Welfare technology – buzzword or reality?

( Picture from the Aarhus Eldertech Study)

Recently I was invited to participate in a meeting preceding the start up of a special line of bachelor education at the University of Southern Denmark focusing on Welfare Technology. It seems to be the first university level education aiming specifically at welfare as a technological focus area.

This topic has gained increasing clout during the last couple of years, backed by the Danish Technological Institute, medical organizations and larger cities like Aarhus, Odense and Copenhagen.

It is expected that this represents a new growth area for Danish Industry and could play an important role, particularly to meet the growing need for health and care personnel as a result of the ageing population. Checking the origin of the term on the net, I found that the first mentioning of Welfare Technology to my astonishment was actually a project, were I had participated as advisor: In 2006 the Danish Technology Board started a project called ‘New Technology for Elderly Care’. In this project we tried to distinguish between technology which is merely focusing on saving physical labour and technology, which actually supported elderly and/or handicapped persons with control of their own (chronic) disease, physical environment, increased mobility and better social contact. It seems that this distinction between objectives has been generally accepted.

In 2007 almost when the Danish project was being finalised, EU launched a program for funding joint initiatives within the member states and associated states called Ambient Assisted Living, clearly focused on elderly. As commissioner Viviane Reading stated at the start of the project:

"There is no reason for older people in Europe to miss out on the benefits of new technologies. The solutions and services resulting from this programme will help them to remain active in society as well as staying socially connected and independent for a longer time. "

At this point 2 calls for proposals have been conducted: The first in 2008 focusing on “ICT based solutions for Prevention and Management of Chronic Conditions of Elderly People” and the second round this year with a focus on: “ICT based solutions for Advancement of Social Interaction of Elderly People”. One might expect rather narrow sighted projects to come out of these specific objectives, but looking at for instance the Persona project from the first call, it doesn’t seem to have influenced the project partners, and the Persona project is really a holistic type of project trying to take the various aspects of self-managing and personal control as well as social inclusion into consideration. The city of Odense and the Danish MEDCOM organisation are very active here.

But welfare technology has more actors than the handicapped/elderly persons and their relatives: If technology is deployed to increase the living conditions and diminish effects of chronic diseases and variations in health, it has to be seen in context with the entire health community and the services related to it – potentially embracing all the players in the field.

In order to make a technical proof for this type of technology and the need for an IT infrastructure behind the gadgets and measurement equipment, IBM DK has participated in a number of projects trying to test both the validity of the technology as well as the infrastructure – and not least: together with the caretakers and the users find out if the interfaces was understandable and if the technology was seen as a help. One of the first projects of this kind was the Eldertech project with the city of Aarhus. (Or download brochure describing the project ).Also the University of Aarhus and the Alexandra Institute participated in this very successful project. Also the city of Copenhagen, inspired by the Technology Council report, last year started a project aiming at improving the quality of life for elderly people living at a municipal old age home, Sjölund.

A new organisation has seen the dawn of light in Denmark: Carenet (http://www.carenet.nu )

This organisation has municipalities, service providers as well as technology providers as members and are 100% dedicated to welfare technology and projects around it.

So it seems that the level of activity in Denmark is very high, and I expect one of the reasons behind this is the timing of the administrative reform, where 275 municipalities were merged to a mere 99 but with an increased responsibility for health care and for people suffering from chronic diseases.

But we are still in the early days – we need to take the positive experiences from the first small scale projects and expand them to a much larger group of citizens. At the same time we need to have a set of recommendations for investment in Welfare Technology: It may be all right to introduce an artificial seal for people suffering from Alzheimers and to introduce the WII game to keep people active, but the real challenge will be to create the tru infrastructure for gradually adding new services and gadgets as technology evolves.

For that we need a set op open standards – as the international CONTINUA alliance is aiming at, and we need to have Danish Software providers and manufacturers to work together to create an open, yet secure set of framework and building blocks. The Danish organisation for Open Source Vendors, OSL, has engaged in an initiative to engage manufacturers of Welfare Technology to apply open source based SW as well as open interfaces. This initiative will lead to seminars and networks with members of the Danish Industry – and possibly also manufacturers and providers from other countries. For those interested, pls. send a note to OSL at secretariat@osl.dk and you will receive further information.

