... This reports offers a survey of national and international trends, in addition to empirical facts regarding how people today use new services for spreading and sharing information. The results indicate that central principles of state information policy will have to be modified. ... The public sector and eGov need to a greater extent to take as their point of departure the fact that the ordinary citizen herself is capable of acting as a supplier of public-sector information and communication.
An important problem, however, is the lack of openness and access to public-sector data. Openness and easy access to public-sector data are essential if these are to be re-usable and be used in other contexts. ...
Therefore, the authorities should take the following trends into account: ...
3. A culture of sharing among citizens
4. Collective intelligence and the knowledge of the masses ...
8. Greater openness and access to information
9. eGovgeeks who develop user-generated information services based on data from the public sector in combination with other information and services ...
There are clear indications that the production and consumption of user-generated content is bound to increase. It may therefore be appropriate for the public sector to start to cooperate with private developers (i.e. eGovgeeks) of user-generated services in order to help ensure that their content and data will be of as high quality as possible for the general public.
Moving information and communication efforts from traditional information producers in the public sector to the general public could also have several other positive effects, such as: ...
More openness on the part of the authorities, because public-sector information – research results, accounts, map data and measurements - can be made more accessible to the individual citizen. ...
A sharper focus on the citizens themselves and participant information generators could be obtained by means of the following measures:
WikiNorge: Treating citizens as partners rather than as mere passive recipients of information: A radical proposal in this respect is that the state should set up Wiki.Norge.no; a «Wikipedia» for public-sector information, where citizens themselves could informally contribute and edit all imaginable sorts of public-sector information ...
Openness: Public-sector information must be made freely available and reusable on the Internet. The authorities must open up and make available their own information, so that citizens and private operators/developers (eGovgeeks) can utilise, publish and share such information in new forms and contexts. This will require common and/or standardised publishing solutions for national and local authorities. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 12/16/2008 02:00:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
