Walk the Talk

Spent a full day at the eu.practice workshop on public services 2.0 and how to implement user driven open innovation in public services. Clearly being the odd one out (not being a civil servant nor having a lot of experience in civil servant matters) , the whole thing turned out to be fairly interesting.

There is of course an inspirational side to it: the 'small' projects (small certainly in a European way of measuring things) were endearingly well conceived.

One of my favourites certainly was debategraph.org, based on the mindmap principle, offering some kind of externalized brain. Or rewiredstate.org, a concept I'm going to mail to my boss.

There was a lot of social economy going around in most of these grassroots initiatives, e.g. OnRoadMedia who use ning to create platforms for marginalised groups in society (best example being Savvy Chavvy ... read the article, I can't link to the project itself, it's a closed network).

But still, this is a European event. The (important) fact that all these 'small' projects cost next to nothing is not something we apparantly did want to get into too much.

More shocking was a Romanian project aimed at analyzing and visualizing the voting behavior of the 5-some Romanian European MP's. And if you start doing thàt, you might as well analyze and visualize the voting behavior of all MP's. After all, voting roll calls can be found on the site of the European Parliament. When clicking on the appropriate page you get a ... 170+ pages PDF listing who voted how on what. OK ....

So the Romanians wrote a script scraping the data to be able to show what they wanted to show. When asked how their financing was organized, the reply was 'US money'. Yes, they did apply for a European grant but the EP found the application ... not relevant. And, more importantly, the site ad gone offline for lack of money some time ago.

So yes, this is a European event and the fact that the EP is NOT interested in walking the talk and allow for transparancy ... not really something anyone was really shocked about. But on the other hand I'm not really able to reproduce what these Romanian colleagues did during their presentation ... weird.


And there was also Patientopinion.org collecting patients feedback on national health related experiences (in hospitals, with doctors, ....) where the British NHS basically thinks this is ... euh ... not relevant.

Or the football club Ebbsfield story, shown in the Ivo Gormsly movie Us Now, where the Ebbsfield trainer basically is not really inclined to accept the advice of the 30.000 something supporters having their say in the line up of the Ebbsfield team that needs to qualify to get to Wembley. They do. They get to Wembley. You almost hear the trainer think 'yeah right, streak of luck'

But still ... this is a eu.practice group committed doing things differently. There is hope yet :-)