The European Union and web 3.0

Already in October 2008 the European Commission launched a consultation on Web 3.0 to try to position Europe and to communicate a strategy to the member states during 3.rd quarter of 2009 proposing a policy approach “addressing the whole range of political and technological issues related to the move from RFID and sensing technologies to the Internet of Things”

This indicates that at the time of the initial consultation, the commission’s view of Web 3.0 was more focused on the ‘internet of things’ than the current understanding of being the semantic network of interrelated data, or as Tim Berners-Lee put it: “The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.”

During the Autumn a number of external experts critized the Commission for lack of innovation and understanding of web 3.0. See for instance this blog critizising the Commisioner Vivianne Reading: http://blog.semantic-web.at/2008/09/30/eu-commissions-short-sighted-definition-of-web-30/

So what is the current status of EU’s view on web 3.0?. In January 2009, Gerard Santucci, Head of Unit from DG Information Society and Media, presented his and his unit’s view on the status of the IoT for the conference on the Future of the Internet. At this point the EU seems to begin to focus also on the tremendous amounts of data that could be available – either as a direct result of collected data through the IoT or by making data available online, so Santucci in his paper also stressed the need for security around it: “The exercise of data subject rights in the context of intelligent networked environments will require the creation of complex Identity Management systems, based on interoperability, identification, authentication, and authorisation.”

In May EU hosted a conference on the Future of the Internet in Prague. This was a step towards a much more comprehensive understanding of the potential promises of the semantic web, and an excellent video was presented here. Also the Swedish Government, before their presidency of ERU beginning July 1, 2009, was present and demonstrated through State Secretary Leif Zetterberg a more forward looking attitude, but again no mentioning of the opportunities and issues around the potential for a semantic web in Europe. His focus areas were 1) formulate a new ICT strategy for Europe from 2011-2015, 2) Harmonize use Digital TV Frequencies in Europe as well as creating one common market for telecommunication industry, and 3) aiming at a secure infrastructure. But no words on making public data available or securing interoperability to create a whole new web 3.0 market place. Hopefully the Swedish Presidency will redress this during the fall.

In June the commission launched an action plan to embrace ‘The Internet of Things’ (IoT) including a comprehensive list of sub-action items, 13 in all ranging from Governance of IoT, over Privacy, Risc Assessments, Impact on Society, Need for Standards, Research Needed, Public-Private Partnership for IoT, RFID Issues, Institutional Awareness, International Dialogue to Measurement of the Uptake. But not much information about one of the key issues in the i2010 Strategy for ICT: Creation of a Single European Information Space with a strong emphasis on Content Online, as stated by Ken Ducatel, Head of Unit from DG/INFSO responsible for the follow-on program to the i2010 in a presentation in March 2009.

In May 2009 a group of international experts called upon the EU Commission to increase focus of solving the inherent problems of the current infrastructure and standards in the Internet:

“The Internet was never designed for how it is now being used and is creaking at the seams. We have connectivity today but it is not ubiquitous; we have bandwidth but it is not limitless; we have many devices but they don’t all talk to each other. We can transfer data but the transfers are far from seamless. We have access to content but it can’t be reused easily across every device. Applications and interfaces are still not intuitive, putting barriers in the way of the Internet’s benefits for many people. And, since security was an afterthought on the current Internet, we are exposed in various ways to spam, identity theft and fraud.”

So the experts is trying to put focus back again on some of the key words for web 3.0: Seamless data exchange, re-use of content, open interfaces. Plus – of course – the challenges raised by the mere fact that we are running out of addresses in IPV4 and need to plan for IPV6 as fast as possible.

The timing of this statement is quite crucial as the hearings for the next ICT Strategic plan – the i2015 – is just about to start, and the more consultations with experts and with country spokesmen that point to these problems, the more likely it will be that EU will see the potential of the semantic web within a short time frame.

In some areas, particularly Health Care, it is obvious that a clear use of semantics is a mere necessity for cross border interoperability and for exchange of electronic patient records, a long lasting problem of standardization even within each member country. (Denmark, for instance, has got at least 5 different standards for EPR’s).

In June 2009 EU organized a seminar for ‘Ontology-driven interoperability in eHealth’. This marked a midterm in a 3-year project trying to define the standards needed and the necessary steps towards interoperability in the eHealth area. The Picture above illustrates the problem. In this context the organisations involved cover the key players for web 3.0: CEN, CENELEC, ETSI, W3C, ISO, OASIS and the more health care oriented standardisation committees CONTINUA and IHE. The eHealth domain as well as the eProcurement domain which I mentioned in my earlier blog on web 3.0, seem to be well on their way towards practical results and methodologies that can be deployed by other domains.

