A Democracy of Tags
Peeter Marvet made a 10 minute screencast in English that provides a tour of Estonian e-government sites, explains where tagging to provide feedback to elected officials could fit in and asks you to provide feedback on the concept.
Watch this and you will wish your country had today's level of interaction with government officials. One of the great things about a small country is the ability to make swift change and test new approaches to government. How would you improve the system? For example, one e-government site requires you affiliate yourself with a group in order to provide feedback -- how could group forming be supported?
In related news, President Rüütel issued a statement yesterday against the internet voting act passed by the Parliament, which wire services are interpreting as a veto, even though he has no such power. His principle concern is Identity (60% of the population has electronic ID cards already). The devil is certainly in the details of this system, but again, here is an opportunity for Identity experts to weigh in from afar.
Very cool! Relevant to my company Comcate and what we're doing with local governments....
Ross - we share some mutual friends...I will email you this summer to see if we can talk more!
Posted by: Ben Casnocha | May 26, 2005 at 11:59 AM
re: "how could group forming be supported" -- well, of course this is also a possible solution.
But probably more important than group forming is ... let's call them "campaign tools" -- so if I have a good idea I can call people (or interested groups or whatever) to discuss, develop and support it (wikis, blogs, RSS, search engines, mailinglists, chat, meetup etc). We didn't form a group with you to discuss this idea here :-)
The main problem with Estonian tom.riik.ee is that it works with HTML frames, so I can't actually send you a link to my idea so you can comment/vote/whatever. Or, if I send you the actual link, you can't log in from it... We have tried to run an idea through tom.riik.ee (related to WiFi, btw) and it just didn't work. TOM isn't a "campaignable resource" so it fails.
Posted by: Peeter Marvet | May 27, 2005 at 12:21 AM