30 September Draft

[Paul Johnston (pauljohn)]

Dear Colleagues,

Below is the current draft at

http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0Aa7ILf5BATiJZG52dnBmcV83OTFmanhwOWhnaw&hl=en_G

Please feel free to jump in and improve it. We want to have a complete
version by Sunday which we will then publish in a commentable form.
Until then I will post the current version here each morning.

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 web's most
disruptive impact is on improving services through collaboration,
transparency and knowledge-sharing.

Europe is uniquely 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 future
public services:

1. Transparency: all public sector organisations be
"transparent by default" and should provide the public with clear,
regularly-updated information on all aspects of their operations and
decision-making processes. These data should be provided in open,
standard and reusable format, but with full regard to privacy
limitations, and with mechanisms for citizens to highlight areas where
they would like to see further transparency.

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. Citizen 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 we call on you to 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 more open
participative government as soon as possible.

[david osimo]

Hi all. Also general feedback from your part on the text is welcome -
not only specific modifications
ciao
david