by Paul Johnston
London-based ex-civil servant now working for Cisco as head of the European public sector team within IBSG, Cisco's global strategic consulting arm. Launched and helped shape this site after wri... More about Paul Johnston
Public Services 2.0 in Europe - the story continues
David Osimo and I are continuing with our open declaration adventure which is teaching us a great deal while also hopefully have some kind of an impact! We have now got a declaration which I think looks pretty good. It is still open for comments, so feel free to give your reaction in a comment on this blog or on http://eups20.wordpress.com/draft-declaration/
We will also do a more detailed supporting document which I will share here for your input in due course. However, the other issue now is getting mass support for the open declaration. We will launch a Facebook group in one week's time and it will be interesting to see how that will work, but we want an avenue for non-Facebook users. What would you suggest? We want a simple attractive place where people can go, read the declaration and do something to show they support it. One thought I had was that we could record a video of lots of different people reading the declaration, put it on YouTube and then ask people to endorse it by becoming fans of the video. Again, however, this would only work for people who have YouTube accounts. Anyone got any better ideas?
For the record here is the current version of the declaration:
An Open Declaration on Public Services in the European Union
The needs of today’s society are too complex to be solved by government alone. While traditional government policies used the web to automate public services and encourage self-service, the biggest impact of the web will be in improving services through collaboration, transparency and knowledge-sharing.
Europe is uniquely well placed to be a leader in this area. It should grasp the opportunity to rebuild the relationship between citizens and the state by opening up public institutions and by empowering citizens to take a more active role in public services.
As citizens, we want full insight into all the activities undertaken on our behalf. We want to be able to contribute to public policies as they are developed, implemented, and reviewed. We want to be actively involved in designing and providing public services with extensive scope to contribute our views and with more and more decisions in our hands. We want the whole spectrum of government information from draft legislation to budget data to be easy for citizens to access, understand, reuse, and remix. This is not because we want to reduce government’s role, but because open collaboration will make public services better.
Against this background, we propose three core principles for European public services:
1. Transparency: all public sector organisations should be “transparent by default” and should provide the public with clear, regularly-updated information on all aspects of their operations and decision-making processes. There should also be robust mechanisms for citizens to highlight areas where they would like to see further transparency. When providing information, public sector organisations should do so in open, standard and reusable formats, but with full regard to privacy issues.
2. Participation: government should pro-actively seek citizen input in all its activities from user involvement in shaping services to public participation in policy-making. This input should be public for other citizens to view and government should publicly respond to it. The capacity to collaborate with citizens should become a core competence of government.
3. Empowerment: public institutions should seek to act as platforms for public value creation. In particular, government data and government services should be made available in ways that others can easily build on. Public organisations should also enable all citizens to come together and solve their problems for themselves, by providing tools, skills and resources.
We recognise that implementing these principles will take time as governance mechanisms will have to be adapted, but we believe they should be at the heart of efforts to transform government. Citizens are already acting on these ideas and transforming public services “from the outside”, but governments should support and accelerate this process.
We call on European governments and the European Commission to incorporate these principles in their eGovernment action plans and ensure that Europe’s citizens enjoy the benefits of transparent, participative, empowering government as soon as possible.
Comments
Paul,
Congratulations to you and David. I particularly like the"participation" section: concise and straight to to the point.
posted over 2 years ago