While EU is gaining its forces and collecting input from all over on the upcoming priorities, the web 3.0/Semantic web environment is slowly progressing, for each day and month producing simple-to-use, practical tags and definitions. See for instance these 4 examples of practical microformats enhancing exchange of information on personal identity, calendar inputs and other:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1773550/semantic_web_4_fundamental_microformats.html

In the meantime, led by David Osimo, a crowd sourcing initiative is taking place to create the People’s declaration on the i2015. Suggest you visit the page and register and vote for the top priorities. As of to day the top rated recommendation is: release government data in free, open, standard, readily available, accessible formats Or – if you want to participate in an upcoming event on the semantic web and it’s potential, register at: http://iswc2009.semanticweb.org/

Towards web 3.0 ???

Last week W3C opened a conference in San Jose, California, on Semantic technology. Also present at the conference were a number of vendors all hoping to commercialize products within the realm of semantics. I got curious and decided to make some research to see how far web 3.0 had really come; I put a question up on Facebook, but the reactions I got were like this: “ Why are we talking about web 3.0? We haven’t even starting exploiting web 2.0?”

So where are we?

We are definitely moving away from web 1.0, connecting computers, over web 2.0 - connecting people - to what may be called web 3.0 – If that means, that web 3.0 is where you use the value of the web 2.0 technologies plus the semantic tools to find your way into all the crab and get the right and/or most likely answers to your questions. In order to do this, of course you need standards and the status of this work was a major part of last week’s conference.

W3C owns some of the core technologies within the semantic domain, and it is seen as a major turning point these days that the maturity of the basic technologies: RDF – Resource Development Framework, and OWL - Web Ontology Language. Based on the standards developed here and also of course the XML-standards, the semantic query language SPARQL has been developed.

Related, but independently maintained standards such as XBRL, is also moving ahead to help clarify definitions and meanings across systems and boundaries.

The whole concept of semantics is particularly important in a multi-language set up like the European Community, and EU as such have since long promoted the use of semantics as a core technology to provide interoperability across the boundaries of Europe. One of the first pan-European areas where principles of the semantic web are being defined and tested in the area of eProcurement. The PEPPOL Conference in January in Copenhagen kicked off the project, where a number of IT companies and representatives from users are seated. The Danish Ministry of Finance and IBM Denmark are both partners here. A general perspective of the PEPPOL Project can be found here: http://www.peppolinfrastructure.com/20090129ConnectingtoPEPPOL.pdf

PEPPOL is still a development project, although the demonstration phase will appear pretty soon.

But as the multitude of globally available solutions presented in San Jose here in June showed, we may now be on the brink of a real break-through to have a multitude of commercial applications available.

Ivan Herman is responsible for W3C’s semantic programme. He gave a lengthy interview that described his opinion of the status. Her stated it like this:

“Web 3.0 is the idea of having data on the web defined and linked in a way that it can be used by machines not just for display purposes, but for automation, integration and reuse of data across various applications." (From San Fransisco W3C Conference)

Other blogs and discussion for a on the net have been dealing with the topic for quite some time.

Phil Wainewright: What to expect from web 3.0? , tries to explain what the main differences and concepts for breakthrough in web 3.0 really are. He explains, that web 3.0 consists of

4 Layers: API-Layer – where service providers give access to content and data. He thinks this layer is pretty mature, with almost no profit left for new comers. The next layer, The Aggregation services Layer contains all the goodies of web 2.0 like RSS Feeds etc., and the third and exciting ‘new’ area is the Application Services layer – Where office, EPR, CMS, and other applications and services are buying offered on demand, software as a service. A fourth layer may consist of Serviced Clients, and this may also be an interesting new business area, according to Phil Wainewright.

As an example of one of the application areas he expects to thrive, is the WebEX Office SaaS:

WebEX – example of a company focusing on delivering SaaS using web 3.0

Searching the web I also found Richard MacManus, lecturing about web 3.0:

“Web 1.0 is characterized by enabling reading, web 2.0 = read/write where everybody becomes a publisher – but web 3.0??”

“Unstructured information will give way to structured information, paving the way to more intelligent computing.”

The essence of his expectations is that web sites will be turned into web services, whether or not this should be considered a brand new paradigm is a matter of taste, but in Rachard MacManus opnion:

“There is a difference in the solutions we are seeing in 2009: More products based on structured data (Wolfram Alpha), more real time – made sadly necessary because of the situation in Iran - (twitter, OneRiot), better filters (FriendFeed and Facebook with copies FF)”

So of web 3.0 is all about structuring data and making data available, then some of the new semantic techniques for storing relations between entities - TripleStore Technology – like ‘Peter is friend with Susan’ – or ‘Muhammed is a member of the AK81 gang’ is the way ahead. Much easier than to describe EDIFACT rules in the 90’ties, and if you could really create this links of links of links and use powerful searching tools across the variety of databases, then we will surely see a new level of intelligent computing.

