eGovernment Forum in Bahrain 2009
The Bahrain International eGovernment Forum will take place on 25-27 May. Titled ‘eServices towards a better life’, the event will gather prominent personalities who will share their vision on the future from eServices and eGovernment.
Some of the forum topics comprise ‘Strategies for Integrated eGovernment’, ‘Securing eGovernment services’, ‘Application Integration for Successful eGovernment Initiatives’ and ‘The creation of secure and reliable online identity and reachability to eGovernment services’.
Featured speakers include Mr. Mohammed Ali AlQaed CEO, eGovernment Agency, Kingdom Of Bahrain; Ms Haiyan Qian, Director of the Division for Public Administration & Development Management; and Christian Rupp, Federal Executive Secretary E-Government Austria.
For more information, visit forum’s website here.
Recovery.gov, or a way to track taxpayer’s dollars
The US Government has launched a new website, Recovery.gov so that the people can follow how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds are invested.
The site is set to include information about the evolution of the Act, together with tools to help citizens hold the government accountable.
One of the most relevant aspects of the website has to do with transparency and accountability, something especially relevant these days. There is also a section where people can share their story, and how the Act is affecting them.
United Minds, direct democracy in Ireland
Trying to make direct democracy something real is not easy. But Ross O’Mullane, from Dublin, Ireland has an idea. He has recently launched United Minds, a new website that proposes to use technology to make government more efficient.
The idea is to create a new system of representation in government, one that relies on the new digital technologies.
This is how it works. There is an Internet based forum, where citizens are invited to debate all issues relating to their lives. Issues in the forum have been broken down by government department.
Based on the debates that take place, a weekly list of tasks and objectives is set to be proposed. Finally, once additional feedback from the people is incorporated, a questionnaire will be put to those elegible to vote. The outcome of that vote will create a mandate for United Minds.
A mandate for what?. Well, the second part of the story, is that Ross O’Mullane will be running for a seat in the Irish Parliament, Dail Eireann. If elected as member of the parlament, his mandate will be to follow the opinion and vote of the United Mind’s followers.
This is a great approach to a very direct-democracy, and I am eager to see how things move forward.
The Vatican, now on YouTube
Vote for your park, an exercise of direct democracy
The city of London has recently launched a very interesting initiative. They invite citizens to vote to decide where to allocate ten grants of up to £ 400,000 each for the most needy parks.
In order to make it easier for participants, authorities have divided the forty seven deserving parks into five London sub-regions. For each of those sub-regions, the two parks that get the most votes will be the winners.
Voting ends on January 30th, and londoners have three main ways for voting: through an online form on the web, by post, or by mobile phone. In this case, the user must enter the word ‘parks’ and her full London post code. That will automatically trigger a vote for the nearest park to that post code on the shortlist.
This type of issues certainly belong to the participatory budgeting domain. And this is a good avenue to move forward the concept of a more direct democracy in the years to come.
Weekly address from President-elect Obama, on YouTube
Top Ten reasons why I launched my YouTube Channel, by Queen Rania
e-Citizen 2.0 report, from Norway
We know this content will not be very useful for most of our readers, but we decided to post it anyway. We are sharing with you today a report called e-Citzen 2.0, and made by Petter Bae Brandtzæg and Marika Lüders.
The paper is only available in norwegian unfortunately, and among other things it highlights aspects like the enormous possibilities for dialogue and distribution of information, if the government and the users of web communities cooperate.
The recommendations made by the researchers imply ‘that public information should be made freely available and reusable, and that public institutions to a larger extent must be willing to experiment and take risks’.
For those who either understand, or at least are eager to practice norwegian, click here to access the report
Senator Online: an Internet based political party in Australia
The concept is at the same time simple and revolutionary. This is a real political party -Senator On-Line- whose goal is to let people directly vote in the Senate.
Each Senator that is elected through the SOL party has a commitment to directly follow the citizens’ wishes on each piece of legislation. In order to make this real, all the australian citizens can vote for or against a given legislation in the party’s website. Each of the SOL senators will then vote in the Senate following the results of the citizen’s vote.
The founder of Senator On-Line, Berge Der Sarkissian in an interview about the initiative months ago said:’The internet is becoming the most powerful democratic tool. We are just for the voice of the majority to be represented in parliament. It’s not a traditional party per se. We stand for people to be easily informed’.
The Australian Electoral Commission already approved Senator On-Line.
This is an extremely interesting initiative. We will follow it’s evolution.
ICT 2008, or setting the agenda for ICT r&d in Europe
The ICT Event 2008 will take place this week, 25-27 November in Lyon France.
The gathering, is organised by the European Commission’s Directorate General for the Information Society and Media.The three days event will bring together researchers and innovators, policy and business decision-makers working in the field of digital technologies.
Around 4000 delegates are expected.Among the different activities, there two sessions are expected for people to meet with other researchers, innovators and engineers working in the Governance and Policy modelling domains.
Within the Conference programme, one of the themes is referred to the impact through policy, that will ‘focus on effective public policies to stimulate ICT research and innovation for growth and sustainable development’.
In order to get more information about this major event, please click here.