From: Dan Jellinek [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 09 June 2008 15:41
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: E-Government Bulletin, 09 June 2008 - ICELE in the balance; Council IT network duplication; Justice Ministry could join prisons' shared service centre.
+++E-GOVERNMENT BULLETIN
- ISSUE 265, 09 June 2008.
- A Headstar Publication
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IN THIS ISSUE: ICELE in the balance; Council IT network duplication; Justice Ministry could join prisons' shared service centre.
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++Special Notice: Designing for all: an inclusive approach to web,
print and electronic publishing
- A practical, one-day training course and document clinic
- Tuesday 24 June, Central London
http://www.headstar-training.com/dfa/
Trainer: Katie Grant, former publications manager, Disability Rights Commission.
'Designing for all' is a practical seminar designed to introduce organisations to the importance of designing accessible, easy to read information for a range of different audiences including older people, people with disabilities and people for whom English is not their first language.
It will help you assess current design and content of information - please bring examples to our document clinic - and follow an inclusive model to improve accessibility across your communications mix.
The course will be of interest to anyone who is involved in the design and delivery of information in print, electronic and web formats including web content managers; content teams; marketing and communications officers; and publications staff. To book a place see:
http://www.headstar-training.com/dfa/
[Special notice ends].
++Issue 265 Contents.
01: Decision Due This Week On Threatened E-Democracy Agency
- ICELE's host council pulls out over funding delay.
02: Council Network Duplication 'Leading To Inefficiencies'
- Some authorities running 10 separate networks.
03: Justice Ministry Could Join Prisons' Shared Service Centre
- Larger combined centre may be operational by end of 2010.
News In Brief: 04: Inclusion Champions - European awards; 05: Fiery Trial - IT back-up at disaster-hit council; 06: Parliamentary Pow-wow - online networking for EU parliamentarians.
Section Two: European Research - E-Participation.
07: Asking The European Citizen: experiments with social networking and virtual town hall meetings lie at the heart of a new EU research project to boost citizen involvement in regional, national and European policymaking. Dan Jellinek talks to one of the project's architects, Francesco Molinari.
Section Three: Parliamentary IT Committee (PITCOM) - Trustworthy E-Government.
08: High Anxiety: Recent concerns over missing data disks and struggling health service IT projects have shattered public trust in the government's ability to share data. Good modern government will depend on rebuilding this trust, hears Derek Parkinson.
[Contents ends].
++Special Notice: Building the Perfect Council Website
- Major International Keynote Speaker for 2008
- 16 July, Olympia 2, Central London
http://www.headstar-events.com/council08/ .
We are pleased to present our third annual event on how to create the perfect council website: a partnership between E-Government Bulletin and the Socitm Insight Programme.
Our keynote speaker this year is international web usability guru Gerry McGovern. An authority on creating effective web content, Gerry has been described by the Irish Times as one of the world's five leading web visionaries (alongside Tim Berners-Lee, Tim O'Reilly, Nicholas Negroponte and Vint Cerf).
Elsewhere, the event will draw on the collected wisdom of a decade of Socitm's annual 'Better Connected' review of all UK council websites.
Workshops will cover issues in detail including boosting web service take-up. Secure your place today at:
http://www.headstar-events.com/council08/
And for companies interested in exhibition spaces please contact Will Knox on [log in to unmask] or phone him on
01273 267974.
[Special notice ends].
++Section One: News.
+01: Decision Due This Week On Threatened E-Democracy Agency.
The future of the UK's International Centre of Excellence for Local E- Democracy (ICELE), the government-funded e-democracy agency, is hanging in the balance after its host local authority warned it would have to cease operations in three weeks' time following delays in funding renewal.
The unexpected announcement came from ICELE chair Matthew Ellis, a councillor at Lichfield District Council which has acted as ICELE's host organisation. In a statement to centre's partners Ellis said: "We have been awaiting a decision on the future of ICELE from our sponsoring government department (CLG) but that decision which was promised consistently since December 2007 has not been forthcoming...I am therefore in the process of implementing an exit strategy plan which will see ICELE cease operations of any kind with Lichfield DC as the accountable body after the end of June."
In the medium term, the government is considering an overhaul of e- democracy policy which could bring into being a new cross- government agency to replace ICELE and draw in elements of similar work currently scattered across the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. Progress in that direction will be made following the publication by DLG this summer of a white paper on citizen empowerment.