According to Alexander Korts, (april 2009) in his article on The web of Data, creating Machine Accessible Information gives the following example:

“One promising approach is W3C's Linking Open Data (LOD) project. The above image (on top of blog) illustrates participating data sets. The data sets themselves are set up to re-use existing ontologies such as WordNet, FOAF, and SKOS and interconnect them.

The data sets all grant access to their knowledge bases and link to items of other data sets. The project follows basic design principles of the World Wide Web: simplicity, tolerance, modular design, and decentralization. The LOD project currently counts more than 2 billion RDF triples, which is a lot of knowledge. (A triple is a piece of information that consists of a subject, predicate, and object to express a particular subject's property or relationship to another subject.) Also, the number of participating data sets is rapidly growing. The data sets currently can be accessed in heterogeneous ways; for example, through a semantic web browser or by being crawled by a semantic search engine.

This in a way makes it reassuring and at the same time illustrates the amount of work still ahead of us before we will reach the ‘promised’ land of web 3.0. Also it shows, that web 3.0 is a journey and not and end in itself. And finally: that we will have to master Web 2.0 techniques and imbed this into all the traditional services and solutions before we get a user friendly and intuitive way of accessing all these data. But most important: It puts a pressure on all Governments (in particular) but also on private companies to make data available. Tim Berness Lee gave a very interesting and inspiring pitch on this matter in February this year: Tim Berners Lee on the next web

Conclusion is that we are still only stumbling at the foot of the mountain, but we have spotted the way ahead.

(And if you are really interested in the topic of Digital Libraries, maybe you should attend the Conference on Semantic Web for digital Libraries in Trento in September. )

Green Cities - Blue Skies Ahead?

This year we are witnessing an increasing level of activity in all institutions and organisations that in some way expect to benefit or to be involved in the upcoming climate summit in Copenhagen in December: COP 15 – Copenhagen December 2009

The objectives for the meeting are very high and the effort put into the preparations have been substantial:

• To get all the world's countries to agree on a global target for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
• To get the world's industrialized countries to take the lead and reduce their CO2 emissions significantly, while the world's newly industrialized countries and developing countries contribute to a collective solution
• To agree on a global climate regime which does not restrain economic growth and that does not distort competition on the world market.
  
  

The Climate conference is supported by the UN International Panel on Climate Control.

The panel does not in itself represent the latest research, and some critics of their predictions claim that they base the recommendations on scientific work that is by now 2 years old. Others, including the notorious climate commentator Bjorn Lomborg, claims that all the effort and money going into carbon dioxide reduction are more or less wasted. But these days the critics seem to become fewer an fewer as the Copenhagen Fever intensifies;

This month the Copenhagen Climate Council will meet and discuss industries’ role in supporting the sustainability agenda.

And also the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its subcommittees are, what the call ‘in full negotiating mode’:

“The Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP) and the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA) will operate in full negotiating mode in 2009 to advance work towards meeting their respective mandates. Important ongoing work under the Convention will also be taken forward in 2009 by SBI and SBSTA.”

But Carbon-Dioxyde submission, pollution and energy waste is first and foremost something that takes place in cities all over the World; so no wonder that this has become a burning platform and has created a lot of both political interest but also a number of real and promising initiatives forward. One of the first of this kind of initiatives in Europe is the so-called Covenant of the Mayors.

This project is strongly supporting the EU plan ’20-20-20’ – EU’s initiative to reduce CO2 emissions by 20% in 2020 as a result of a 20% increase in energy efficiency and a 20% share of renewable energy sources in 2020.

(The big question is if this is enough to reverse the trend towards global warming!)

The Council of European Municipalities and Regions (CEMR), in Malmö, 22-24 April 2009, and discussed the covenant, adding to examples and recommendations and the number of cities and regions that have signed the Covenant is still adding.

