E-Petitioning a Council: A new flow diagram

As part of the EuroPetition project, I created for myself (and the others in the project) an idealised summary flow diagram of the process. It’s a four-stage model is used to illustrate the processes involved during the life of an individual petition , based on one I had done last year relating to the UK Parliament. Downloadable PDF available below.

Europe: conservative, cautious or…?

More negative comparisons with the USA. In Europe’s defence, I do get the impression that the formal political processes here are more concerned with social inclusion and participation than they are in the USA, and our political processes provide for more than two parties and therefore a wider range of viewpoints, so maybe the issues aren’t seen as urgent? I’m just saying…

• European Governments Can Ignore Social Media… Or Not? #eparticipation | A DiMaio | Gartner
  There does not seem to be a real sense of urgency in Europe. Engaging citizens remains a noble aspiration but few would consider doing it by reaching out to them on somebody else’s social network. With few exceptions, most seem to be banning access to social sites from the workplace, and there is very little done even in terms of social media strategies and policies, let alone any reflection on the pivotal role of employees.European clients seem to be unwilling to challenge the status quo and to believe that anything can happen from the bottom-up and from the outside-in.

  (tags: europetition smartcities opinion 2009 participation egovernment networking)

PS I’m learning that Delicious auto-post to WordPress combined with WordPresses autopost to twitter don’t make a good combo. So I’ll silence Delicious now I think… it’ll reduce the number of these rushed blog posts at least!

Participation and open data

Overview of the subject – with links and accompanying presentation. All good stuff

• Social Strategy Talk: Participation and Open data :: Lee Bryant | Headshift
  Presentation at the Amsterdam Social Strategy Talk, talking about the issue of public participation and open data in relation to government innovation.There were plenty of smart people there, including practitioners from the government of the Netherlands and key players behind the Dutch Digital Pioneers initiative that funds social innovation.A very simple introduction to why this topic matters, plus a consideration of some recent critiques of transparency initiatives, decorated by a lovely data visualisation of world population growth from the G-Econ project.

  The subject is certainly in the air!

  (tags: europetition social strategy media participation edemocracy egovernment transparency)

10 Years of ITC

The International Teledemocracy Centre celebrated it’s 10th Birthday last week. More at our website.

Just think how much this field has changed in the last decade – I’m proud to be part of team that has been around to describe, evaluate and help create working e-participation and online engagement systems.

I wonder where we’ll be in 2019?

 

What problem with e-petitions?

Nice to see that e-petitions were discussed at the LocalGov Camp Lincoln – Liz Azyan wrote up a sumary on the Jadu blog. Go and have a look, and admire the diagram she downloaded from this blog. Great to see it being used.

Also have a look at Liz’s pages too if you’re interested in Local Government engagement online.

A way some companies make money out of open source

Bottom line: keep control of your code, but release versions of it under an opensourc license.

• The Commercial Open Source Business Model | Dirk Riehle
  Commercial open source software projects are OSS projects that are owned by a single firm that derives a direct and significant revenue stream from the software. Commercial open source at first glance represents an economic paradox: How can a firm earn money if it is making its product available for free as open source? This paper presents the core properties of commercial open source business models and discusses how they work. Using a commercial open source approach, firms can get to market faster with a superior product at lower cost than possible for traditional competitors. The paper shows how these benefits accrue from an engaged and self-supporting user community. Lacking any prior comprehensive reference, this paper is based on an analysis of public statements by practitioners of commercial open source. It forges the various anecdotes into a coherent description of revenue generation strategies and relevant business functions.

   

  AKA “single-vendor commercial open source”

  (tags: opensource business strategy report 2009)

Data standards for ePetitions

Says it all – this is a golden opportunity to get the groundwork in place for standards that can be applied in England and then across Europe where e-petitioning is adopted – eg using the EuroPetition system.

• FutureGov » Features » ePetitions data standards – get involved!
  Andy Gibson is working with Futuregov and Particitech to create a simple set of data standards for all the UK’s local government ePetitions. From next year, it’s probable that all local councils will be required to provide electronic petitioning tools to their citizens, and we want to make sure they all do it the right way, and in a form that means they can all talk to each other.