In the short term a small amount of transition funding has been made available to ICELE. CLG has yet to make a public response to Ellis's statement, though a final funding decision from ministers is expected later this week. However a simple continuation of ICELE's work is unlikely following the strength of Ellis's statements. Ellis denied however that his statement had been intended as an act of brinkmanship, as has been suggested by some observers. He told E- Government Bulletin: "The letter I have sent to partners is... not in any way done to force CLG's hand. Firstly that would be impossible to do anyway and secondly the past 12 months have been sufficiently testing that I would not want to see a continuation of Lichfield DC's involvement in it."
ICELE was set up in 2006 to take forward the work of the government's former national project on local e-democracy and elements of one or two other national projects. Its work has included championing local e-petition projects; creating a free blogging tool for councillors, 'BloginaBox', and taking over from CLG the development of the VOICE portal for local community websites.
CLG concern over ICELE's operations is thought to centre on its spending on staff and management and a failure to achieve its initial broad objectives. However, Ellis told E-Government Bulletin that charges of overspending were "plainly not true".
He said: "I don't believe that a figure of £170,000 for 2007-08 is large when you consider the brief was to reach local authorities across the UK as well as trying to meet the UK Government's wish for a higher profile for this this work in Europe. Less than a handful of people have worked for ICELE, some part time, and I believe they have achieved some positive results from a pretty well standing start and with limited resources."
+02: Council Network Duplication 'Leading To Inefficiencies'.
Many UK local authorities are running 10 or more separate IT and telecommunications networks, leading to both cost and energy inefficiencies, a Headstar conference on shared services in the public sector heard last week.
Running multiple separate networks also prevents councils from being able to experiment with flexible and customisable, Andrew Cholerton of Siemens IT Solutions and Services told delegates at Shared services in the public sector conference ( http://www.headstar-events.com/shared-services08/ ).
Many local authorities currently run separate networks for a wide range of purposes such as fixed and mobile voice telecommunications, libraries, education services, traffic lights, street lamps, CCTV, social services, bus management and variable message signs, Cholerton said.
"Ten or more networks is not uncommon, and even the best cases may run five or six," he said. "A large county council can spend £20 million a year on telecoms."
One key cause of the current situation is the nature of funding provision, he said. "For example under the People's Network scheme libraries were given additional funding to provide internet services.
Some local authorities expanded the framework already in place, but many local authorities spent the money on new networks."
Another problem is 'productisation' of networks by suppliers, Cholerton said. "Suppliers are more than happy to take money from one part of an organisation and the next day sell an identical product to a different department, when if they were working together more effectively together they would realise that they could share."
Councils should start to think of networks as a type of shared service, combining them into harmonised data networks to reduce their number, cut costs and improve efficiency, he said. He cited the private sector example of a supermarket chain that had placed systems for its cash registers, lights, CCTV, power management and even petrol prices on the forecourt onto a single data network, allowing it to save millions of pounds a year on energy consumption by analysing and managing energy use across all its operations.
+03: Justice Ministry Could Join Prisons' Shared Service Centre.
The UK's Ministry of Justice is building a business case for it to join the Shared Service Centre (SSC) operated by HM Prison Service to run its finance, procurement and human resources functions, delegates at Headstar's conference on shared services in the public sector heard last week.
The multiple award-winning SSC has been in operation since 2006 and is based in Newport, Wales. It runs finance, procurement and human resources services that were previously split over more than 100 prison locations.
The Ministry of Justice is the central government department with overall responsibility for prisons, as well as running legal, judicial and constitutional affairs.
Steve Hodgson, Head of Shared Services for HM Prison Service, told conference delegates that maximum value would only be derived for the Ministry of Justice if it switched to using precisely the same kind of Oracle software platform used by the SSC. "The plan for the MoJ is to use the existing platform, and they will only get the full saving if they go for that."
If the business case is approved, the combined and expanded SSC should be live by 2010, Hodgson said.
++News In Brief:
+04: Inclusion Champions: A set of awards aimed at inspiring progress
among those working towards overcoming digital exclusion in the EU has been announced by the European Commission. The European e- Inclusion Awards will be awarded to individuals, organisations and companies in seven categories: ageing; marginalised young people; geographic inclusion; cultural diversity; digital literacy; e-accessibility and inclusive public services. According to the organisers, as many as one third of Europeans fail to benefit from new technologies. Entries close on 12 September and winners announced in December:
http://www.e-inclusionawards.eu/ .
+05: Fiery Trial: Call centre management and computer back-ups
allowed Melton Borough Council in Lincolnshire to operate its usual central telephone line and run many services from alternative venues after fire gutted its headquarters at the end of May. Many services including building control, street scene and environmental services were said by the council to be running without disruption, though some including land charges and electoral registration were "still being
salvaged":
http://www.meltononline.co.uk/ .