Among other pan-European initiatives the Green shift Europe founded in 2008 pointed at a number of possibilities for city administrations, companies and citizens to contribute to achieving the EU targets – and maybe even to go beyond them:

Examples from the Green Shift proposals:

• Energy generation and distribution uses one third of all primary energy. Electricity generation could be made more efficient by 40% and its transport and distribution by 10%. ICT could make not only the management of power grids more efficient but also facilitate the integration of renewable energy sources. Denmark generates half its electricity through decentralised grids, with wind power accounting for 20% of all electricity. As a result, its C0₂ emissions fell from 937 to 517 g/kWh from 1990-2005.
• The heating, cooling and lighting of buildings account for more than 40% of European energy consumption. ICT can continuously monitor data to optimise lighting, ventilation and equipment performance and provide consumers real-time updates on their energy consumption to stimulate behavioural changes. In Finland, this smart metering encouraged consumers to increase energy efficiency by 7%.
• 20% of world electricity is used for lighting. Changing to energy efficient light bulbs could halve today's energy consumption for lighting by 2025. Intelligent light bulbs, which automatically adjust to natural light and people's presence will have an even greater effect.
  
  

The European organisation for cities, Eurocities: Focus on the importance of smarter cities to demonstrate the role that ICT can play in improving the energy efficiency of cities, the consequent reduction in emissions and working towards achieving a more sustainable low-carbon economy and society. Also to coordinate work on the development of a “Green Digital Charter” which would propose an action orientated and measurable framework and to support cities in using ICT to facilitate emissions reductions through improved energy efficiency and innovation.

In working towards a ‘Green Digital Charter’ for cities the main points are:

1. Getting local partnerships of key leaders and stakeholders together in each city to promote the new green agenda
2. Establishing a series of digital applications for improving the measurement, transparency and visibility of energy use and then involving local citizens, service providers and organisations to test-bed projects to deploy these
3. Ensuring the city’s own ICT infrastructure and digital services have the minimal possible carbon footprint.
4. Facilitating innovation to develop new digital infrastructures to enable low carbon activities and to achieve systemic carbon effectiveness
5. Encouraging and promoting low carbon activities through innovative research and development activities and deployment projects

IBM, one of the private companies supporting the Eurocities organisation, is supporting the climate agenda on a global basis, most markedly in the Smarter Planet approach.. Smarter cities are one of the key areas under this heading. IBM’s work in this area can be described in the following 4 different visions:

1. The connected city – making full use of telecommunications and mobile services to facilitate as well personal social networks as well as collaborative working reducing travel and increasing innovative capabilities
2. The sustainable city – instrumentation to monitor and control all sorts of submissions, energy consumption, waste and recycling. This is based on intelligent systems that will help monitor and also to utilise incentive based market systems or personal-incented methods to support saving and managing constrained resources.
3. The integrated City – Most cities are still today operated in silo’s and departments, and parts of the traditional city operations may have been outsourced. The integrated city approach offers capabilities again to have an enterprise view of what is happening encouraging optimization of city services and assist in incident management as well as crime prevention.
4. The entrepreneurial city – deploying ICT solutions that will enable cities’ eco-system integration also taking commuting and collaboration between citizens, work places and consumers’ sites into consideration.

Example: The EDISON Project in Denmark was announced in February 2009. The objective of this project is to make a proof-of-concept that wind-based energy systems are able to offer a major part of the needed energy resources by allowing surplus energy to be stored in batteries of electric cars in peak periods, by operating windmills much closer to predicted storms and to have an intelligent electricity network connected to neighbouring countries to level off production and consumption.

Another example is the Stockholm congestion/Intelligent traffic regulation system; Not only did the variable pricing scheme – combined with an increased frequency of busses and tramway – lead to a reduction of inner city traffic by more than 20%, the level of pollution also dropped sharply. This model, supported by IBM solutions, is now being replicated in a number of cities around the World – from London, to Dublin, to Brisbane.

For the upcoming Eurocities summer event taking place in Reykjavik, Iceland from June 10 to 12, focus will move from the overall political declarations to practical and solid best practices that can be copied between the member cities. The preliminary program can be found here:

http://www.reykjavik.is/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-3567/5628_view-835/

G20 - Fears or Expectations?

(picture: Franklin D. Roosevelt at London Summit 1933)

The upcoming G20 meeting where 85% of the World’s GDP will be present will take place in London where a similar meeting took place in June 1933. The question remains if this G20 meeting will meet the same fate as the former London meeting or a step away from the brink of the sharp economic downturn.

