Public Services 2.0 - An Open Declaration for Europe

It has been truly impressive to see the way that the Obama administration has galvanised the debate in the U.S. about how the Web can help improve government and public services more generally. It would be great to see a similar wave of activity in Europe to build on some of the great stuff that has already happened here (and where we may even have been a bit ahead of our American cousins at least some of the time!).

In an attempt to contribute to that goal David Osimo and I have launched an initiative to create an Open Declaration on Public Services 2.0 which we hope will be presented and discussed at the ministerial e-government conference in Malmo in November 2009. This is very much a bottom-up initiative - we have an objective (encouraging european public sector decision-makers to grasp the opportunities of Web 2.0) and a rough idea of the process, but we are very open to evolving that as we move forward.

For the first phase of the project we are in brainstorming mode and we just want to gather as many ideas as possible. So if there are ideas that you would like to put on the agenda of European public sector decision-makers have a look at the homepage of the initiative at http://eups20.wordpress.com/ and then add your ideas via the userforum we have created at http://eups20.uservoice.com/pages/15029-policy-recommendations-for-public-services-2-0.

In the second phase of the project we will try to pull the ideas together into some sort of framework and draft a declaration to go with them. We will then open the process up again for more input, commenting and amendment. Finally in September we hope to find ways to get as many people as possible involved in the process in order to give European policy makers a sense of the importance of this agenda.

This is an experiment, so we are to some extent making it up as we go along, but it is also a fantastic opportunity to show open collaboration in practice and push the opportunities the web offers right up the agenda for the ministerial conference. So do please get involved both by contributing your ideas and by any suggestions you may have on how we can make this initiative as impactful as possible.

We have a hashtag for twitter and blog posts on this subject which is #eups20, so please use the tag if you want to contribute to this debate elsewhere.