by Andrea Di Maio | September 20, 2010 | Comments Off
I landed in Rome, the beautiful capital city of my country, about two hours ago. I went to the taxi rank and, as usual, I took the first taxi in line. The driver made a joke which I would have understood just minutes later telling me “I can see you are in a hurry”. Actually [...]
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Category: e-government Tags: citizen portal, transparency
by Andrea Di Maio | August 9, 2010 | 5 Comments
My last post about the summer reading of “Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency and Collaboration in Practice” is inspired by two different articles. The first one is “My Data Can’t Tell You That” by Bill Allison. His article highlights a characteristic of open government that I have been writing about. “In this brave new era of [...]
Category: open government data web 2.0 in government Tags: open government, transparency
by Andrea Di Maio | August 6, 2010 | 6 Comments
Another great essay from “Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency and Collaboration in Practice” is “Open government and open society” by Archon Fung and David Weil. They take a very interesting spin on open government by observing that “Unfortunately the current discourse on technology – focused as it is on accountability and issues such as corruption – [...]
Category: web 2.0 in government Tags: open government, transparency
by Andrea Di Maio | December 18, 2009 | 2 Comments
Today I met the CIO of a large Indian jurisdiction and I thought we would discuss his challenges. To my surprise, he did not seem to have any issue. He said that the IT role in the organization is to establish and run infrastructure, advise various departments (which are largely independent on procurement and application [...]
Category: e-government Tags: transparency
by Andrea Di Maio | October 13, 2009 | 8 Comments
Over the last few days there has been quite some debate about an article Against Transparency by Lawrence Lessig. In this article Lessig, who ironically sits on the advisory board of the Sunlight Foundation, looks at the dark side of transparency, something I have touched upon in a couple of previous posts (see here and [...]
Category: open government data Tags: government 2.0, transparency
by Andrea Di Maio | October 10, 2009 | 3 Comments
The award of the Nobel Prize for Peace to President Barack Obama has both caught many by surprise and stressed how compelling his vision for change is on foreign policy. Some commentators have criticized this choice, indicating that it is more an award to hope than to achievement. Some of the processes he has set [...]
Category: open government data Tags: Obama, transparency
by Andrea Di Maio | September 7, 2009 | 3 Comments
As reported by the New York Times, last Friday President Obama said he will open up White House visitor logs on a regular basis for the first time in modern history. Visitor logs that will be disclosed include As the article says By the end of the year, the White House will begin posting online [...]
Category: open government data Tags: Obama, transparency
by Andrea Di Maio | July 22, 2009 | 1 Comment
Although I am on vacation, I keep receiving feeds and alerts from various blogs and publications, in between my teen age daughter’s short text messages asking to stay up with friends a little bit longer and unanswered calls to my younger son to know whether he’s still alive after a diving session. I noticed that [...]
Category: open government data Tags: Obama, transparency
by Andrea Di Maio | May 22, 2009 | 4 Comments
Yesterday the Obama administration took important steps toward open government. The first one was the announcement of how the citizen engagement process in policy-making will work. As explained on the White House Open Government Blog: “…Beginning today, we will have a brainstorming session for suggesting ideas for the open government recommendations. You can vote on [...]
Category: social networks in government Tags: open government, social networks, transparency
by Andrea Di Maio | May 5, 2009 | 5 Comments
Like Google, also Amazon is creating vast repositories of public data pulled from data sources managed by government. The last example is the addition of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER) shapefiles, covering American states, counties, districts, places, and areas. Amazon has already posted other data in past, such as [...]
Category: open government data Tags: Amazon, data.gov, Google, transparency