In 1933 the meeting was organized by the League of Nations . The objectives of many Nations were to re-instate the currency link to the Gold Standard, which would secure that prices and wages would fall in parallel with a downturn, and the idea was that this would still enable foreign trade. The objective of some of the leaders – Mussolini, Hitler – was to demonstrate that nationalism and increased spending of re-armament would prove to be a way out of the crisis, while the country that was accused to put a torpedo to the London summit was USA. The new president, Franklin Roosevelt, had put his New Deal on the table back home, and this – very much like the present situation – resulted in a weakening of the Dollar because of huge deficit – in other words: US Govt paid to get out of the crisis by inflating it’s currency. This would be effectively stopped if the Gold Standard was to be reinstated. But it shouldn’t have been a surprise that FDR would work against the scheme – already in his inauguration speech, Roosevelt said:

"I shall spare no effort to restore world trade by international economic readjustment, but the emergency at home cannot wait on that accomplishment,"

This time around the agenda is almost the same - http://www.londonsummit.gov.uk/en/summit-aims/ - but with the added objective to re-start the World on a path towards sustainable growth.

The official UK website for the G20 meeting expresses the hope that the meeting will restore financial stability and avoid further recession. Not all the key players share the optimism – China has argued that it fears the pressure on the dollar value as they have ended up by pouring more than 1000 billion Dollars into US Treasury Bonds. Hence they recommend that Dollars will be replaced as a reserve currency by Special Drawing Rights issued by IMF based on a basket of currencies. Already before Obama put his trillion dollar deficit to the Congress, China expressed fears that the 682 Bn $ portfolio of US bonds would be devalued. . Before the G20 meeting, the comments from Wang Qishan – Vice premier China: http://www.londonsummit.gov.uk/en/global-update/cp-china/active-part - has been moderate, and maybe China has reached the conclusion, that if the Dollar is no longer the World’s currency for reserves, than nothing would prevent the Dollar from falling. So China is facing a catch 22 problem. EU also recommends to hold back the China SDR-scheme for a while.

At the same time tens of thousands protest against the G20 meeting . As people are being fired, the ‘end of capitalism’ is often heard in the crowds. What may be an even worse sign is some experts view that we may have seen the ‘end of globalisation’. See the views expressed by Harold James in this version of ‘What matetrs’. :

"The breakdown has created a political impasse. State rescues of entire banking systems are a necessary and inevitable response to the financial meltdown, but the consequence will be to try to limit banking to national units. Italian taxpayers will not want to see their money used to bail out remote eastern European debtors. The same political logic applies for fiscal stimulus packages, where voters will not want to see foreign producers in effect subsidized."

We may once more witness a situation where US will take the lead in what would this time become a new era of nationalism, disguised as regionalism. Already the rescue packages accepted by the US congress contains element of protectionism, ‘buy American’.

Others remain optimistic. See Recommendations – From Brookings - http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2009/0326_g20_summit.aspx or to quote from their list of recommendations also pointing to IMF as a potential key player: (See the full report from

http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2009/~/media/Files/rc/reports/2009/0326_g20_summit/0326_g20_summit_bradford_linn.pdf )

“At least a tripling of resources for the IMF from currently $250 billion to $750 billion through a combination of a generalized quota increase, a sizeable SDR ($250 billion) allocation, a further authorization to borrow under the so-called “New Arrangements to Borrow” (NAB) or ad hoc borrowings from selected surplus countries— following the commitment already by Japan to $100 billion—and other measures to make the IMF a major actor in the global financial system”

The fears in US and UK are that there may not be lenders enough in the World to finance the galloping public deficits. Some UK critics have calculated that if you add the nationalized banks’ debt, this will all add up all debts ever accepted by UK Governments from 1691 to 2008!

Or, as it was put in this article: Public Debts at Armageddon height: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article5811186.ece

“With the debts of the nationalised and part-nationalised banks now on the public sector balance sheet, the ratio of public sector debt to GDP in the UK exceeds that of Italy and Japan. And it is set to grow much higher. On the basis of the planned levels of borrowing, it could exceed 65 per cent of GDP in 2010-11. And at that scale of indebtedness, the Armageddon scenario most feared by the Treasury - that there will be insufficient lenders to match the planned level of borrowing - begins to look a distinct possibility.”

The UK recession clearly deepens as UK Public deficit hits all time record – but this time around so does the recession in almost all other countries. This is what gives us the hope that the G20 meeting – even if it may not solve all problems – at least will prove to be the first step on a long journey towards more global commitment and cooperation – including a greater role for the 3^rd World countries. The Financial Ministers met 2 weeks ago and this statement was part of their end comminqué for the preparatory G20 meeting:

"Emerging and developing economies, including the poorest, should have greater voice and representation, and the next review of IMF quotas should be concluded by January 2011,”

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).