[:en]Some egovernment experts, organized a workshop in Brussels, on March 16th, as they thought that distance is increasing between what it’s possible using web2.0 and what the governments mean for using ICT for Innovation and presenting some project already running.
The workshop Public services 2.0: How to implement and promote user-driven open innovation in public services was possible thanks to private actors: the only institutional presence was Mechthild Rohen (Head of Unit, EC DG INFSO eGov). The fonctionnary resumed initiatives on eparticipation and edemocracy, making his presentation reading a paper and announcing a public consultation starting on May, 15th.After she talka about the importance of transparency and participation, when someone in the public asked her “Are you planning to use social media?” she answered something like, “Of course, not. It will be a big thing, we cannot trust what the public says.”
as Manao said on her blog.

Very short and effective presentation in series, the website monitoring the UE financing in agriculture (Jack Thurston, Farmsubsidy), a system for monitoring MEP (Members of Europeans Parliament) voting activity (Adrian Moraru, IPPC) – [I had the opportunity to see how difficult is to measure what MEP are doing from the Parliamente website as I wrote here], mental maps supporting taking decisions (David Price, Debategraph), hacker promoting Egov hacking day, a full day of coding for the government pro bono (Emma Mulqueeny, Rewired State),the famous Patent Opinion, in which people thanks more than complaining about public health (James Munro, Patient Opinion), a project for harvesting proposal for public health (Carlos Guardian, 1001 ideas para sanidad publica), a social enterprise for giving voice to the “last”, also through a web radio in prison (Nathalie McDermott, On Road Media), Google who has a full time employee for putting timeline of public transportation on Gmaps (Simon Hampton, GoogleTransit) and other initiatives started to promote local development, as the Italian project Kublai,presented in a funny way by the Director Alberto Cottica.

To everyone of the presenter was asked to give information about project costs: 10.000 euros for the Romanian project for monitoring MEP activities, 3000 euros (or less) for hacking gov day, so someone said that “people are bottleneck, not money”.

It worths to say that I was not in Brussels for the workshop, who has an high success in terms of subscription, but I could follow the streamiong video, organized by Futuregov and twittered all the time with many others following the conference online and in presence. Using the tag “eups20” su flickr, slideshare, del.icio.us and going to this pageflakes it’s possible to get all the documents and website used during the workshop.

Let’s hope that policy makers are listening 🙂

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