Open Government Archive

Learning from US Network TV

John.Weigelt

Published: April 23, 2010Posted in: Open Government

Like many Canadians, I grew up watching some, ok a lot, of US network television. I admit that there wasn’t a great deal of educational value there. Perhaps an episode or two of School House Rock that told me what a conjunction is, but not much more. Now that Saturday morning cartoons don’t dominate my weekend schedule, although I can’t pass on the Simpsons, those “educational” experiences are less overt. But they still come up on occasion.

One such occasion happened a few years ago during the US mid-term elections. It just so happens that the US network stations that we get here in the Nation’s capital herald from Detroit. We Canadians were bombarded with campaign commercials from any number of candidates seeking seats on the US Congress or US Senate and perhaps even a few seats in important places. Of course I can’t recall any of their names, nor tell you who won the important jobs. I can tell you what struck me most was the commentary from the many autoworkers that lent their support testimonials in the TV ads. Most of these people were supporting particular candidates for helping provide funds to keep their particular automotive plant open. It struck me that perhaps these hardworking people would have been better served by funding training programs to prepare them for today’s evolving job marketplace. The recent turmoil in the US automotive industry, personalized by the Oscar nominated HBO documentary “The Last Truck” suggests that perhaps more could have been done to better prepare these communities for the Digital Economy. Let’s keep a close eye to make sure we really learned this lesson.

The second learning came more recently, well actually earlier this week when I saw another commercial. Yes I only pay attention to the commercials. This commercial from the Detroit Medical Center promotes a web-based real-time Emergency Room wait times at their five hospital facilities (http://www.dmc.org/ERwait ). As we all know, ER wait times are a key concern here in Ontario as well http://www.health.gov.on.ca/transformation/length_of_stay/index.html .

Before you jump to conclusions about the results on either site, stop. There are too many differences between the measurements to even start to make any reasonable assertion. What we can learn is that someone, someplace in Michigan has found a way to report useful data about the ER in what seems to be a real time basis, and that the data is useful for the community to help them make an informed decision should they have the luxury to plan their visit to the ER. This is a lesson of making data more readily available to empower individuals to make more informed decisions. And that’s one to grow on…

Canada Gov Camp

John.Weigelt

Published: April 14, 2010Posted in: Canada Gov Camp, Open Government

I’ve had the opportunity to connect with a number of innovative thought leaders across Canada and engage in many of the local Open Gov activities that they are leading across the country. Since many of these activities have been focused on specific local regions, I’ve been thinking that perhaps it’s time to broaden the conversation and include all three levels of government. This Canada Gov Camp will follow the successful changecamp model and seeks to foster a dialogue between thought leaders in the community, government and industry in an un-conference format. Here is a brief synopsis:

Date: early June 2010, (Welcome keynote – evening prior)

Location: TBD – Central Ottawa Location

Précis:

A number of municipalities have embraced the concepts of open government and government 2.0. There have been a number of community driven events where interested individuals have come together to progress the thinking in this area and explore tangible activities under the umbrella of change camps or citycamps. While interested individuals have travelled across the country to participate in these unconferences, the focus of the events have been local or community oriented. We think that these discussions are of critical importance to the future and are keen to support and encourage the conversation at a broader level. We feel that by providing an environment for a discussion at the national level, to explore the interactions between cities, provinces and the federal level, these conversations can expand and bring together all jurisdictions that support Canadian individuals and businesses. We expect that participants will explore the role of provincial and federal governments in cultivating the growth and prosperity of Canada’s vibrant communities.

Watch for more info once the location has been fully secured.

