Re: egov directory

On 1/24/2011 4:49 PM, Sandro Hawke wrote:
> On Sat, 2011-01-22 at 14:39 +1100, Chris Beer wrote:
>> I'd even go so far as to say that Charter Item 1.4 (Community
>> Directory) should happen now - the issue with mobilizing the community
>> is identifying who is part of the community and actively seeking them
>> out. Thoughts?
> Let's brainstorm for a minute about what this directory would be
> like....    What kind of things are listed in it?

Potentially anything...

>    People

Yes, although people come and go, roles and areas don't as much. Might 
be prudent to include organisation and similar entity information as well.

> , Projects,

Yes. And initiatives, sites, services etc. Project suggests things that 
are in train, not services etc that already exist.

> Events,

Always a good call

>   Documents, ...?

Relevant ones definately.

>      Do people list themselves and the things they
> are involved in, or do interested, potentially anonymous observers do it
> (as in wikipedia)?

Mix of both. People - no - we should restrict this to the actual people 
listing themselves. All other information should be fine as 
crowdsourced/anonymous. I'd personally prefer to steer clear of 
anonymous, preferring the Wikipedia approach of verified information 
from known people (even if the original pointer to that info is anonymous).

>
>
> What kinds of things are said in it?

Facts only - I do not see it as the IG's role to offer critism or open 
support for any particular initiative as that would be commenting on the 
decisions/policy of Government. However the ability to bring people, 
agencies and governments together though a central directory of 
publically available information is a powerful one that the IG does 
have, in addition to promoting W3 standards and work in the e-Gov space 
that is "state" independent / policy neutral.

>     If people are listed, what do
> people want and have some right to know?

Want is an always an audience metric, regardless of subject - different 
courses for different horses as they say. They implicitally have the 
right to know anything that is already in the public domain. ie: if we 
can obtain it through open public channels (internet, a phone call, 
etc), then it can be published.
>    If projects, etc, are listed,
> what do people want to know about them?

See above - however without any sort of study, we can only best guess. 
Although I think we'd be on the money from collective experience.
> Maybe the focus is on problem solving?  Maybe I want to find people,
> etc, related to solving some particular problem I'm facing?   The IG
> note [1] could be taken as a map of the eGov problem space, useful for
> organizing this.

Excellent suggestion. It also ties in beatifully with the LOD group in 
that any such implementation of a directory along those lines is by 
definition LOD.
> For instance, we could list the items related to "Participation and
> Engagement", and even more narrowly, the sub-topics, such as "Clear and
> Simple Rules for Public Servants".
>
> That might work...

Especially if crowd-sourced - let the users do some tagging prehaps and 
define the topics?
> I think we can probably do this in a crowd-source way, if a few people
> are willing to put some real effort into getting it started.

Agree. +1. I believe that there will need to be some discussion around 
the technical aspects, however these can wait until we have a set of 
requirements to work with.


-- 
/*Chris Beer*
Invited Expert (Public Member) W3 eGovernment Interest Group & W3-WAI 
WCAG Working Group
EM: chris@e-beer.net.au <mailto:chris@e-beer.net.au>
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