Superb video by Julien Frisch introducing the Web Communications team of the European Parliament. The team consists of 39 people writing and publishing the daily news about the European Parliament in 22 languages! They describe themselves as:
[...] a mixed bag linguistically and culturally, we are also a new and relatively young team. Most of us are in our first job in the EU institutions and only really came together as a team at the beginning of 2007. We hope that we have a fresh and young perspective on what happens in the Parliament. At the same time, we are professionals, committed to our job of communicating to real people, in comprehensible language, what this Parliament is doing in their name. This is also the reason we have decided to start this blog.
The blog is an eclectic mix of stories on politics, social media, europe and their travels around the parliament.
The Sunlight Foundation recently launched a national campaign to make government more open, transparent, and ultimately: accountable. The campaign has adopted a new logo that can be used by any organization working toward government transparency.
On launching the campaign Sunlight's Engagement Director Jason Brewer explained the new logo and the rational behind the Open Government 'movement':
We hope this emblem is a first step in giving us something we can all own and point to as a symbol for what open government means to us, and what we believe.
[...] We believe that what government does, how it is influenced, or how it spends our money are all things that are public information – and today, “public” means that the government’s data must be accessible by any citizen, at any time, from anywhere: online and in real-time.
Through the campaign we hope to dramatically further the movement for open government that has been building, and give it the infrastructure it needs to be successful at the local, state and federal levels for years to come.
Open Government beliefs
The primary objectives of the campaign - and beliefs at the heart of the Open Government movement - include:
1) An open, transparent Government is something we create when public government data and information about government activity is made easily accessible to us – online and in real-time – and we use it effectively.
2) Government has a responsibility to be open and transparent, but it will not become so on its own.
3) We would rather use positive incentives (the “carrot”) than negative incentives (the “stick”) to make government transparent, but we will use whichever is most effective.
4) Changing the way government thinks and behaves is as important as changing government rules.
5) Technology isn’t part of the open government “pie.” It’s the pan.
6) Changing the way the public thinks about government and how they engage with it, is as important as making government data and information accessible.
7) Effective and responsible engagement with government will make it work better for all Americans.
8) Achieving our vision of a transparent government will require the ongoing commitment of citizens in every district across the United States to make it possible.
9) We will sacrifice “perfect” in order to take action and make progress today.
Open Government Logo
In the video below, Noah Kunin from the Sunlight Foundation walks through the reasoning behind the logo, and explains the campaign to ensure more government is transparent and accountable.
For more on the Campaign for Transparency, and to provide feedback, check out
NASA - in conjunction with 23 other Federal agencies - has launched its Open Government site.
In a post on NASA's collaborative blog Beth Beck - Space Operations Outreach manager - encouraged citizens to use the site to provide ideas and comments on ways to make NASA more Transparent, Participatory, Collaborative, and Innovative.
According to OpenGovTracker, the site has the most ideas (93) of all Agencies involved in the Open Government initiative. These ideas have had 717 votes along with 217 comments.
The citizen media training initiative of Global Voices Online recently opened their new Transparency website. The site's aim is to provide a resource to map and evaluate technology projects promoting transparency, accountability, and civic engagement around the world - primarily outside Europe and North America.
There are currently four case studies available documenting grassroots online technology projects. Each of the cases studies concentracts on either:
transparency of government information
accountability of elected officials,
or civic engagement in the political process
Current projects include:
ADOTE UM VEREADOR - a site encouraging Brazilian citizens to blog about the work of their local elected officials in order to hold them accountable.
SITHI - a Cambodian human rights portal aiming to crowdsource and curate reports of human rights violations
MZALENDO - tracking the performance of Kenya's Parliament by tracking votes, publishing records, and providing analysis and context
VOTA INTELIGENTE - providing Chilean citizens with more information about their elected officials
ISHKI - a complaint brokerage which collects and organizes complaints from local citizens about the public and private sector
The Open Government and Gov 2.0 movement is progressing steadily in Western Europe and North America. It is reported on extensively in the media, through blogs and various social networking sites. The situation outside of these advanced democracies, however, is less well understood and discussed. As such, the Global Voices site provides a necessary portal to highlight advances in democractic accountability and transparency in developing countries.
In this video produced for The Nation and FixCongressFirst.org, Lessig describes his concern over President Obama's limited approach to truly "changing Washington," and his view that Congress is a deeply broken institution that needs reform. He believes:
At the center of our government lies a bankrupt institution: Congress.
Find out Professor Lessig's solutions and ideas in his cover story for the February 4, 2010 issue of The Nation magazine, "How to Get Out Democracy Back". Lessig proposes citizen-funded elections along with "banning any member of Congress from working in any lobbying or consulting capacity in Washington for seven years after his or her term".
The point is simple, if extraordinarily difficult for those of us proud of our traditions to accept: this democracy no longer works. Its central player has been captured. Corrupted. Controlled by an economy of influence disconnected from the democracy. Congress has developed a dependency foreign to the framers' design. Corporate campaign spending, now liberated by the Supreme Court, will only make that dependency worse. "A dependence" not, as the Federalist Papers celebrated it, "on the People" but a dependency upon interests that have conspired to produce a world in which policy gets sold.
