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| From the newswire: Planning the launch of a Community of Users - The case of the IST SemanticGov Project |
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 ©1954 and 1959 by Teletype Corporation
Information on new or ongoing projects in the area of E-Government should aim to help diffusion of a project’s unique selling propositions. This time we present the IST SemanticGov project.
SemanticGov aims at building the infrastructure (software, models, services, etc) necessary for enabling the offering of semantic web services by public administration (PA).
Through such a cutting edge infrastructure, SemanticGov will address longstanding challenges faced by public administrations such as achieving interoperability amongst PA agencies both within a country as well as amongst countries, easing the discovery of PA services by its customers, facilitating the execution of complex services often involving multiple PA agencies in interworkflows.
More importantly, this infrastructure will exploit SemanticGov as an enabler for total reengineering of PA service provision and propose a paradigm shift of today’s modus operandi.
To achieve this SemanticGov project aims at capitalizing on the Service Oriented Architectures paradigm, implemented through state-of-the-art Semantic Web Services technology and supported by rigorous and reusable public administration domain analysis and modeling, while being in line with all major European programmes and initiatives in the field e.g. the European Interoperability Framework and the recent work conducted by the EU IDABC Programme, the forthcoming i2010 group of Member States representatives and the Competitiveness & Innovation (CIP) Programme.
The consortium consists of a complementary set of top-level scientific partners, world-leading industrial companies and user partners capable to take up SemanticGov results. This composition secures the successful execution of the project as well as the widest exploitation of its results.
As a wider impact, SemanticGov is expected to enhance the administrative capacity of national public administration systems by providing a new paradigm for service provision, and pave the way to the administrative dimension of European seamless collaboration (a.k.a. “Common European Administrative Space”) by facilitating the communication amongst EU national administrative systems.
ALTEC is part of the SemanticGov consortium and together with the Coordinator of the project, the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas and in particular the Laboratory of Information Systems of Professor Konstantinos Tarabanis, we are planning the launch of a Community of Users for addressing uptake and adoption issues of the project developments.
Till today we have managed to hold several information exchange and brainstorming sessions with representatives from local authorities, central government agencies and experts.
I was happy to see that there is genuine potential for this – but there are many risks and dangers. What I see – and is at a great degree very understandable – is that people are in general very hesitant or negative as in many cases being part of such a Community usually ends up either into nothing, or in receiving some non-useful-if-not-totally-crap emails and messages or invitations for events that lead nowhere.
I have had all these concerns and been discussing them with colleagues and partners. And I am afraid that there is no right answer on how to tackle with them.
However, what I do take as granted is the following:
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People are in general tired of receiving bulks of information, opening documents, printing files, or simply deleting them. I personally delete many things that could have been worth to read and communicate with the people that produce them. |
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People are also in general tired of "participating" or "being members of" communities, virtual schemes and conceptualisations that work only for reports and even there only hardly. |
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Therefore, it is that I would have liked us making the extra mile in terms of not wanting to preach our R&D developments in such a passive Community but organising some real links and truly functional bonds amongst the members from which we personally and the SemanticGov project could draw value.
I do know that people don’t have time to follow discussions or participate in collective psychotherapy sessions over Internet (synchronous or asynchronous). In this respect, we have to organise the community in some way so that people find it worth to spend some time with us.
Also what I do know is that except from some few bright exceptions, the majority of government or public sector people involved in this area of EU R&D projects finds the area either difficult to follow (jargon, etc.) or non interesting and somehow they have a feeling that what a project shall develop will have very few adoption possibilities.
If we bring the above into our design specifications for the Community we shall aim to build, we can have some more increased optimism for the success of the venture.
I would be eager to hear from all of you on the above matters,
Adamantios Koumpis, akou@altec.gr
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