As pointed out by Nick.
egovernment
Co-creating an open declaration on public services 2.0
An email from my friend Paul Johnston – he’s a Cisco public sector specialist and is behind the rather neat Connected Republic site – alerts me to EUPS 2.0 initiative. Here’s how it is explained:
Every two years, EU Ministers gather to agree on a Ministerial Declaration on e-government, which is the main European strategic document. This is usually accompanied by an Industry declaration.
We feel the urge to add an open declaration, collaboratively built and endorsed by EU citizens who share the view that the web is transforming our society and our governments. We feel e-government policies in Europe could learn from the open, meritocratic, transparent and user-driven culture of the web. We also feel that current web citizens should engage more positively with government to help designing a strategy which is genuinely difficult to adopt in the traditional culture of public administration.
We trust that if we manage to deliver quality of insight and quantity of endorsement, we will present this declaration officially at the EU ministerial conference on e-government, in Malmo on November 2009.
The open declaration is being collaboratively edited using the MixedInk tool, which to my shame I am yet to have a proper play with.
Check out the blog, and the Google Group too. I’ll be keeping my eye on this, a potentially really interesting initiative.
It’s Andrew Stott!
So, the announcement has been made, and the new Director of Digital Engagement is Andrew Stott.
Andrew is currently Government Deputy Chief Information Officer. He has had director-level oversight within the Cabinet Office for the Power of Information work from its inception and was a member of the Minister for Digital Engagement’s Power of Information Taskforce.
The reaction to the appointment has been mixed, some pleased that a guy with clear ability at driving stuff through government has the job; others less pleased that the director isn’t someone from outside the Whitehall bubble.
Here’s some of the reaction from the blogs:
Paul Canning asks ‘Did no one qualified want to be the government’s digital director?’
However another insider confirmed to me privately that the real reason Stott may have the appointment is simply that strong candidates from outside Whitehall with web 2.0 experience didn’t apply.
Simon Dickson wonders where the inspiration lies:
There’s…general (but for the record, not universal) consensus that Stott will be a ‘safe pair of hands’. Of course he meets the criteria of having ‘the authority to be credible with Ministers and senior officials’ and ‘experience of the workings of Government’. But there’s little evidence – and I stress, evidence – of his fit with some of the other supposedly essential criteria. If he has ‘run a public facing web site of significant size’, or ‘innovated in web, beyond web publishing’, the web itself doesn’t have much information about it.
Emma Mulqueeny is more positive:
To be honest, I rather thought that this would be given to some super clever bod from outside government, who would come at the job with a wealth of experience, challenging ideas and determination to ‘make stuff happen’. Then, as so often happened before, said person would begin to flag in the face of the enormity of the expectations of the job, burned out within a year to 18 months and left to go and do something else, broken.
Well… that won’t happen now; so this job that seemed a bit of a ‘nod in the right direction, but basically impossible’ is actually not that at all. If they wanted it to be that, they would not have appointed Andrew.
Nick Booth asks what we can do to help Andrew in his new job:
My first thoughts are the most obvious.
1. Join the conversation. Assuming Andrew want’s to engage with us, take the time to give him useful help.
2. Offer him a mentor or two? Is that cheeky? I hope not. Who would be ripe for that role?
3. Make sure he knows he’s surrounded by a substantial community that wants POIT to succeed.
Andrew Lewin is rather pleased:
I think many – including myself, if I’m honest – expected a new face from the private sector to make a bold splash and shake everything up. Which, to be honest, wasn’t a very appealing prospect to those of us who have been plugging away at this for a while now and thinking that we were finally getting some real progress on many fronts. To suddenly change direction and start all over again would have been both irritating and time-consuming, just when there is no time to waste. This appointment means we should be able to get on with things, but with a high profile person at the head of things to drive it forward still faster.
I’ll be watching the Digital Engagement blog (why didn’t they just use this one? 😉 ) and Twitter feed to find out what the new Director will be doing.
My advice would be to seize the initiative, set out some small but important things to achieve and make them happen, to get the doubters back onside as soon as possible.
EDIT
More views, one very positive from Harry, and another from Neil.
The importance of evaluation
Stephen Hale at the FCO has an excellent, interesting and important post about measuring the success of the London G20 Summit site.
With wonderful openness and transparency, Stephen has set out some of the factors by which the site’s success could be measured, along with the results. Its fascinating reading, and provides lots of lessons for anyone approaching an engagement project like this.
Indeed, this ties in with Steph’s recent (and overly-modest) post about the achievements of the engagement bods at DIUS over the last year or so. He wrote:
We still haven’t nailed some of the basics like evaluation, [or] the business case
Figuring out whether or not something has actually worked is terrifically important, and the long term efficacy of online engagement relies on this nut being cracked.
Stephen’s post highlighted some really good practice here: outline what your project aims to do, and come up with some measures around it so you can work out whether it worked or not.
As Steph mentions, having an up-front business case is really important – a written down formulation of what the project actually is and what it ought to achieve.
Now, business cases and evaluation criteria can be developed in isolation and in a project-by-project basis. I wonder, though, how much more value could be created by developing a ‘package’ of evaluation which could be used as a foundation by everyone involved in government online engagement?
Of course, each project has its own unique things that will need to be measured and tested, but surely there are some basic things that every evaluation exercise would need to look at?
How about some common evaluation documents were created, and that every project undertaken ensured that the basic, common stuff was recorded, as well as the unique bits. That way, some kind of comparative analysis would be possible, especially if everyone submitted their results into a common database.
Just how hard would it be to come up with a common framework for online engagement projects? I think it is worth a shot.
Real Help Now
Simon Dickson reports on the new site from the UK Government which currently aggregates news from around the country on what help is available to help businesses and individuals through the current economic difficulties.
Fundamentally, in this initial build, it’s a news aggregation site – pulling together material not just from national sources, but regional and local too. The aim is to complement the citizen- and business-facing stuff, at Directgov and BusinessLink respectively, by showing what’s actually happening on the ground, well away from Whitehall and the City.
I’m involved in the project from a content point of view, which at the moment is mainly a job of identifying content to be tagged in Delicious to appear on the site. A dashboard has been set up to monitor various news sources around the UK to make sure we pick up a good range of stories.
The site came together very quickly and is a great example of agile and flexible development. We’re hoping to be expanding it in the future to produce some original content, but at the moment it presents a nice picture of what’s going on out there.