Filed under: Digital Sustainability, FLOSS, Open Government Data, Politics
I know, for many people it sounds too much “open”: Open Source, Open Standards, Open Cloud, Open Government, Open Budget, Open Politics, Open Everything… While I admit there is some hype and buzzwording all around “open everything”, there is a clear trend towards more transparency, collaboration, participation, and innovation within our society. However, I don’t want to start a philosophical discussion. Let me just briefly list the initiatives I’m currently involved in:
In January 2012 I participated in the workshop “European Public Administrations and Open Source Sofware: The Power of Communities” at the Open Source World Conference in Granada organized by the European Commission. Many great initiatives and projects were presented, among them I’ll talked about OpenJustitia, the new open source project by the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland.
In February 2012 I talked at the Public Management Colloquium in Hamburg about the Open Government Data movement in German speaking countries.
On April 21st 2012 I participated in the Münchenwiler Seminar of the Collegium generale of University of Bern. The sessions were about Open Access, a topic of interest of our Parliamentarian Group for Digital Sustainability since many years. My talk was positioned as kind of an outbreak closing session about open government data.
On April 26th 2012 my parliamentarian colleague Giovanna Battagliero and I founded the cross-party group of Digital Sustainability in the City Parliament of Bern. Starting with 20 members our group covers members of the parliament from left to right. I really hope there will be more such groups founded in other parliaments.
On April 27th 2012 my friend Oleg Lavrovski and I moderated the first Bernese Open Data Hackday. It was actually just an afternoon and evening session, but the result was really great. My favorite app was created by Thomas Preusse visualizing the City of Bern budget as an open budget app. Have a read at Oleg’s blog post, the Opendata.ch blog, and the news paper articles in Der Bund and Bernerzeitung.
This week I participated at the WSIS Forum 2012 in a UNDESA/ITU session on Future Government: A Global Perspective in connection to open Government Data and Citizen Engagement with a short presentation on Management and Governance of Open Government Data Initiatives.
On June 19th 2012 I will be opening the first open cloud conference in Switzerland. On behalf of the Swiss Open Systems User Group /ch/open we’re organizing many interesting talks at the University of Bern.
On June 28th 2012 the second Opendata.ch conference takes place in Zürich. We’ve many great national and international speakers in the plenary session. In the afternoon focus session I’m moderating several interesting talks about finance and procurement: Überblick zu OpenSpending.org und weiteren Open Budget Initiativen by Friedrich Lindenberg (Entwickler bei der Open Knowledge Foundation), Ein kritischer Blick auf Open Government Data für Finanzdaten by Maja Menn (Direktorin Finanzverwaltung Stadt Zürich), Öffnung des Haushaltsprozesses, Open Budget 2.0 & Open Budget Data by Christian Geiger (Doktorand an der Zeppelin Universität), Studie zu offenen Bürgerhaushalten in Deutschland by Andreas Burth (Doktorand an der Universität Hamburg), Erfolgsfaktoren und Herausforderungen bei der Umsetzung von Bürgerhaushalten by Dr. Alexandra Collm (Forscherin an der Universität St. Gallen), Warum und wie man eine Open Budget App entwickelt by Thomas Preuss (Open Budget App Entwickler), Einblick in die gespiderten Beschaffungsdaten von simap.ch by Daniel Meister (datahouse AG)