- From: <daniel@citizencontact.com>
- Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2010 10:54:49 -0500 (EST)
- To: chris@e-beer.net.au
- Cc: "Hugh Barnes" <hugh.barnes@nehta.gov.au>, "W3C eGov IG" <public-egov-ig@w3.org>
All, I was under the impression that it was breaking up into small groups was part of the problem. It seemed harder to get interest in creating work product. Perhaps it was because the groups were each working on different tasks. Perhaps a more organic way to structure the group to create useful work products is to work create one or two efforts that involve breaking up the problems and work into task forces that depend on each other to drive the work forward. This may help to provide incentive and group resolve and attention. And then there may be more interest in participants following the problem/project as it works it through the taskforces. Working on the same problem from different aspects may also help to give the impetus to create documents that are understandable to the "non-experts" in the other taskforces and to the larger public. For example, first identify a couple problems from the list that are both important for governments and will involve the different taskforces. Work out the business processes involved: who is the content creator, what is the process for creating and/or collecting, how is the content made available. Then identify the rules and laws (generically and/or specific) that might govern the process and show how the finished products can reference the rules. Then the technical taskforces take those road plans and show how using W3C standards and best practices for the technical implemenatation can take place. Just documenting this process will show governments what it takes to come up with great eGovernement solutions. And the interdependencies of the taskforces will keep interest higher and give more opportunities to share to our whole group and a much larger audience. And it may make the work product more applicable both for a specific problem set as well as less esoteric. Daniel Bennett -----Original Message----- From: "Chris Beer" <chris@e-beer.net.au> Sent: Monday, December 20, 2010 5:46am To: "Hugh Barnes" <Hugh.Barnes@nehta.gov.au> Cc: "W3C eGov IG" <public-egov-ig@w3.org> Subject: Re: Proposal to structure new eGov IG Hi Hugh, all Good questions. Note though that as per my earlier comments, I believe that breaking the group into small TF's is simply a workable option. Apart from Michael's suggestions, there may be other ways to structure things other than tech's or issues - Regionally (US/EU/AUNZ etc), Size (Local, State, Federal), even Sector/Portfolio (Health, Education, Social Services, Employment, GLAM etc) - end of the day I think we all agree that smaller groups within the IG gives focus and a better change of deliverables being achieved. The kind of workflow I outlined earlier could work for anything. On 12/20/2010 12:42 PM, Hugh Barnes wrote: > Chris wrote: > >> Oh - suggestion - in addition, the IG could produce a monthly news digest of e-Gov related material from the W3 (and Governments/elsewhere?), with each TF using their W3 liason contacts with other W3 groups to collate news of relevance within thier sphere for inclusion. > Absolutely. > > What I have thought for a while now would be useful is a "this week in …"-type summary/digest of activity. This should be targeted at time-poor followers who want to know what is being done and what is being debated. I know from my own experience that it can be very difficult to get back up to speed with goings on after one "drops the ball", so to speak. You can't find a way back in and you're lost forever (it seems). > > It requires a keen community-minded person to create such a summary. An example is http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Community_Updates for the OpenStreetMap community. I'm not volunteering. > > (Also, it's especially difficult to follow threads with all the lengthy top-posts. Really, inline replies work much better for many readers ("me" :) ) and archive searchers.) > > Now I'm going to abandon thread context (for reason above) and address a few things I noticed: > > * could someone explain the reason to single out accessibility as an eGov focus [1]? I've been a huge accessibility advocate since long before it was fashionable and I understand that government information *must* be published accessibly, but surely this is a given and there are plenty of general accessibility resources available that do this job? What am I missing about eGov? Straight up I can think of a few reasons. (I'm assuming no level of knowledge with any of these in answering to the list - they are good questions and ones I know you personally have given consideration to.) The first (and probably least important) is that Government is likely to always be the best uptaker of any standard or guideline developed by the W3C, other than vendors implementing technical standards. Accessibility is just one example. 