Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

Will Politics 1.0 Swallow Government 2.0? a response. | internet.artizans

I’d contend that the bolder win is for people to aggregate and socialize solutions i.e. actual functioning answers to social needs, whether stand-alone, grant funded or direct hacks of gov operations. That’s what Social Innovation Camp has been trying for, and it’ll be interesting to see which side of the wavy grey line that folk at the myPublicServices unconference will plump for.

Why Government 2.0 Has Little To Do With Government – Andrea di Maio

Government 2.0 is not about organizations and institutions. It is about the way in which constituents aggregate and socialize knowledge in ways that change their expectations and how they relate to government institutions.

eGov AU: Adapt the service not the user

The issue of adapting services versus adapting users isn’t unique to emergency services, it affects every interaction between government and public.

Every time the government forces people to use the channel it prefers – be it telephone, paper, in-person (or even online) – it is attempting to adapt the user to suit its own processes and needs.

This can reduce citizen engagement, satisfaction and completion rates, resulting in poorer outcomes for individuals.

Instead the government should seek to understand how people prefer to engage and seek ways to adapt its services to suit peoples’ needs. AGIMO’s report, Australians’ use and satisfaction with e-government services—2008, provides some ideas.

Introducing FedThread: Opening the Federal Register | Freedom to Tinker

The Federal Register is published by the U.S. government, five days a week. The Federal Register tells citizens what their government is doing, in a lot more detail than the news media do.

FedThread makes the Federal Register more open and accessible. FedThread gives users:

* collaborative annotation: Users can attach a note to any paragraph of the Federal Register; a conversation thread hangs off of every paragraph.
* advanced search: Users can search the Federal Register (going back to 2000) on full text, by date, agency, and other fields.
* customized feeds: Any search can be turned into an RSS feed. The resulting feed will include any new items that match the search query. Feeds can be delivered by email as well.

I think FedThread is a nice tool, but what’s most amazing to me is that the whole project took only ten days to create. Ten days ago we had no code, no HTML, no plan, not even a block diagram on a whiteboard. Today we launched a pretty good service.

Schneier on Security: Moving Hippos in the Post-9/11 World

It’s a security risk:

The crate was hoisted onto the flatbed with a 120-ton construction crane. For security reasons, there were no signs on the truck indicating that the cargo was a hippopotamus, the zoo said.

The last thing you need is a hijacked hippo.

Does this make any sense? Has there ever been a zoo animal hijacking anywhere?

A new public services: Voices from the frontline | Society | guardian.co.uk

How do we create innovative public services fit for the future? A unique report in tomorrow’s Guardian examines the hard choices ahead for hospitals, schools and welfare providers. Here, frontline public sector staff give their views