Seventeeth months ago, the W3C Team started to look into a
somewhat new area for W3C, eGovernment. You know, the way in which
government agencies, departments and the like are using technology
(mainly the Web) to develop services and communicate with their
citizenry, the industry and between themselves.
Why? Well, the massive use of Web technology to develop and
deploy those services already made the Web a crucial tool for
eGovernment.
We have learned quite a number of things so far. Services are
getting more and more sophisticated. It's not just that you can get
information online or download a form, fill it and walk to a
government office in person to give it to a public servant. You can
do the whole process online. What is more, in some cases, the
"paper" service is even disappearing and users are faced with just
its online incarnation.
At this moment in time, is more important than ever to do things
well, and Web standards are in the heart of it. In the rest of this
post, I review some of the most important challenges we found so
far, and what we are proposing to tackle them.
Governments are spending huge amounts of money in building those
services but their usage (especially of those availables for
citizens) is low. Originally, governments were putting services out
there in the same way they've been doing for years. You, as a
potential user, need to know what government agency is in charge of
a given service in order to be able to find it and use it. This was
not working well. Citizens are not aware of the government internal
structure. Fortunately, things are changing and governments are
putting strong effort in building a citizen-centric experience.
This means that they put themselves in the role of their users and
try to build what the users expect. Part of this effort are the so
called "one-stop stops", government portals where, no matter what
agency or department is in charge of a given service, are built in
terms a user can understand and make available the whole offer of
government services on the Web.
Governments are finding benefits in using open standards, so
many W3C standards are used to build those portals and services,
and the Web Accessibility Content Guidelines (closer to turn
2.0) are among the most widely known and used. What is more,
many are building their own National Guidelines for Public Sector
Websites or, more generally, their Open Standards policies on their
own.
Going back to the portals. Do you know what the one of your
government is? Don't be afraid if not. Most don't. And most of the
times the number of services available there are in the several
hundreds or well over a thousand ones... Anyway, you try going to a
search engine and many times you find the information you are
looking for somewhere else or don't find it at all.
Governments are recently putting much effort in engaging users
in the use of these online services. The portals are a step in the
right direction and another is to put the information where the
users are looking for it, on the Web sites they use regularly to
find videos, photos, information. This requires more resources and
new expertise and new challenges arise. For example, if a
government agency puts up a blog and get comments, what should it
do with them? What if those comments could eventually improve the
information that the government already had about the information
exposed? How do the new information compare to the authoritative
one that the agency already had in its systems? All good questions,
most still unsolved.
This increasing effort in getting the users participating more
is also accompanied by a increasing one in getting the most
information out there for them, also not without challenges. It's
usually very difficult to discriminate from the information the
government already has, which one can be made public a which one
cannot. In case of doubt, government tends not to release
information. It's too risky.
There is a clear need to improve information systems. They need
to evolve into smarter ones. On one hand, it's important to
annotate the provenance of the data archived there somehow, so
other systems could query it and learn for what purpose that data
was collected and if it's reusable or not and until what extent. On
the other, it's about time to end with information silos and
achieve a seamless integration of data. Semantic Web is here to
help and there is an increasing number of successful use cases
already. And once you are there, why not
open your data? I'm sure you are aware of the usefulness of
many application mashups, can you imagine what new possibilities
government data mashups can open? Maybe the Open Government Data
Principles could give you a hint on why this would be a good
idea.
Is this all? Of course, it's not. There are other eGovernment
challenges out there (identity, security, integrity...) and some
are not just government specific but would need a solution
somewhere else (e.g. other technical Activities at W3C), but we
believe we need to start simple and somewhere, and these are the
most important and the ones that came up more often during the
exploratory work so far.
We believe that the challenges described here are common to
governments all over the World and that a collaborative effort
between governments, industry, citizens, academia and other civil
societies would have a strong beneficial impact in addressing
them.
If you find this interesting, you are welcome to join us in the
W3C
Australia eGovernment Tour 2008, four talks in three cities in
seven days, coming soon to a city nearby (if you are in Australia,
that is) and take a look at what we
proposed as a next step at W3C and comment on it, the sooner
the better.