One final push to complete our version of the declaration

[Paul Johnston (pauljohn)]

Dear Colleagues

I think David and I have taken the current draft as far as we can. We
like it, but I am sure there is still plenty of room for you to
improve it. So please do have a look below and give your reaction.

After getting your feedback, we plan to publish a commentable version
of the declaration and finally make the announcement that we will have
an official slot at the Malmo event. We hope the commentable version
will:

1) produce further improvements to the text
2) start to capture some of the ideas that we will need to include in
the supporting document that gives our ideas on how to implement the
declaration.

Many thanks for your support and contributions!

Paul

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.

[Tim]

Looks pretty solid to me. Definitely ready for commenting by a broader
audience.

Nice work!

Tim


On Oct 2, 12:49 am, "Paul Johnston (pauljohn)" <paulj...@cisco.com>
wrote:

[Dave Briggs]

Yes, it looks good.

Looking at the text, making it commentable a la Digital Britain etc
would probably not work as it isn't long enough for that treatment, I
don't think. Maybe posting it on the eups 2.0 blog, and using the
comments on that, would probably suffice?

Dave

--
Dave Briggs, Digital Enabler
d...@vebrig.gs | http://davepress.net | 07525 209589 (Mobile) 01223 96 9253

[Matt Poelmans]

I'm also tempted to add a couple of points (from the Dutch e-
CitizenCharter), but I agree that to be convincing we should be brief.
The one element lacking that merits mentioning though is
accountability about performance ...
Nevertheless compliments for work well done!
Matt Poelmans

[Alberto]

Very. Well. Done. Thanks, guys!

I think you are missing a comma in the last sentence, after the word
"participative".

A.