My $20

John.Weigelt

Published: April 1, 2010Posted in: General, My $20, Open Government, Policy

My Canadian $20

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about open government and the need for greater citizen engagement in the machinery of government. Local governments have had the most success in reaching out to their communities and getting greater involvement from businesses and individuals in local affairs. This is partly because of the larger number of daily interactions that we have with our city services. If you think about it for a minute you can appreciate that many of those things that you see during the day, like tap water, electricity, public transit, traffic lights, trash collection, public pools, local policing, restaurant health checks and more, are all local government services. On any average day it seems that we take advantage of well over 10 municipally provided services. It’s difficult to think of many provincial services over and above health, driver’s licensing, highways and the great outdoors. It’s even more difficult from a direct federal government interaction, perhaps passports, citizenship and RCMP.

So how do we get better citizen engagement across the three levels of government when the interaction between the jurisdictions is so different? With the end of April Canadian personal tax deadline looming, many individuals are thinking about their money. One common “service” across all governments is tax: municipal, provincial and federal taxes. Maybe there could be some way that we could encourage greater citizen interaction in the allocation of taxes to government programs. Perhaps taxes could represent a catalyst for Canadians to give their 2¢ worth of input. 2¢ is hard to subdivide across multiple programs, so let’s up the ante a little and use $20 as a baseline. Since Statistics Canada states that average personal taxes amounted to $14,600 in 2008 (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/091218/dq091218b-eng.htm) ,$20 represents less than 0.14% of your total tax bill. I’m sure CRA probably won’t mind that 0.14% is being put aside for this project.

Here’s the concept: Give every taxpayer a notional $20 that they can allocate towards discretionary projects ( projects other than essential services (core policing, clean water, essential healthcare etc.)) Over top of a regional map, let people select programs that interest them from a pull down list of government funded activities. For each activity, allow people to allocate from $1 to $20 of their notional fund towards each project. So tax payers could, for example, allocate $5 towards a coffee shop in Khandahar for the troops, $5 for maintaining their local outdoor rink and perhaps $10 for improvements to the 400 series highways. At the end of the selection period, the governments could tally the value, and truncate those activities that didn’t receive enough support to reach their minimum goals (it would be hard to build an off ramp with say $100). The unallocated funds could be re-distributed in a prorated manner based upon support received to date. I created this rudimentary survey to get a sense of the types of projects that people could select at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/69GS2ZH. I know it’s a long way from the clickable map with gov data mashup listed above. Since it’s only an example, it even allows you to go back and spend your $20 multiple times! I’ll report the results in early May.

Why not have a look and think about how you would spend your $20.

Open Government is a Team Sport

John.Weigelt

Published: March 25, 2010Posted in: Open Government

Earlier this week, in conversation with some of our worldwide government teams, I had the opportunity to share some of our experiences with the open government activities underway across Canada. With so many great initiatives underway, I couldn’t focus too long on any particular project and really looked to try to draw out the higher level success factors that could be replicated in other regions around the world. As I went through the recent events and noteworthy news items, I shared the Open Data case study posted by David Eaves (http://bit.ly/98WVqt ). While David called out some of the work that Microsoft is doing for Open Gov, it struck me that the singular “Microsoft” really hides a significant lesson learned or best practice and that lesson is that Open Gov is a collaborative effort of many.

This may seem like a truism to many of you, but I think it’s well worthwhile to state. It’s clear to me that it’s a team sport from at least two different perspectives. From an internal perspective, our open government work relies on the tireless efforts of people across a variety of teams including the local public sector team, the developer evangelism team, our product groups, the partner team and many others. However, the work of all these people wouldn’t be effective if it weren’t for the external conversations, brainstorming and other interactions that we have had. The CloudCamps, ChangeCamps, roundtables, consultations and even one on one conversations with thought leaders have all contributed to a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities for individuals, businesses and governments. Without this collaborative approach, any of the activities we started would most certainly have not hit the mark. There are many individual teams working hard at the local level and perhaps even regional level open government activities. I’ve noticed that there are several common themes that always pop up during these conversations including civic engagement, transparency, privacy, common data-sets, standards/Interoperability, social networking and others. Perhaps it’s time to time to bring these teams together for a national level conversation on open government across all three levels (municipal, provincial and federal).