RE: egov directory

I would be delighted to see an ontology of three things, on a wiki:
Information
People
Events
 
For information:
category (free format to start?), source/location, availability (access/license/open), endpoints (sparql, sql, api, other), URL to docs/information, certification/verification (some sort of ‘quality’ or ‘trust’ check, none at first while we sort that one out – or see what is offered by posting entities, it may sort itself out)
 
For People:
name, expertise/title, contact (phone, email, twitter, etc), projects/associations, misc (consultant available, url to person, etc), artifacts (white papers, websites...)
 
For events:
category, what, when, where, who, url to details, access ... well, you know
 
Is it Christmas yet?  Well, Sandro, you DID ask...
 
From: public-egov-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:public-egov-ig-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Chris Beer
Sent: Monday, January 24, 2011 2:21 AM
To: W3C eGov IG
Cc: team-egov@w3.org
Subject: 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
TW: @zBeer <http://www.twitter.com/zBeer> 
LI: http://au.linkedin.com/in/zbeer