[...]Nor can one exaggerate the need for precisely this reform. We can't just putter along anymore. Our government is, as Paul Krugman put it, "ominously dysfunctional" just at a time when the world desperately needs at least competence. Global warming, pandemic disease, a crashing world economy: these are not problems we can leave to a litter of distracted souls. We are at one of those rare but critical moments when a nation must remake itself, to restore its government to its high ideals and to the potential of its people.
[...]What would the reform the Congress needs be? At its core, a change that restores institutional integrity. A change that rekindles a reason for America to believe in the central institution of its democracy by removing the dependency that now defines the Fundraising Congress. Two changes would make that removal complete.
[...]That one--and first--would be to enact an idea proposed by a Republican (Teddy Roosevelt) a century ago: citizen-funded elections. America won't believe in Congress, and Congress won't deliver on reform, whether from the right or the left, until Congress is no longer dependent upon conservative-with-a-small-c interests--meaning those in the hire of the status quo, keen to protect the status quo against change. So long as the norms support a system in which members sell out for the purpose of raising funds to get re-elected, citizens will continue to believe that money buys results in Congress. So long as citizens believe that, it will.
[...]A second change ...: banning any member of Congress from working in any lobbying or consulting capacity in Washington for seven years after his or her term. Part of the economy of influence that corrupts our government today is that Capitol Hill has become, as Representative Jim Cooper put it, a "farm league for K Street." But K Street will lose interest after seven years, and fewer in Congress would think of their career the way my law students think about life after law school--six to eight years making around $180,000, and then doubling or tripling that as a partner, where "partnership" for members of Congress means a comfortable position on K Street.
The first Australian Social Innovation Camp is scheduled for 5th -7th March 2010. Today is the last day to submit ideas to be developed during the weekend. To submit your idea goto http://asix.org.au/content/submitting-idea.
Social innovation refers to new strategies, concepts, ideas and organizations that meet social needs of all kinds - from working conditions and education to community development and health - and that extend and strengthen civil society. The camp is an opportunity to concentrate on particular ideas and develop working prototypes.
Here's a brief description about how the camp works:
Collecting ideas
The Social Innovation Camp starts with a big, open call for ideas. Anyone can enter an idea for a web-based social innovation. You don't need to be technically skilled - you just need to know about a social need that you've either encountered in your personal or professional life where the web might be able to help.
From the ideas submitted, a panel of judges select between six and eight of the most promising to be developed at the Social Innovation Camp weekend. The public votes will also be taken into account when selecting the ideas coming to the camp.
Weekend event
Then the people behind the selected ideas, together with software developers and designers, those with business and marketing skills, as well as individuals with expert knowledge of social need are invited to the Social Innovation Camp weekend.
From a Friday evening to a Sunday afternoon, participants are asked to organise themselves into teams around the selected ideas and then set five challenges:
1) What’s the problem they're trying to solve?
2) Build the technology with which to do this
3) How will you sustain your idea?
4) How will you build a community of users?
5) What are you going to do after the Social Innovation Camp weekend
At the end of the two days, all participants come back together to pitch what they have built and the judges award a small prize to the projects which have shown greatest potential.
A corporation runs for Congress? Great spoof regarding the absurdity of the Citizens United decision last week. The problem is it's not so far from the truth.
President Obama descibed how the Citizen United decision would mean "a new stampede of special interest money in our politics":
With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans. ... We are going to talk with bipartisan congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision.
The Huffington Post's investigation fund has been running a series of articles on Electronic Health records (required by 2014), and whether their implementation can lead to the care improvements and the cost savings envisaged by President Obama.
The President has praised the Cleveland Clinic for having "one of the best health information technology systems in the country" and holds it as a model for healthcare in America. As a result of this, the Huffington Post analysed their IT practices and how they developed and managed a system of Electronic Health Records throughout the clinic.
The video below examines whether the experiences of the Cleveland Clinic can, and should, be replicated across the country.
The Obama administration is current spending $45 billion to jump-start a national system of electronic medical records. They want doctors and hospitals to digitize their records within five years, as a means of improving care and achieving billions of dollars in savings.
Cost savings
WhileCleveland Clinic doctors say there is no doubt the switch to digital record-keeping has boosted the quality of care, they question whether they have saved money and reduced costs.
The Huffington Post notes how the Cleveland clinic has invested $100 million in IT over a decade, but cost savings have not materialized and hospital officials are not certain when they will. Whether their effort of digitizing records will save money is not altogether clear. This is consistent with some recent national studies that question whether electronic records can lead to lower medical spending:
A study of 4,000 hospitals published in November in the American Journal of Medicine--carried out by Harvard researchers who are some of the most prominent advocates of a single-payer healthcare system--found no cost savings or increased efficiencies with digital records. That was consistent with preliminary results from a separate study of 3,000 hospitals by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health, who found no evidence of cost savings with electronic records.
The switch to Electronic Health Records (EHR) has received mixed reviews at hospitals around the country. Other countries, such as the UK, are already advanced in the development of EHRs, but are having their budgets cut as a result of delays and cost overruns. The Cleveland Clinic's experience shows that while EHR's can improve the quality of care and administration, they're not necessarily a panacea for reducing high healthcare costs.
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