Validation of the TaxonomyLast update 22 Nov 201560 paragraphs, 4 comments
Definition of Open Government ServicesLast update 22 Nov 201519 paragraphs, 2 comments
Validation of the Taxonomy
Taxonomy of Scope of OGS
Width, indicating the main elements of the taxonomy:
- Services of general interest. This class of services provide an essential safety net for citizens and helps promote social cohesion in areas such as health care, childcare or care for the elderly, assistance to disabled persons or social housing. Such services involve tasks and functions related to citizen`s welfare and participation, and refer to the supply of basic infrastructure and services for businesses. Clearly OGS are a subset of services of general interest.
- Public sector: this concerns the part of the economy providing various government services, including such services as the military, police, public transit and care of public roads, public education, along with health care and officials working for the government itself. Public sector leads the design and implementation of OGS, even if in collaboration with citizens and businesses.
More broadly, infrastructures: ports, airports, etc.
Energy sector
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Mar Martínez
- 12 Dec 2015 02:57
There are other public services independently of the provider (either public or private) - Telecommunications
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Mar Martínez
- 12 Dec 2015 02:59
- Government: is an institution set up by a community of people (e.g. nation, state, city, region, association, federation) to address issues and problems that the community accepts need a common, accepted, and implemented approach for the community beyond the ability of self-organisation or private, individual action.
Domains of the taxonomy:
Consider aligning with the "data themes" vocabulary of the Publications Office. This taxonomy will be used to classify open government datasets on the pan-European data portal. It is used in DCAT-AP.
http://publications.europa.eu/...
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Stijn Goedertier
- 11 Jan 2016 10:53
- General public services: it includes executive and legislative organs, financial and fiscal affairs, external affairs, foreign economic aid, general services, basic research, R&D General public service;
- Defence: it includes military and civil defence, foreign military aid, R&D related to defence;
- Public order and safety: it includes police, fire-protection services, law courts, prisons, R&D related to public order and safety;
- Economic affairs: it includes general economic, labour and commercial affairs, agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, fuel and energy, mining, manufacturing and construction, transport, communication, related R&D;
- Environmental protection: it includes waste and water waste management, pollution abatement, protection of biodiversity and landscape, related R&D;
- Housing and community amenities: it includes housing development, community development, water supply, street lighting, R&D related;
- Health: it includes medical products, appliances and equipment, outpatient, hospital and public health service, R&D related to health;
- Recreation, culture and religion: it includes recreational and sporting, cultural services, broadcasting and publishing services, religious and other community services, R&D;
- Education: it includes pre-primary, primary, secondary and tertiary education, post-secondary non-tertiary education, education no definable by level, subsidiary services to education, R&D;
- Social protection: services related to sickness and disability, old age, survivors, family and children, unemployment, housing, social exclusion.
Power: OGS is applied to the three different branches of the government:
- Executive: this branch is the part of the government having the authority and responsibility for the daily administration of the state as well as having the power to execute the law. Top leadership positions in the executive branch include the head of government, the defence minister, the interior minister, the foreign minister, the finance minister, and the justice minister;
- Legislative: this branch is the law making body of a state or anyway a political unity and has the power to enact, amend, and repeal public law. The main actors related to the legislative branch are deliberative assemblies that debate and vote upon bills;
- Judiciary: this branch interprets and applies the law in the name of the state, providing a mechanism for the resolution of disputes.
Levels of government. OGS can be implemented at the following levels:
- Supra-national. An international organization, or union, whereby member states transcend national boundaries or interests to share in the decision-making;
- National. This is the level of the state, for example EU Member State level;
- Regional. This is a form of public administration, which exists as the lower tier of administration than the central state;
- Local. This level of administration represents the lowest tier of administration and it includes province, department, county, prefecture, district, city, township, town, borough, parish, municipality, shire, village, and local service district.
Users. Actors that can benefit from OGS include:
- Other governments. OGS can be used to strengthen the boundaries and communication between governments. For instance in some regions we are seeing close collaboration between metropolises from different countries for what concerns Smart Cities initiatives which are often co-created by citizens;
- Citizens. OGS services can be created with the collaboration of citizens, who can for instance provide information or participate to the creation of the service;
Absolutely right. In fact, consumers, users, customers (citizens in the present case) represent a valuable source of innovative information, pretty useful for new services development.
Some lines of research assess that there are a more or less numerous group of users (citizens) integrated into the mainstream (society) particularly concerned with the specific themes-topics-issues they are interested in and, therefore, capable to provide information about possible gaps (uncovered needs) or ways to improve a product/service.
Comment also appropriate for 'Types of OGS - Collaborators - Citizens'
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César Sahelices Pinto
- 12 Jan 2016 11:46
- Businesses. Idem for the businesses, which can be involved in the design of the service or build services using the government as a platform.
Object of the taxonomy:
- Public services: activities that are publicly funded and arise from public policy and that are for the collective benefit of the public, accountable to and governed by a political process. This includes both administrative and human services, and obviously represents the core scope of our taxonomy;
- Public policy: this is the principled guide to action taken by the administrative executive branches of the state with regard to a class of issues in a manner consistent with law and institutional customs. In most case public policy builds on national constitutional laws and regulations. Public policy does not relate only to the legislative branch, but also to the executive. It is related to the concept of “open decisions” as in European Commission, (2013a).
