The European Commission is asking for new ideas on how to use ICT to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and quality of public sector and public services. The EC has made available an online public consultation, open until 15 April 2013.
The survey is introduced by a draft document on directions for ICT-driven public sector innovation. The paper identifies inter-linked drivers, trends and enablers, to which it welcomes comments by all the interested stakeholders: national administrations, businesses, researchers, innovators, academia and interested users.
The document describes open government as "one of the pillars of ICT-driven public sector innovation based on open data, open services and open participation." As one of the technological tools and other enablers, it writes: "An open governance framework requires focus on interoperability (also of legacy systems), open standards, and storing data and services in the `cloud' to enable accessibility and use by many users."
This open governance framework can benefit from automatic machine exchange of data and applications, the EC writes in the draft report. This will allow users to ask questions, instead of searching for answers by using key words. "Also, ecosystems of public sector apps can be created (often through co-creation with other actors) derived from open data and user data mashups, whilst games can be used for 'serious' purposes."
The draft paper sees open governance systems as one of the possible focus areas for research and innovation.
The consultation itself consists of three questions, that can be answered online. Contributions and the identity of the contributors to the consultation will be published on the Internet.
More information:
Consultation on directions for ICT-driven public sector innovation in the EU
Consultation form
Draft paper on the consultation