Archives for June, 2009
by Andrea Di Maio | June 30, 2009 | 1 Comment
Just yesterday I blogged about my skepticism that opening government data will fundamentally change the picture as far as citizen engagement and participation is concerned. I know there are differing opinions on the topic and I do agree that more data is better than less. Earlier today I’ve come across an article from Nextgov about [...]
Category: open government data Tags: data.gov, government 2.0
by Andrea Di Maio | June 29, 2009 | 3 Comments
A former colleague of mine, Paolo Magrassi, used to say this when challenging benchmarking reports or statistics or quantitative analysis. His words came to mind after I read Casey Coleman’s latest post on her blog. I like her blog as she provides an authoritative, yet informal view of events that affect the federal government. In [...]
Category: open government data Tags: government 2.0, GSA, Vivek Kundra
by Andrea Di Maio | June 29, 2009 | Comments Off
Just a few minutes ago I had a very enlightening conversation with the CEO of an organization who is in charge of a single government portal. The portal has a good brand and is enjoying some considerable success with constituents, while being appreciated also by different departments whose information and services gets delivered through the [...]
Category: e-government Tags: citizen portal, government 2.0
by Andrea Di Maio | June 29, 2009 | Comments Off
Some tome ago I posted about whether there is room for a “European cloud”, with reference to on-going discussions on the future of government interoperability in the EU. Last week, an apparently unrelated event caught my eyes: The European Commission adopted a legislative package proposing the setting up of an Agency for the long‑term operational [...]
Category: Europe and IT Tags: cloud computing
by Andrea Di Maio | June 26, 2009 | 12 Comments
I have just finalized the agenda for the government tracks in our three flagship events, i.e. our Fall Symposia in Orlando, Cannes and Sydney. In two of these events I will present what I hope will be a controversial session, looking at reasons why government organizations should be very cautious with web 2.0. I have [...]
Category: e-government web 2.0 in government Tags: crowdsourcing, government 2.0, open government data, procurement
by Andrea Di Maio | June 26, 2009 | 2 Comments
Earlier today I had quite an interesting conversation with clients in a Tax & Revenues Department who were looking for whether they should regulate how their developers contribute back into open source communities. At the end of the conversation one client asked me whether we had any research showing if using open source has a [...]
Category: open source in government Tags: open source
by Andrea Di Maio | June 25, 2009 | 3 Comments
In a previous post I anticipated that the Italian minister for innovation and public administration wanted to ban Facebook and other social sites. This may be the consequence of a directive he issued on May 26th, available as a scanned document on the relevant department’s web site (in Italian only). Whereas other countries, such as [...]
Category: social networks in government Tags: social software
by Andrea Di Maio | June 24, 2009 | Comments Off
Second day at the IBM Smarter Cities event, where I have attended the breakout session on smarter government services. The breakout session started with the IT director of the City of Helsinki who gave a quick overview of the city portal, which was awarded by the UN as the best among 100 cities they surveyed [...]
Category: e-government Tags: IBM, mobile, smart city, web 2.0
by Andrea Di Maio | June 24, 2009 | 3 Comments
Yesterday I attended the first day of the Smarter Cities event that IBM organized in Berlin. This looks like a well run event with about 500 people attending, including senior executives and officials from several countries. The first day was mostly devoted to introducing the very concept of smarter city, to stress how important cities [...]
Category: e-government Tags: environmental sustainability, smart city
by Andrea Di Maio | June 23, 2009 | 2 Comments
Some time ago I debated the issue of whether teachers should use social software and what sort of challenged they are going to face. A recent decision by a German court pushes the boundary further, by ruling that pupils can rate teachers on line. The next step might be the possibility for pupils to shoot [...]
Category: web 2.0 in government Tags: education, rating