What does Europe need to do to lead the way in Public Services 2.0?

My impression is that we have made huge progress in the last 18 months in terms of the public sector taking on board Web 2.0 approaches and Web 2.0 tools. There have been plenty of great initiatives in Europe and the election of Barack Obama has prompted an impressive upswell of activity in the United States. But (and I am sure you knew there was a but coming) there is still a huge way to go before these new approaches become mainstream.

As it happens, the European Union is in the middle of developing a new ICT strategy to replace the i2010 strategy and there is a ministerial e-government conference in Malmo in November, so there is a great opportunity to try to give this agenda a huge push in Europe. After a Public Services 2.0 workshop in Brussels, David Osimo and I decided we would try to get some Web 2.0 style input into the new ICT strategy and the e-government conference. Our aim was to develop a bottom-up open declaration on Public Services 2.0 to add to the ministerial statement that will be presented at the conference in November and the industry statement.

Well, we have made some progress, but what we really need now is lots more participation. We started with a brainstorm on uservoice to get some sense of what people wanted to see happen in Europe. We are now developing a short manifesto on mixedink at http://mixedink.com/Eups20/Manifesto to capture the key ideas in as impactful form as possible. Please go to the site and add your own version of the manifesto or amend an existing manifesto or just rate the different manifestos to help the best one rise to the top.

Once we have a final manifesto, we aim to use a wiki to develop a supporting document giving ministers detailed ideas on how (and why) they might implement the idea. At that stage, we will also be looking for mass participation and endorsement of the manifesto via a Facebook group (and possibly some other tools)