With the emergence of new trends like open government and open data, there is a perception by many that eGovernment is yesterday’s news, and has largely been completed.

In a candid conversation, Barbara-Chiara Ubaldi, head of the OECD’s eGovernment unit, explains that there is much work still to be done to bring eGovernment into the daily work of the public sector.

In the real world, policymakers responsible for individual areas still don’t talk to each other, don’t work together – so, we still haven’t reached that level of interoperability, integration and coordination which is indeed essential for the implementation of larger interests like open government, for instance.

Barbara also highlights the ways in which the OECD is starting to connect the dots between national eGovernment policymaking and practical implementation by both the public sector and civil society.

About Barbara-Chiara Ubaldi

Since October 2010, Barbara-Chiara Ubaldi has led the OECD E-Government Project within the Division for Public Sector Reform at the Public Governance and Territorial Development Directorate.

Ms. Ubaldi has been serving the OECD as Policy Analyst since February 2009. In this capacity, she managed a number of thematic reviews on e-government and participated in several Public Governance Reviews, which include Denmark, Greece, Mexico, Italy, Estonia, Egypt, Spain and France. Ms. Ubaldi has been co-ordinating for the past three years the OECD work on e-government indicators and the analysis on the use of new technologies – such as cloud computing and mobile technology – to enhance public sector’s agility and mobility, as well as open government.

Prior to joining the OECD she worked for more than seven years as Programme Officer at the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs in New York where she was responsible for the full scale management of technical cooperation programmes targeting e-government and ICT use in the public sector, and for developing the content of online self-assessment and capacity building tools in the area of e-government and knowledge management.

Ms. Ubaldi is also a speaker at the ICEGOV 2012 conference – hear her sneak preview (5 mins) of the conference here.

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Episode links and resources

• OECD eGovernment Unit
• OECD report on M-Government
• OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation

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A successful participatory budgeting program is one that delivers what has been decided… It is very fashionable right now to use technology to engage with citizens, but you’re not able or willing to respond to citizens, then don’t engage with them.

Tiago also emphasises the escalating impact of mobile technologies to enable a more inclusive participatory budgeting program:

One of the things that you see is… the power of using mobile phones for citizen participation…We’ve been in areas where citizens walk further to charge their mobile phones than they walk to get water!

About Tiago Peixoto

Tiago Peixoto is an Open Government specialist in the ICT4Gov program of the World Bank Institute.  Having worked for 10 years as a practitioner and researcher in the field of ICT and participatory governance, Tiago is currently an open government specialist at the ICT4Gov program of WBI’s Open Government cluster. Prior to joining the Bank, Tiago has managed projects and worked as an advisor and consultant for various organizations in the field of participation and technology, such as the European Commission, OECD, the United Nations, and the Brazilian and UK governments. He is also research coordinator of the Electronic Democracy Centre, a joint venture of the European University Institute, the University of Zurich and the Oxford Internet Institute of the University of Oxford.

About the World Bank Institute

The World Bank Institute (WBI) is a global connector of knowledge, learning and innovation for poverty reduction. It is part of the World Bank Group, and connects practitioners, networks and institutions to help them find solutions to their development challenges.

How you can use this episode

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Episode links and resources

• World Bank Institute
• Project overview of Participatory budgeting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
• Recent Participatory Budgeting conference in New York
• Participatory Budgeting Facebook Group
• Non-exhaustive map of Participatory Budgeting Cases Around the World. Markers in red indicate cases of e-participatory budgeting (ICT facilitated)
• Article on mobile phones and Participatory Budgeting
• Mobile Participatory Budgeting in South-Kivu
• La Plata Multi-Channel Participatory Budgeting including PDF Case study
• Belo Horizonte’s (Brazil) e-Participatory Budgeting (PDF)
• ICT facilitated Participatory Budgeting in the DR Congo
• Brief report of NYC Participatory Budgeting Process, prepared by the Community Development Project at the Urban Justice Center (PDF)
• World Bank / Open Government Partnership webinar on “ICT for Citizen Engagement”

Videos

Participatory budgeting project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Participatory Budgeting and CrossVoice

Mobile Participatory Budgeting in South Kivu

La Plata (Argentina) Multi-Channel Participatory Budgeting

Belo Horizonte Participatory Budgeting

Recife Participatory Budgeting

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Tune in for a conversation with Gwynne Kostin from the U.S. General Services Administration about new innovations in m-gov and the programs being developed by the GSA to support agencies in delivering of government services using mobile devices.

The focus of the Mobile Program Management Office is to help Federal agencies to make government information and services available to the public any time, anywhere and on any device… it’s critical for government to try to figure out how to move into this [mobile] space and make government make more sense to where people are.

About Gwynne Kostin

Gwynne Kostin is Director, Mobile in the Office of Citizen Services & Innovative Technologies at the U.S. General Services Administration. She is working with federal agencies to clear a citizen-centric path for mobile access to government.

Gwynne previously was director of GSA’s Center for New Media and Citizen Engagement, where she worked to make it easier for government to engage with citizens and citizens to engage with government through the development of cross agency tools, policies and services. There she launched the government’s free, policy-compliant “build-a-blog” platform apps.gov NOW and the contest platform challenge.gov.

As Director of New Media for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, she drove the use of new technologies to solve business problems creating the department’s first social media strategy, developing a cross-agency web communications model for disaster response, and leading new media communications and strategy for the department’s 22 agencies.

Prior to joining public service, she spent ten years in new technologies, including founding a successful Internet start–up in an association and leading strategic Web communications in health care and education. She enjoys talking to interesting people and figuring out how things work.

How you can use this episode

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Episode links and resources

• Mobile Gov Community of Practice to support agency practitioners in delivering mobile services
• Making Mobile Gov Project
• Apps gallery inside apps.data.gov which gives agencies some good ideas for mobile apps
• Mobile Gov Wiki to share knowledge
• Mobile Gov Wikithon #5 – a focused gathering to develop the knowledge on the wiki
• Post from Gwynne Kostin on Govloop on the challenges of Gov 2.0 – “Doing Gov 2.0 backwards in high heels”

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