New look...
Same old content. Just playing around for now
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.
Overview of the subject – with links and accompanying presentation. All good stuff
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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!
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?
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.
Bottom line: keep control of your code, but release versions of it under an opensourc license.
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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”
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.
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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
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.
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.

