IfG.CC - The Potsdam eGovernment Competence Center

Since the early days of e-government there has been much talk about joined-up government. I think it was Tony Blair who first used this term. The concept is simple and those of us who touted it as the great solution for transforming government knew that the technology was there to make it happen. After all, that’s what internet technologies are all about — making it possible for people and organisations to connect up to each other and remove a lot of the unnecessary noise from public administration.

There have been others, of course, who took an opposing view, seeing this new drive to connect and share information as a danger to citizens. Some even argued that the inability of organisations in the past to share information about their clients was itself a safeguard of civil rights. That’s why we have rules about data protection.

Weiterlesen: Ireland: Juggling issues of access

The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has implemented a new electronic business-reporting tool and is believed to be the first organisation in Ireland to go live with this technology. To produce one of its quarterly surveys, the CSO piloted extensible business reporting language (XBRL), which structures financial information in way that can be easily understood by computers.

XBRL works on a similar principle to XML in that it describes the content and structure of data, avoiding the need to open documents to find the information within them. XBRL is a business-reporting extension of that and covers small form-based sets of data through to full financial statements.

Weiterlesen: Ireland: CSO scores a first with new e-reporting technology

Voters will soon be able to discuss proposed legislation with Dáil committees via online Government chatrooms as part of sweeping reforms to give the electorate betterinput into parliamentary business.

The proposed discussion forums will be piloted in early 2006 to allow interest groups to discuss the Broadcasting Bill with the all-party Oireachtas Communications Committee.

Weiterlesen: Ireland: Chatroom voters have greater say on Dáil committees

One of the really interesting possibilities that the internet opened up for e-government was the prospect of being able to show data in a spatial context in that it is possible to show information and data about places on maps. What’s exciting about this is I suppose it can make it very meaningful for people to see data displayed in circumstances that they can relate to. So, in the case of planning information — whether housing or infrastructural development — it makes a lot more sense to people to see it in pictorial form.

But it doesn’t just end at planning because, if data can be shown in a spatial way, it becomes possible to layer different sets of data on a map to give a more comprehensive view of what the combined data means to a particular place. For instance, in the case of the Meadowlands project in New Jersey, the authorities had succeed in layering information about toxic waste disposal, population concentration and disease on a single map and it became very easy to detect a possible link between the location of particular types of material and the incidence of cancer.

Weiterlesen: Ireland: Plans of action