The electronic government landscape is increasingly pointing towards a diffusion of power, and an increased role and voice for citizens in public decision-making.

Tomasz Janowski from the UNU-IIST Center for Electronic Governance discusses some of the global trends that he is observing: participatory democracy, the increased regulation of new service delivery channels and the need for leadership in ICT services, challenging the notion of what “whole of government” really means in practice.

With positions of CTO, Chief Knowledge Officer, Chief Innovation Officer emerging, we also see the Government CIO as a consolidating role speaking on behalf of government information technology to other functions of government, and also to the public.

Tomasz also shares some of the recent discussions and shared experiences emerging from the W3C e-Government interest group around the use of social media in Government.

About Dr Tomasz Janowski

Tomasz Janowski is a Senior Research Fellow at the United Nations University International Institute for Software Technology in Macao, where he founded and heads the Center for Electronic Governance. Previously, he was a Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, UK, where he obtained PhD in Computer Science and Assistant Professor at the University of Gdansk, Poland, where he obtained MSc in Applied Mathematics. He also worked for software companies in Poland and the U.S.

Tomasz’s research focuses on Electronic Governance (EGOV) policy and practice including foundations, education, development frameworks, models and design, measurement, etc. He directs EGOV research, transfers research results into practical instruments, and applies such instruments in government policy and practice. Under his leadership, the EGOV center developed a capacity-based EGOV development framework EGOV.*; built instruments to support the use of this framework; applied the framework in Afghanistan (EGOV.AF), Cameroon (EGOV.CM) and Macao SAR (e-Macao); and contributed to EGOV awareness- and capacity-building in Argentina, Bahrain, China, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, Estonia, Ghana, India, Jordan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Maldives, Mongolia, Nepal, Nigeria, Palestine, Philippines, Tunisia, Uganda, Vietnam and other countries.

Tomasz is the co-founder and an international speaker at the  ICEGOV 2012 conference – hear his sneak preview (5 mins) of the conference here.

Feature image courtesy UNU

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Episode links and resources

• United Nations University International Institute for Software Technology and the Center for Electronic Governance
• The Cluetrain Manifesto
• W3C eGov interest group
• W3C eGov LinkedIn group

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The US Data.Gov platform now features more than 470,000 datasets from 172 agencies, as well as thematic communities representing such diverse interests as health and education through to developers and consumers.  Jeanne Holm shares some of the lessons learned over the last 12 months of escalating the platform, reinforcing the importance of a focus on people rather than the data itself.

I think the most important aspect of Data.gov is not necessarily the data it provides but the voice that it gives to people across the country.

Jeanne also discusses the collaboration between the US Data.gov and Indian data.gov.in teams to develop the open source Open Government Platform, and give us an update on the activities of the W3C e-Government interest group.

About Jeanne Holm

Jeanne Holm is the Chief Knowledge Architect at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, CalTech. She chairs NASA’s Knowledge Management Team, which facilitates access to and reuse of the knowledge to support future missions and drive innovation. Her team’s solutions help people manage space missions, learn virtually, and share lessons learned by transforming NASA into a learning organization through innovative techniques in developing communities of practice, harnessing the power of social media, and ensuring lessons are shared and embedded across the organization.

Jeanne was the manager for the award-winning NASA public and internal portals. She supports several DoD organizations in multi-generational learning, utilizing social media, creating collaborative structures, and identifying emergent technologies. Her activities range from social media, virtual worlds, gaming, ontologies, to collaborative systems. As a Fellow of the United Nations International Academy of Astronautics, she leads teams that set standards for how space missions should manage knowledge and share data in the future. She is the former chair of the Federal KM Working Group with 700 members across government, and serves on international standards and conference boards.

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

How you can use this episode

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Episode links and resources

• Data.gov
• Data.gov communities
• Data.gov blog
• Open Government Platform
• Data.gov.in beta site
• Open Government platform on Facebook
• W3C eGov interest group
• W3C eGov LinkedIn group

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You can use the social sharing links at the top of the page to easily share this story with your networks. You can also follow and join in the social conversation about this episode with:

• People and organisations:
  @JeanneHolm
  @usdatagov
• Tags: #opengov #opendata #gov2in #egov