How’s that for a way of summing up the potential of new interactive tools to transform government?
While Babelfish may often be a bit of a joke, sometimes a translation can unlock a bit of value from a sentence and a light goes on in the heads of we foreigners. A translation from Norwegian is very enlightening – as may be a translation from bureaucrat-ese into plain English
Is it the case that government – and democracy – suffers because it it described by bureaucrats rather than it’s users? Is there a case that ‘Open Government’ would be better served by employing a trusted third-party mediator (with a ‘public service’ remit) and asking them to describe government for the rest of us? Surely this would make more sense than the playing-dead version of Freedom of Information that we have at the moment – simply pointing the public at a corporate Document Management System and saying ‘job done’?
Oh, that link (above) to SoSaidThe.Organization is worth a look as well….
[...] I’d suggest that Will’s position could be taken one step further: You could reduce local authorities websites down to the very bare bones: An unstyled bit of CSS that provides just the facts. This could be picked up by trusted service users and they could describe the councils services for them – providing information and a feedback loop in one go. As the Norwegians describe the whole Web 2.0 concept: “The ordinary citizen as a supplier of public sector information.” [...]