskforce. He also gave a number of private/personal experiences and pointed out a number of areas where the exploitation of web 2.0 by government would be inevitable.

Davied Van Berlon from Netherlands discussed on the role of ‘Civil Servant 2.0’, the changes necessary not only in the technical World but much more the change of culture that is needed also in terms in attitude, ways of working. The Civil Servant 2.0 is a combination of blogs, wikis, social network between civil servants aimed at educating, discussion among peers and by including web 2.0 specialists empower the civil servants and inspiring them.

Jose Alonso is the chair of the eGov group in W3C/CTC. He described projects and ideas to open up the Governments huge collection of data to the general public. One example was the transparency project in Chile where data on all public procurement is on line. The underlying requirement for to open up public archives is of course is to use open document standards like XML, OpenOffice.

Yven Punis, Principal Scientist from JRC IPTS, the EU Research Centre studying web 2.0 finished the day off by a discussion on how the technology might be taken up during the next few years.

David Osimo summed up the day and by using the RSS feed from the conference site you should be able to participate in the formulation of EU’s next version of the ICT strategy when the call for crowd sourcing starts in May. Eventually all of the presentations will be available here as well.

(The conference managed to be on top of the twitter popularity roll for 3 hours when the presentations and discussions were being broadcasted in live video).

Reflections on Media Manipulations

I owe my English readers a short summary of what happened to me a couple of weeks ago when I was happily on my way to Italy on vacation: A bright Friday morning I was awakened by a call from one of colleagues in Denmark who to his great surprise had seen a TV 2 Early Morning News broadcast referring to a ‘Joint proposal by EU and IBM’ to have private citizens assist in law enforcement using IT to spy on each other.

The background for this strange headline was obviously an article in the Danish niche-newspaper Information (During the war a renounced and much appreciated underground paper), who had an interview with me under this very same heading. The interview was based on a paper produced together with my assistant Michael Hvass on ’How can e-Government benefit from web 2.0’. The journalist said he had read it, but seemed to be very much more interested in getting my support to statements on how this could be applied to prevent crime. This topic was of course only a tiny bit of the article that was much more focused on the benefit of social networks, and I told the journalist that I would be very careful to have citizens watch on each other, and that I was much more interested in preventive actions like setting up social networks to assist with integration of 2. generation youngsters or between relatives and friends. As we had made referrals to David Osimo, who is an EU Scientist researching web 2.0, the journalist seemed to have called David Osimo and put the same directed questions on citizen surveillance, to which David O. replied. Obviously neither of us should have replied, and some editor in Information obviously thought that the article needed to be beefed up by a conspiracy-like headline which was way out from the work of David O. as well as our article.

And as TV2 News is a 24x7 news station they need to produce some exciting stuff all the time, and this probably means they use the scissors more than their head and cut out the morning newspapers headlines and take it from there.

In fact, TV2 News called me that Friday morning, and I told them, as I had told Information, that I would be very careful about mutual citizen surveillance, it would lead to riscs and would be in conflict with our thoughts of democracy, but of course mobile phones/cameras where already used to prove things – and again, the social network preventive effects like services for the homeless in Canada, support to ‘father groups’ in ghettos would be far more interesting.

Well, I was later called by my elder son, who was equally puzzled that his dad suddenly turned out to be support of STASI-methods. So I managed to write a Danish blog on the subject same evening without having been able to see neither the article nor the TV broadcast.

When I came home I found out that this spin of a spin obviously had been circulating around and called ‘little brother’ and a lot of persons were really angry with the idea. No wonder.

Well, readers of my blog know my viewpoints on the importance of protecting privacy and while constantly keeping personal integrity while discussing new security tools.

Poor Davis Osimo later wrote me that he had spent a few terrible hours trying to explain why this was simply a hoax.

In his comment at Information’s home page, he said:

I was asked for examples of this, and I mentioned them. When asked what I think about them, I said that personally I don't agree with similar projects, and that they go against the tradition of liberal democracy.
I said that citizens input is more effective for monitoring government, not other citizens. I never said that web2.0 does not produce harassment, indeed if you look at my research reports it clearly spells out the risks for privacy and excessive social control. See the report on www.jrc.es
Finally, I don't speak in the name of the European Commission.
Can the author clarify this. Urgently. “

I left the case as it was when I found that my blog began to be cited further down in Information’s on line article and that David Osimo of course denied any idea of a conspiracy.

And IBM of course is not recommending anything like mutual citizen surveillance as the IBM company has a long standing tradition and firm attitude to protect privacy and integrity.

Then again last week a similar 180 degree’s off spin was fired off by TV2 News. It seemed that the MetroExpress newspaper had a story claiming that EU was now discussing how to allow Sharia-law to be used in specific legal cases within the member states, for instance when it concerning divorce cases involving other ethnical citizens! This was – as Berlingske found out – completely wrong, on the contrary the stated source in EU was actually working to stress that this should never happen, but again TV2 News peddled the story leading 3 political spokesmen from different political parties to protest. It is understandable that the politicians do not have time to do a proper research on topics like this, but it is highly doubtful if the TV station is really doing ‘public service’ by not checking up on their sources.

Well, that was what happened when I was on my way to Italy and to Assisi.

A couple of journalists really should start en route to Canossa.

If they have the time to research where that is and what is meant by that.

I doubt it.

(Clues: The picture shows Hugo of Cluny and Henry IV Barbarossa)