Taxonomy of Types of OGS
In the following section, we present the main features that help describing OGS. To be identified as OGS, a service must fulfil at least one feature of each category.
Technology: From a technology point of view, OGS can be characterised by different elements.
- Open data: initiatives based on open government data, released typically in bulk formats through open data portals. An example of such projects is http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/, which visualizes data based on open government data.
- Composable services: initiatives reusing not just data but software components. In the context of Service Oriented Architecture, different object composing the service are separated in terms of responsibility from a business oriented point of view and they interact through Application Programming Interfaces (Rest or Soap, XML or JSON). For instance, Unit4 Access Point (https://ap.unit4.com/) builds on PEPPOL services to provides API access that integrates with invoicing services of business and government.
- Other technologies can also be used to support different forms of human collaboration, such as collaborative tools and social media. For instance, Commentneelie.eu allowed anyone to comment on speeches by former EC VicePresident Neelie Kroes.
Collaborators: different type of collaborators can be involved in OGS:
- Citizens: individual citizen and NGOs can have an active role by providing data or launching online tools (e.g. Fixmystreet.com is a platform launched by an NGO and which enables citizens to provide data).
- Business: business can be involved in the design phase (e.g. NemHandel) or directly build services on top of government data (e.g. Google Transit) .
- Other government agencies and civil servants: services can be collaboratively built by different part of the public service and individual civil servants. For instance, http://ambtenaar20.ning.com/ is a social network for civil servant launched by an individual civil servant on a voluntary basis.
Role of government: government can have different roles; from the initiator to no role at all.
- Lead: government itself can launch OGS. For instance, the UK NHS choices service includes the possibility for users of health services to provide feedback.
- Enabler: any service built thanks to the increased openness and collaboration, based on the initiative of citizens business or NGOs. Typically all the apps built on top of open government data fit into this case, such as the OpenBilanci service which analyses spending data.
- No role: OGS can be built by third parties without the authorisation nor awareness of government, and sometimes in opposition to it. This refers to services that for instance scrape government data and build services on top of it. For instance, Fixmystreet and Farmsubsidy were originally built without any government involvement by scraping data out of PDF reports.
Resources: as described in (Osimo, Szkuta, Pizzicannella, & Zijstra, 2012b), third parties can bring different resources:
- IT skills: developers and hackers are, broadly speaking, more skilled than government at creating applications in a very short time frame, also because of the absence of complex institutional requirements. For instance, opencorporates.com is a far more usable and sophisticated service that government have implemented on managing company information;
- Specific thematic knowledge: Wikipedia teaches us that everyone has something (s)he’s expert on. Peertopatent exploits the technological knowledge on things such as parallel simulation, Netsmum the maternal experience;
- Experience as users of public services: it is costly and difficult for government to understand the perspective of users of public services. Open feedback channels such as PatientOpinion highlight problems that government would not think about;
- Pervasive geographic coverage: broadly speaking citizens have a more pervasive coverage of the territory than government, at least in populated areas. It is far more effective to let citizens casually signal a problem in a street than to have civil servants travelling up and down the city. This is particularly relevant in disaster situation where only citizens have the information at the right time, such as in the case of crisis where citizens on the ground can share valuable information, if properly managed (as in the services enabled by Ushahidi.org);
- Trust and networks: when it comes to daily lifestyle choices, citizens make choices trust friends and experts more than civil servants. For government to convey messages and induce behavioural change, such as inducing people to live a healthier life as in ActiveMobs, it is well known that you have to take into account the power of imitation and influence of networks (Ormerod, 2010);
- Many eyes and many hands: citizens are more and it is therefore more effective to let them monitor the quality of the data or to help doing large collaborative works such as in the case of DigitalKoot where 80.000 Finnish citizens took part in an online game to digitize and catalogue old newspapers and journals.
Collaboration modality: collaboration can be voluntary or paid, in different forms, as described in (Prpi, Taeihagh, & Melton, 2015)
- Virtual labour market: this includes a reward for each participant for the work carried out, often through platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk. However, this is very rarely used in the context of OGS;
- Tournament based collaboration: this refers to competition where the monetary reward goes only to the winner. Inducement prizes are organised in this way, and crowdsourcing platforms such as challenge.gov use such method. This is also the principle of hackathons;
- Open collaboration: most of the times, NES leverage the voluntary and collaborative effort of citizens to contribute to the public good through any of the resources listed above.
Cycle phase: the collaboration can be applied to the design, implementation or evaluation of the service/policy:
- Design: third parties are involved in the collaborative definition of the service and policy. For instance, companies have been involved in the design of NemHandel, or citizens contribute to the design of the mid-term review of the Digital Agenda for Europe in 2012;
- Implementation: third parties actually help delivering the service or policy, for instance by providing data or work contributions as in the case of DigitalKoot where citizens helped to digitize ancient journals held by the National Library of Finland;
- Monitoring: third parties can be involved by providing public open review of public spending as in the case of Monithon;
- Evaluation: citizens can be involved in the open evaluation of public services, for instance by providing feedback on hospitals (as in the case of Patient Opinion).