  Andy will be putting out the draft standards via this channel in November for your feedback and amendments

  (tags: democracy edemocracy participation standards england&wales uk 2009 europetition)

CfP: JITP2010 – Politics of Open Source

May 6-7, 2010 – Amherst, Massachusetts

Political issues closely tied to the free and open source software movement(s) include: national government policies related to the adoption of open source technologies or questions related to interoperability and open standards, software patents, vendor lock-in, and copyright. These are central themes we expect may be discussed in this forum. In this context, we welcome international submissions since differences in the political perspective appear in international contexts.

However, topics related to how the concept of openness has led to various interpretations, adaptations, and applications of “open source” in other domains, and political issues that surround these broader innovations, are also welcome.

Manuscripts by January 10, 2010. More here, inlcuding a PDF with full details of the call.

On the same subject, have a look at the musings of Chris over at the Delib blog.

Knitting my social network apps together

A bit of navel gazing…

I’ve been a fairly cautious user of social networking tools, but despite that, I have now accumulated WordPress (obviously), Twitter and Delicious accounts (as well as the Facebook account that I prefer to use for bits of my personal life, though work has seeped in there too).

I create messages and content using all four services, but often I want the content to feed from one to the other. I’ve been playing around with connecting them over the last year or so, particularly since adding Twitter into the mix.

This is how it’s looking right now:

Notes:

1. The biggest pain (and challenge) is the impossibility of automatically getting Delicious bookmarks into WordPress as draft posts. Delicious does support auto-posting, but they always come through as published posts with the useless title ‘links for dd-mm-yyyy’. So I have to remember to delete anything that’s not relevant (leading to a broken link for anyone who follows the blog on RSS), and quickly edit and title anything that is.
2. I’ve tried to keep intermediary applications out of it as much as possible, but Delicious’s posting to twitter is so bad (being just a shorted link like http://icio.us/42p2lc) that I had to resort to Twitterfeed which picks up the link title too.
3. As far as I know, there’s no autofeed from WordPress to Delicious, and anyway, I’d want to tag up the link before it went live. I’m a neurotic tagger.

Delicious does seem to the weak spot in the network, but at 1757 bookmarks and counting, I’m too committed to think of moving. I am getting to the stage though where I think I’ll have to turn Delicious’s auto-posting off, useful though it has been in prompting me to blog. Maybe the lower volume will be appreciated…

Outside of this little network, I do use Google Reader for tracking other peoples’ blogs, and I feed my WordPress stories into LinkedIn, but that doesn’t really seem to count.

Finally, have a look at this posting by Balau for a fully grown version of what I’ve done, which is what prompted this posting in the first place, along with my own need to visualise my information flows:

CFP: 10th European Conference on e-Government ECEG 2010

Conference in Dublin 27-28 June 2008 (Abstract submissions by 30 November)

The conference committee welcomes contributions on a wide range of topics using a range of scholarly approaches including theoretical and empirical papers employing qualitative, quantitative and critical methods. Action research, case studies and work-in-progress/posters are welcomed approaches. PhD Research, proposals for roundtable discussions, non-academic contributions and product demonstrations based on the main themes are also invited.

(tags: conference ireland europe 2010 egovernment participation)

Three counter-intuitive opinion pieces

The first has been doing the rounds of the blogosphere – raises interesting questions on what should be transparent (govovernment data) and not (private diaries) – but what about about drawing the boundary line? In the end, transparency is no substitute for (uncorrupt!) democratic control, I reckon:

• Against Transparency | Lawrence Lessig | The New Republic
  There is no questioning the good that transparency creates in a wide range of contexts, government especially. But we should also recognize that the collateral consequence of that good need not itself be good. And if that collateral bad is busy certifying to the American public what it thinks it already knows, we should think carefully about how to avoid it. Sunlight may well be a great disinfectant. But as anyone who has ever waded through a swamp knows, it has other effects as well.
  (tags: usa policy opinion egovernment 2009)

The next two are nothing to do with e-democracy, but caught my eye anyway.

How charities and be effective, make a difference, and still be self-financing. Though to be fair I didnt see much about revenue sources other than Gloag’s millions:

• Gillian Bowditch: Ann Gloag should coach our needy charities – Times Online
  A model for making sure charities are well run, not just well intentioned. Shame it’s one of the Gloags that have done it.
  (tags: scotland society politics finance business 2009)

And finally a bit on a fundamental flaw in the UK’s polity:

• Joan McAlpine: There’s no time to fix broken Britain – Times Online
  Why it’s impossible to invest in a long term fix to the poverty trap. Frank Field was stymied, and Ian Duncan Smith will be too.
  (tags: uk scotland politics opinion 2009)