+06: Parliamentary Pow-wow: An online networking tool for
parliamentarians across Europe is to be launched by the EU. The proposed site may bring together as many as 20,000 parliamentarians from the European Parliament and member state national and regional assemblies to help "find responses to common challenges." The site is scheduled for launch in October:
http://www.myparl.eu/
[Section One ends].
++Section Two: European Research
- E-Participation.
+07: Asking The European Citizen
by Dan Jellinek.
'E-participation' - the use of online tools to boost democratic debate and policy consultation - has become a major strand of European Commission research funding in recent years, with a wave of projects already underway and a call for new proposals open until the end of August.
Among projects already funded, the two-year, 550,000 euro research project 'IDEAL-EU' (http://www.ideal-eu.net) stands out as a definite one to watch, drawing together as it does an experiment with social networking for citizen policy debate with a range of both physical and virtual 'town hall meeting' events at regional level (see news section, E-Government Bulletin, 28 May 2008).
The project was launched in January this year by a consortium led by the regional governments of Tuscany in Italy, Poitou-Charentes in France (the authority headed by former French Presidential candidate Segolene Royal) and Catalonia in Spain. It has two main goals: to improve citizen involvement with the creation of EU law and to improve citizen input into policymaking and government at a regional level.
Focusing initially on encouraging citizens to help shape public policy on tackling climate change, the project has two main, interlinked
elements: a social networking platform and a series of physical and virtual citizen 'town hall meetings'.
A trial of the social networking platform (http://www.ideal-debate.eu) is already live, combining discussion forums with document and video exchange with the sorts of 'Web 2.0' networking features associated with sites such as Facebook, for example personal profiles.
This trial will be followed in November by a 'pan-European electronic town meeting on climate change' involving three physical meetings of around 150 invited citizens each in the partner regions (taking place in the regions' respective mother tongues) and a series of virtual meetings online (taking place in English). Each will involve facilitated discussion and electronic voting, either live or online.
The outcomes will be fed to the European Parliament's committee on climate change and used by the three regions to explore the possibilities for greater integration of online participation tools in their administrative processes.
The lead partner in the project is the region of Tuscany or Toscana as it is known in Italy, an area with a relatively long history of experimentation with e-participation. In 2006 Toscana held a town hall meeting with citizen participants chosen at random within an overall profiling system to ensure social balance, aptly to discuss a draft regional law on citizen policy consultation. The meeting helped develop a draft law, which has since been passed, which makes certain forms of consultation such as citizen forums mandatory for the development of certain types of policy.
In the first month of the new law being passed, a further, online discussion forum was held as a follow-up exercise, and in 2007 a separate trial of participatory budgeting was held allowing citizens to debate healthcare budget priorities in the region. The new European trials will build on these experiences, adding a social networking element and extending the work across four languages.
How will participants be chosen for the town hall meetings, both real and virtual? Dr Francesco Molinari, a consultant based in Tuscany who is dissemination manager for the project, says the first place the project's managers will look for participants will be the social network being created now online, neatly tying together the two elements of IDEAL-EU.
"We will try to create continuity between participants in the platform and participants in the town meetings," he told E-Government Bulletin last week. "We will invite people who are active in the social networks, those who create online communities, and those who make active and meaningful contributions."
Priority will also be given to young people (aged 14 and over) and youth organisations, with the French region of Poitou-Charentes in particular reaching out to secondary schools will involve pupils at secondary schools.
"The most important outcome of the projects will be that the results are readable and understandable," says Molinari. "In the end, lawmakers are free to accept or deny any suggestions made, but it is important that at least no one will be able to say 'I am unclear what you want.' So we will end the town meetings with a vote on a clear issue, but before the vote will come a discussion, and before that a session of information- sharing and knowledge-sharing."
One of the biggest challenges posed by the project will be to moderate the virtual discussion sessions, and run a fair and accurate online vote at the end of them, Molinari says.
"That will be the tricky part of our project, but also the most exciting one! The participants in virtual tables, located anywhere throughout Europe, will share a discussion table through their internet connections, with a virtual facilitator moderating them online. Special software will allow them to vote at the end of each discussion round."
However, the real key to the success of the trials will not be the technology they use but how well the results are incorporated into real policymaking processes, he says.
"I quite agree with those who say technology is not an issue. In aiming to improve participation in public decision-making, we don't need innovative technologies, just to implement those we already have.
