The two-day Open Gov West conference (and un-conference) in Seattle this past weekend, organized by Knowledge as Power, brought together a diverse crowd of open government thinkers and practitioners. A number of private sector innovators, academics and non-profit leaders joined public administrators and officials from the Seattle area as well as those visiting from British Columbia in a multi-faceted discussion on topics ranging from data liberation to public engagement. Day one of the conference followed a traditional format of speeches and panel discussions, while on the second day, a bar camp format was chosen to facilitate small-group dialogue in sessions put forth by conference participants in the morning.

Illustration: Our Open Gov West Twitter word cloud (click on the image for a link to the raw data)

The New York State Senate CIO, Andrew Hoppin, who was invited as the keynote speaker, presented his work which by many is considered a landmark effort in the field. While the event’s focus was on open government, and the majority of participants were active in the open data movement as well as the area of citizen engagement and IT services for public administration, some work on participation projects was also introduced. Travis Triplean for example of the University of Washington presented some research on process and systems design for large-scale consultation platforms, and Rob Hoehn of Ideascale was there to speak about that company’s experiences with the realization of the federal government’s open government initiatives across all departments. A common theme throughout the discussions at Open Gov West was how to work with governments and how to successfully engage a broad range of citizens. The fortunate presence of a considerable number of “non-techies” ensured that discussions produced ideas for very wholesome approaches to citizen engagement and public dialogue. The importance of face-to-face communication has not been rendered void by the increasingly dazzling number of iPhone apps and governmental blogs or 311 systems.

Photo: Intellitics founder and CEO Tim Bonnemann (right) and intern Sebastian Haselbeck (middle) at the wrap-up session at the end of day two

Overall, the event connected a very interesting group of people with each other. Many creative ideas were tossed around and one future collaboration or the other was kicked off. The event was organized quite well, and especially the first day was quite amazing. On the downside, the second day saw a sharp drop in the number of attendees, and many of the later sessions suffered from that and the way the sessions were introduced and distributed. An earlier promotion during the event of the OGW wiki would have yielded a powerful knowledge base around the event’s debates and could have served as a launch pad for ideas, networking and idea-gathering.

In Europe, the 5th Ministerial eGovernment Conference — titled Teaming up for the eUnion — is happening in Malmö, Sweden today and tomorrow. At a press conference this morning, the long-awaited Ministerial Declaration on eGovernment (212 KB) was presented to the public.

The declaration, which is regarded as “our joint policy priorities until 2015,” addresses a number of issues such as transparency, open government data, collaboration, privacy, open source etc. Here’s what it has to offer in terms of participation:

6. Through this declaration, we will build on past achievements and increase our collaboration on eGovernment. Our public administrations should jointly strive for the following policy priorities, to be achieved by 2015.

• Citizens and businesses are empowered by eGovernment services designed around users’ needs and developed in collaboration with third parties, as well as by increased access to public information, strengthened transparency and effective means for involvement of stakeholders in the policy process,
• [...]

[...]
Our Shared Objectives by 2015

Citizens and businesses are empowered by eGovernment services designed around users needs and developed in collaboration with third parties, as well as by increased access to public information, strengthened transparency and effective means for involvement of stakeholders in the policy process.

[...]

13. Involve stakeholders in public policy processes. We will actively develop and promote effective, useful and better ways for businesses and citizens to participate in the policy processes. Increased public engagement through more effective methods at all levels enhances government’s efficiency and effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions and services.

As a complement to this official declaration, the Open Declaration on European Public Services will be presented tomorrow. Here’s its take on participation, one of three “core principles for European public services”:

2. Participation: government should pro-actively seek citizen input in all its activities from user involvement in shaping services to public participation in policy-making. This input should be public for other citizens to view and government should publicly respond to it. The capacity to collaborate with citizens should become a core competence of government.

Last-minute endorsements of the Open Declaration are still being accepted.

I just came across this project today (a sure sign I need to refactor my RSS reading habits). From their about page:

Background

Every two years, EU Ministers gather to agree on a Ministerial Declaration on e-government, which is the main European strategic document. This is usually accompanied by an Industry declaration.

We feel the urge to add an open declaration, collaboratively built and endorsed by EU citizens who share the view that the web is transforming our society and our governments. We feel e-government policies in Europe could learn from the open, meritocratic, transparent and user-driven culture of the web. We also feel that current web citizens should engage more positively with government to help designing a strategy which is genuinely difficult to adopt in the traditional culture of public administration.

We trust that if we manage to deliver quality of insight and quantity of endorsement, we will present this declaration officially at the EU ministerial conference on e-government, in Malmo on November 2009.

The open declaration will consist of a short manifesto and a more detailed supporting document with ideas on how the manifesto might be implemented.

The first phase ran from June 15 through July 15 of this year and used Uservoice to collect a first round of ideas around the following question: “What are the top things EU governments should do in the next 3 years to use the web to transform public services?”

Phase 2 is still ongoing (ends September 30) and uses MixedInk to collaboratively write the manifesto.

And finally, there is also a wiki which will “pull together a more detailed document to support the declaration itself.”

The project was launched by David Osimo and Paul Johnston and is supported by a group of well-known European experts in this field.