The European Commission has warned of a ‘20th century black hole’ in its online Digital Libraries programme aimed at making the content of Europe’s vast library, museum and archive collections available on the web.
The Digital Libraries initiative, dubbed ‘Europeana’, was launched in 2005 and is due to be opened as a web portal in November 2008 (http://fastlink.headstar.com/dl2).
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By Majeed Saleh
The new group of online technologies referred to as ‘web 2.0′ offer valuable opportunities to public sector bodies but also present major challenges, a leading consultant in the field will tell public sector ICT manager this month.
Ewan McIntosh, a consultant who advises the Scottish government on learning and technology futures, will be delivering the keynote speech to a conference on web 2.0 in the public sector hosted in September by the public sector Society of IT Management (Socitm).
Web 2.0 is a catch-all phrase covering several types of service, McIntosh told E-Government Bulletin in an exclusive interview ahead of his speech.
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UK government departments must consider and address the impact on carbon emissions of all new ICT procurement by January 2009, according to a strategy paper issued by the Cabinet Office.
The paper sets out plans to achieve the government’s commitment to carbon neutrality in its central office estate by 2012 (http://fastlink.headstar.com/carbon1), developing the Sustainable Operations on the Government Estate (SOGE) agenda announced by the prime minister in 2006 (http://fastlink.headstar.com/soge1).
In the area of ICT, Carbon neutrality will be achieved by lowering the power consumption of equipment, minimising transport and cutting waste through minimisation of paper use as well as reducing emissions through changes in business processes and working practices. Carbon off-setting is to be seen as a last resort in the pursuit of these targets.
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Two new government initiatives are inviting members of the public to put forward ideas on how to improve democracy and public information services to win a share of a total of £170,000.
The Building Democracy project (http://www.buildingdemocracy.co.uk/) is asking people for ideas on ways to encourage greater democratic participation. The project has 150,000 pounds to spend on 10 of the best ideas, provided by the Ministry of Justice as part of its Governance of Britain and Communities in Control agendas. Similar competitions have been run by the department in 2006 and 2007, with past winners including MySociety’s FixMyStreet (http://www.fixmystreet.com/) and the Speakers Corner Trust (http://www.speakerscornertrust.org/). Read the rest of this entry »
Government departments that consult with citizens online must manage people’s expectations of the policy impact of each exercise, according to a new report from political research charity the Hansard Society.
“Online deliberations offer a promise of transparency; unclear communication from engagement teams is often read by participants as obfuscation,” finds the report, which marks the third and final stage of the society’s Digital Dialogues review commissioned by the Ministry of Justice (http://www.digitaldialogues.org.uk/thirdreport).
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In our last issue, we reported on a controversy over the interpretation and use of web site traffic statistics which blew up at our July conference Building the Perfect Council Website ‘08, co-hosted with the Society of IT Management (Socitm).
In his conference address Nick Mailer, a director of leading web hosting company Positive Internet, had argued that website statistics can be hard to interpret and lack objective meaning. In response Huw Williams, public services consultant at Logan Tod & Co, defended the cautious use of some stats as a valuable guide to user behaviour.
The debate continued following publication of the articles on our blog, E-Government Bulletin Live (see http://www.headstar.com/egblive/?p=138 ).
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by Bengt Feil
Almost all e-democracy projects are combinations of social activity and some sort of web based technology. And in many cases, the people developing these technologies want to share their ideas and advances with the greater e-participation community.
To achieve this, some of them publish the work as open source projects which can be reused under some sort of open licence, like the GNU General Public License (GPL - http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html). This raises the question of how useful and well-adjusted open source technologies are in the field of e-participation and e-democracy.
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The deadline for councils in England and Wales to procure online systems offering childcare information to parents has been extended by two months, after an original deadline of 31 July proved impossible to meet.
Local authorities now have until 1 October to purchase an integrated search and database system known as an Information System for Parents and Providers (ISPP), a requirement set out in Section 12 of the Childcare Act 2006 which came into force this April.
The act places a duty on local authorities to provide both local and national information on childcare and other services, facilities and publications for parents, children and young people. Council are responsible for procuring their own ISPP, within standards set out by government and with a share of a £4 million capital fund working out at between £15,000 and £30,000 per council.
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The power of the internet to draw large communities of people together is being increasingly exploited by campaign and lobby groups of all sizes, which are devising ever more creative ways of mobilising people to support their cause online.
An example is the current Friends of the Earth campaign ‘The Big Ask’, which devised an inventive packaging for an electronic petition drawing on celebrity power and video-game style interactivity. It created an online simulation of a flight booking system for a ‘virtual flight to Parliament’, inviting people to look around the plane and come on board, ‘booking seats’ on the flight next to celebrities. When you book your seat you can upload a photograph of yourself and email your MP online to urge the government to include aviation emissions in climate change law - the ultimate goal of the ‘flight’ itself.
Other examples include the ‘Tescopoly’ campaign (http://www.tescopoly.org/), a partnership of national interest groups also including Friends of the Earth seeking to challenge the power of major supermarkets to shape the UK’s food supply chain.
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Delays and discrepancies over the number of ballots recorded are among concerns raised over the use of electronic vote counting in the recent Greater London Authority elections, an Electoral Commission report has found.
More than seven million votes were cast in the May ballots for Mayor of London and the London Assembly, and all were counted by machines at three centralised points. The system, provided by Spanish company Indra Sistemas, used scanning machines to capture images of each ballot paper and analyse them using recognition software. Where the ballot produced a result that could not be identified electronically, the image was forwarded for manual adjudication.
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