Re: organising an eGov global taskforce suggestions(redux)

Ed,
thank you for taking the topic to the meetings, and sorry I am not often
online when they take place-
would be nice  to develop a strategy for this group cause there is a lot of
 work in this direction (eGov) is needed

 I think ideally the
> eGov effort would be a community group that anyone (w3c member or not)
> could join.


I think that's the case already, isnt it?


> I don't think this group is in a position to be able to
> identify individuals with integrity or ethics.


no, you are right, that would also be too discriminating. we need to
embrace all, :-)


I also think this group
> is quite small given it's scope (the Web and government/politics).
> However I think you're right that more could be done in the area of
> recruiting people to join the group. The big challenge here is
> language I think -- is it expected that communication be done in
> English? Or should language specific lists be created as needed? I
> don't know if this has come up before.
>

Good point. Language is indeed an issue, for most topics, and a big divide
across all areas and knowledge domain.  I am aware that there should be
ways to enable inter- multi- lingual discourse. not sure how to do it, but
it could be important. For example, I spent time recently in Catalonia
(similar  independent province like the Basque country from what I
understand), they have their own language which is Catalan .  In Catalonya
I have met, among other interesting people, a group of intellectuals
critical of politics and governments in general. I recently pointed Felix
Rodrigo Mora [1] to this eGov WG, as an example of places where we are keen
to discuss how new technologies, if appropriately configured, could help to
create a more transparent and inclusive and accountable and functional  and
participatory forms of governance, and that at least this is one of the
things that some of us would like to explore here.  The fellow is a radical
thinker *may or may not agree with his political views (in fact I disagree
with him quite a lot, yet the disagreement is documented in castellano [2]
but he has a lot to say and has original ideas. However he does not speak
English, so without a translating mechanism the group cannot interface with
him.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PG4lqUa8gH0
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_syz1_FxOHw (not a good video, just
taped the conversation for note taking purposes)


The key thing for me is that some important ideas exist in the world that
people may not come across because of the language divide.

Depending on who we find, and the type of work being done,  it could be
group to have language specific subgroups to create telegraphic summaries
of key documents/events/talks/ideas/books in local languages etc, and
translate them to english, and generally cross reference resources and
initiatives.  I find Google translate does a decent job , then a native
speaker must make a few passes to refine the translation

>
> As far as guidelines go, I think the Improving Access to Government
> through Better Use of the Web [1] still does a pretty good job. But
> perhaps we need to build upon it?


defnt


> Are there gaps that you think need
> to be addressed? I agree that there is definitely a need to share case
> studies better.


must think


> This area of the Wiki is particularly vacant [2,3].
> Maybe collecting already published examples of effective use of the
> Web by government would be a good way to bootstrap it? It seems like
> minimally adding the use cases that have come up on telecons would be
> a good thing to do.
>
>
 I suspect I may have started one or two of the pages below but may have
forgotten to populate them (sorry) would b e good if those doing a
presentation could also list and link the materials and documentation  in
the relevant portions of the wiki <process>



> //Ed
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/egov-improving/
> [2] http://www.w3.org/egov/wiki/Main_Page#6._Case_Studies
> [3] http://www.w3.org/egov/wiki/EGov_Procurement
>