508 compliance for instance, is driven by government, even though it is the vendors who have to achieve the conformance. In other areas, (security for instance) again - government is the driver (eg: the old ACSI 33 in Australia) and vendors achieve conformance. The second and others roll on from this premise of robust adoption of standards is that of all the W3 activities, WAI, and more importantly WCAG, is prehaps unique in that there are only *guidelines* in play (as opposed to actual standards), yet these guidelines have been given far more legal and some would say ethical and moral status than any standard ever published by the Consortium. It is an extremely high profile activity for the W3, and if one was to total up the cost to government world wide in not implementing WCAG (through lawsuits etc), it would far outweigh the costs associated with not implementing any other standard W3C has ever developed - in short - no one ever got sued for not using CSS, or XHTML or even RDF, if you follow my line there. As such, understandably, accessibility is a huge ticket item for Governments at the moment. Like Hugh, I've been accessibility-ing since, well, forever. And we all know that *must* has never equaled *is* - there is still plenty of Government information that *must* be published accessibly, but isn't. It is only in very recent years that accessibility has really become an "oh my god if we don't do this we're going to get sued" issue. Yes - we realise that it shouldn't be like this - it should be a given, it should be done as a matter of BAU, but it never is. And when you combine accessibility with privacy, copyright, archive acts, records management et al, converting all that legacy content into accessible formats becomes an issue - even converting a new third party PDF submission into TXT can have it's own copyright issues. Which leads to the next reason - WCAG and other WAI activities (such as ARIA) *is* techical in nature. Techniques and Specs are aimed at implementors, and documents that could be considered "policy" in nature tend towards the abstract and generally only cover background information. With WCAG for instance policy writers as well as executives are often confused and/or frightened off the sheer size of the work that comprises it, and are happy to leave it to the techs to simply put in to place if they thought it necessary. Now for the first time, we are seeing high level governance around the world that says "you have to be compliant" - yet this governance/legislation is not clear and doesn't give much assistance to agencies in writing thier own policies around accessibility. In some cases, there is confusion in the interpretation of the guidelines, or even conflicting legislation which makes implementing the guidelines difficult. Yes - there are a lot of general accessibility resources available - but government needs to make policy as well as implement, and likes to have government specific briefs to utilise as well as easy access to a community of practice from other public sector practioners. All in all, the accessibility playing field is a lot trickier and a lot slipperier than it is for the private sector - it certainly couldn't hurt to have eGovernment specific accessibility advice/resources on offer. > * use of social media should be singled out for guidance as an effective tool for engagement [1], but please can we use generic terms? Twitter is a single application platform owned by a for-profit corporation. Let's call it microblogging. My personal belief/hope is that federated open microblogging of the type available with StatusNet [2] will be the norm, probably after Twitter annoys everyone with their profit-making initiatives (which I understand they are under pressure from investors to pursue). Should W3C be encouraging private networks, even if they are in many respects, at least now, "open"? See also "A Standards-based, Open and Privacy-aware Social Web" [3].</rant> +1 + 1 + 1 - SM needs to be about Engagement. More importantly, it needs to really encompass Gov 2.0 values as well. I'd prefer either of those two terms over SM and/or microblogging. And we shouldn't limit to microblogging etc. Why not include things like live streaming video of a town hall meeting with TTML for instance, or discussions on privacy, redaction, archiving and persistance etc. > * I'm not sure I see much of a need to address cloud computing either [1]. You could outlines pros and cons, but it seems fairly a policy-driven operational decision that will necessarily differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. I could be having a bad day, but I just don't get it. I'm in two minds about CC as well - but CC isn't really my thing - I'll leave to others to discuss the merits thereof in that sense. I do agree that SaaS etc really is a jurisdictional policy decision - but standards discussions could have uses? > * I liked Daniel's public utility/service-oriented approach very much [4]. Let the tech be suggested to address the service need. For example, "Publishing documents especially laws and regulations that can be used and cited.", so we need to advocate well constructed, consistent, stable URIs. As do I - I see that suggestion as very similiar to my own abstract workflow proposal - first comes the issue, service need, etc. Then comes the tech to address it. But also the policy implications of that technology and the IT policy implications of the issue at hand as well - where there is common ground for all governments. (Open Systems vs Data Security for instance. Privacy vs Public Record. Archive vs Accessibility. Copyright vs breaches for the Public Good.) And advocacy isn't enough I feel - offering a framework that can be used is even more useful - why advocate well constructed, consistent, stable URI's when you can produce a standard PSI URI framework that will work for anyone, on any scale. We have a brain trust of top people in this group to do someting like that. We have the practical experience of some of the leading implementors as well as direct lines into case studies and access to decision makers world wide. Why can't we? (Go on - accept the challenge - you know you want to) </rant> ;) Cheers Chris > This is as much time as I can give to the conversation right now. Sorry I was mainly critical :~| > > Cheers > > --- > > [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-egov-ig/2010Dec/0023.html > [2] http://status.net > [3] http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/socialweb/XGR-socialweb-20101206/ > [4] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-egov-ig/2010Dec/0027.html
Received on Tuesday, 21 December 2010 15:55:56 UTC