"What we typically need to create - or at least improve - is our institutional context, to find new ways of interaction between citizens and politicians that can be socially acceptable as well as politically desirable. But whatever the outcomes of the IDEAL-EU project, whether positive or negative, these technologies are here to stay."
++Section Three: Parliamentary IT Committee (PITCOM)
- Trustworthy E-Government.
+08: High Anxiety
by Derek Parkinson.
Transformational government promises to improve public services, but is in danger of losing the trust of the people it is intended to serve, attendees heard at the May meeting of the Parliamentary IT Committee (PITCOM - http://www.pitcom.org.uk).
The recent loss of computer disks containing personal details about millions of citizens by HM Revenue and Customs heightened public concern about the government's approach to data privacy, said Louise Bennett, chair of the British Computer Society Security Forum Specialist Panel.
Consequently sharing data between agencies, a key part of transformational government, is viewed with alarm by many citizens.
"Most of us happily trust our GP with medical records, but many are anxious about one million NHS staff having access to them," Bennett said.
This is not because we mistrust online services as a rule, as many of us are happy to share personal data through online networking sites such as Facebook, or bank online, or book our holidays through websites, she said. "Perhaps it's because we tend to trust online services when we think we are in control," she said.
Government has focused too much on the technology and not enough on policy, Bennett said. Part of the problem is that issues such as data privacy have been considered the responsibility of IT staff. "It's a board level responsibility, a ministerial responsibility. Do health ministers recognise that they are ultimately responsible for our health records?"
The legal protection set out in the UK's Data Protection Act needs to be clearer and strengthened, she said. The Act was drafted when public sector data was still held in organisational silos, she suggested.
In an attempt to address these issues, the BCS recommends implementing key principles of data privacy such as accountability, which would require all government departments to clearly state why they collect data, how long it is held for, and who is ultimately responsible for it.
Citizens have a right to know which officials or groups of officials have access to personal data, and for some specific types of data such as personal healthcare information the citizen should have the right to limit who has access without his or her explicit consent, Bennett said.
A 'Stewardship principle' would impose on the original collector of personal data a duty of care to ensure any organisation sharing it understands the risk associated with that data.
Too often the government presumes that personal data can be shared when citizens have given no specific consent or sign of understanding that it will be, she said. This can only erode trust, and the government would do well to pay attention to a Confucian maxim whereby given the choice of whether to give up weapons, food, or the trust of its citizens, governments always should guard trust most vigilantly.
William Heath, public sector technology commentator and moderator of the 'Ideal Government' blog, also emphasised the need for greater trust. The government sowed the seeds of its present difficulties at the start of its modernisation programme, he said.
Not long after Labour returned to power in 1997, Tony Blair set out in broad terms a vision of public services radically changed by technology, said Heath. "He talked about a new relationship with citizens, although he didn't say specifically what that would be. But it's a significant issue, and shouldn't be undertaken lightly".
The language of e-commerce filled the vacuum, and the e-government agenda has subsequently been shaped by conflicting intentions, he said.
"E-government is described in a way that makes it sound like services, but it can feel like they treat us as potential paedophiles, terrorists, or freeloaders."
This has not been conducive to public trust, and conventional approaches to rescuing public sector IT projects such as reviews, hiring consultants, or improving the technology, will not remedy this, Heath said.
Discussions on the Ideal Government blog and elsewhere suggest that e-services will become better the more citizens are active participants in their design, implementation, monitoring and feedback, and new technologies could enable this, he said. Increasingly, the public are confident users of online services and given that active citizenship is something we value, they should be more widely consulted and involved in the design of public services. "Instead, what we have seen is an increasingly toxic centralisation of power," he said.
In the discussion that followed it was suggested that trust may not be a decisive factor in deciding to use an online service, particularly if the benefits of convenience are great. It was also emphasised that there are many potential benefits for citizens from information sharing in the public sector, and attempts to increase public trust should not prejudice these.
NOTE: MPs and Peers founded PITCOM in 1981 to provide a bridge between Parliament and the IT industry. E-Government Bulletin publisher Headstar is the official writer of PITCOM meeting reports and technology briefings for Parliamentarians. To download further meeting reports and briefings free of charge, see:
http://www.pitcom.org.uk .
[Section Three ends].
++END NOTES.
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ISSN 1476-6310
+PERSONNEL
Editor - Dan Jellinek.
Reporter: Majeed Saleh.
Associate Editors - Derek Parkinson, Mel Poluck.
Marketing and Sales Team - Claire Clinton, Jo Knell, Will Knox.
[Issue 265 ends].
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