en.europa-eu-audience

The implications of codecision for national parliamentary scrutiny

Version française
Source: European Union Select Committee , House of Lords

An interesting point of view

The Select Committee published its report on Tuesday 21 July 2009.

Download and read the whole document (186 pages but with a summary from http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200809/ldselect/ldeucom/125/125.pdf

European Commission split over Google Books

Version française

Published: Friday 28 August 2009  on www.Euractiv.com

The digitisation of books is becoming an increasingly controversial issue in Brussels. Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding is supporting the efforts of Google, the main private actor in the field, while Internal Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy has called a hearing (7-09-2009) on copyright violations committed by Google Books in Europe.

Source for full text on : http://www.euractiv.com/en/innovation/commission-split-google-books/article-184902

See also the european project www.europeana.eu

and for publications theme on this blog http://europa-eu-audience.typepad.com/en/5_publications/

Consult citizens in budget decisions in times of crisis

 Version française
Source: Cefrio, Government Services, Quebec, May 2009

 The financial crisis currently forces the administration to review their budgets and seek innovative ways to reduce expenses. Some rely on the Internet and its potential for unifying solutions. The budgets have been implemented in several regions of the world to gather ideas from citizens on ways to improve public finances or at least prioritize investments until the economy regains its breath.

Full text (French version) on http://www.msg.gouv.qc.ca/fr/connaissances/e-veille/2009/mai.asp#article1

Ebook ideal offer

Version française (source language)

Source : http://www.couperin.org/spip.php?article585

See also a list of the readers for e-books at http://www.couperin.org/spip.php?rubrique63

In a context of abundance of offers, the consortium Couperin consortium (The French consortium Couperin is an association pooling different structures: universities, colleges, research institutions and other organizations) wanted to share with publishers of e-books for its recommendations and practices currently found most interesting. Here are 10 proposals to build, in partnership with publishers and providers of services or content, what could be called an ideal offer. 

Download E-books_ideal_offer_couperin_org

European eGovernment Awards 2009 Finalists announced

Version française

The European Commission has announced the names of the 52 finalists that are going to compete for the European eGovernment Awards 2009. The Awards ceremony will take place on 19th November in Malmö (Sweden). The 52 selected projects are managed by public authorities at local, regional or national level from 17 different European countries, providing services in their own locality or cross-border.

Some good ideas to pick for EU websites also

Source: http://www.epractice.eu/awards (25-08-2009)

See the list

Towards collaborative web-based impact assessment

Version française

Abstract

Impact assessment (IA) is a key method for the legislator to evaluate policies, norms or regulations currently under development. Experts use IA to gather and analyze input from many individuals to obtain clear problem statements, estimations regarding policies etc., and use this information to compare policy alternatives. Currently, the opinions, expertise etc. gathered for IA need to be structured by hand. Thus, the analysis steps of IA are time-consuming, and IA does not scale with the number of persons involved. In this paper, we introduce a collaborative approach for IA.

Based on a Web 2.0 architecture, we let a community of individuals derive the potential, downsides and design alternatives of policies collaboratively. An important characteristic of our approach is that it guides individuals through the process of creating structured input. Our approach is fully implemented, and we have evaluated it together with legal experts using the structured-case method. While our evaluation reveals that the acceptance of web-based IA strongly depends on the user interface, it also acknowledges that our approach can be an important tool for future IA.

Source : http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1556211
ACM International Conference Proceeding Series; Vol. 390 archive
Proceedings of the 10th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Social Networks: Making Connections between Citizens, Data and Government table of contents

SESSION: Knowledge management and collaboration table of contents

Pages : 190-198   , Year of Publication: 2009 , ISBN:978-1-60558-535-2

Authors

Clemens Heidinger	Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Germany
Erik Buchmann	Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Germany
Klemens Böhm	Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Germany

Sponsor : Digital Government Society of North America

Publisher  Digital Government Society of North America  

From concept to implementation - Digital Britain

Version française 

The UK has moved forward from its recent Digital Britain report to release an Implementation Plan. This details how the government proposes to turn the actions within Digital Britain into reality.

A very interesting, and not overly long, document, the plan lays out clear governance structures, responsibilities and accountabilities for rolling out Digital Britain.

It's a model other governments could choose to use to take the step from Gov 2.0 vision to actualisation.

By Craig Thomler eGOV Australia

Source: http://egovau.blogspot.com/2009/08/from-concept-to-implementation-digital.html

Tags: edemocracy, egovernment, gov2.0, governance, leadership, management, project, report, whole-of-government 

See also: http://europa-eu-audience.typepad.com/en/2009/06/digital-britain-the-final-report-.html

Automating semantic metadata extraction

Version française

Source: Yunhyong Kim, DCC-EPSRC Research Fellow, HATII University of Glasgow

Since May 2005 the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII), University of Glasgow, has undertaken an initiative to automate the extraction of semantic metadata from digital objects. This is motivated by an earlier study into automating or semi-automating the ingest and preservation processes. The construction of sufficient metadata, describing the content, bibliographic information, provenance, and technical and administrative requirements of an object, is a crucial element in the management and sustenance of digital repositories, libraries and archives. The manual collection of such metadata is a labour intensive process, and, the exponential rate at which digital objects are produced will eventually make it impossible to rely on manual methods. The objective of this initiative is to take steps to understand the extent to which metadata creation can be automated, before the urgency arises.

Open the Report [PDF, 91 KB], Published 3rd September 2007

See also

DPE Briefing Papers: a series of concise overviews of key digital preservation and curation issues at http://www.digitalpreservationeurope.eu/publications/briefs/

French national Library (« BnF ») and Google Book Search

Version française

Almost five years after the launch of Google Book Search, the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) could entrust the digitization of its assets to Google. Remember that the British Library in 2005 (see MS and BL) had planned to conduct a similar exercise with Microsoft (Microsoft : Book search winding down (05-2008)

Why the European Union (Official Publications Office) does not open up negotiations to that effect with Google? The OECD and various UN agencies have already concluded agreements to increase the visibility of their publications

Sources :

http://www.journaldunet.com/ebusiness/breve/41244/la-bnf-pourrait-confier-la-numerisation-de-son-fonds-a-google.shtml

http://www.leparisien.fr/flash-actualite-culture/la-bnf-pourrait-confier-la-numerisation-de-ses-fonds-a-google-18-08-2009-609994.php

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gIpHswq0yHEtjCBZJqm9ZceYf5mg

 

Google Book Search : see Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_books

EU: Commission consults European citizens on the accessibility of its websites

Version française

The Commission is inviting citizens (with or without disabilities) to reply to an online questionnaire to express their degree of satisfaction with the accessibility and the user experience of the European Commission websites.

The deadline to contribute is 6 September 2009