ICTlogy

Held at the IN3 headquarters in Castelldefels, Spain, on Friday March 9th, 2007, this open workshop of the MODINIS project, Breaking Barriers to eGovernment, will focus on ways in which innovation can be and has been achieved in eGovernment to improve governance in the information age. How can the widespread diffusion of the Internet and Web enable governments to transform not only the delivery of public services but also approaches to governance? The project has already identified 7 key categories of barriers to the development of eGovernment across Europe. This workshop turns attention to approaches for overcoming these barriers to stimulate innovation. These approaches span at least four key categories: legislative, technological, citizen-centric and organizational solutions.

Here come my notes for the fourth part of the workshop.

Data Protection. Best Practices in e-Government: Real Experiences
Francisco J. López Carmona, Data Protection Agency of the Community of Madrid, Spain

e-PRODAT is a European project aimed at promoting the exchange of knowledge and experiences between Agencies and other public bodies concerning the protection of personal data in Governments and Public Administrations, specially those related to e-Government, focusing in best practices in the sense of real world practices.

Public bodies must follow the law but also be cost-effective and act according to data protection while being realistic, practical.

Best practices areas: raise overall awareness among the citizenship, improve public information while providing public services, data needs minimization (optimization of data needs and managing, avoiding having to ask for more data each and each time, but also avoiding asking for more data on a “just in case” basis), ease the citizenship to execute his rights (in the field of personal data), let inclusiveness be an issue (data protection and digital divide).

Best practices identifies in e-Government and Data Protection: consent management infrastructures, privacy friendly identity management, data management, online services to citizens.

López Carmona briefly introduces dataprotectionreview.eu, a review whose name says it all ;)

Summary and Synthesis: Theory and Reality
Bill Dutton, Oxford Internet Institute (OII), University of Oxford, UK

A first issue: e-Government should be a means, not a goal, but the matter is that due to e-Government we’re having data security concerns, hence e-Government debate is becoming a goal.

A second issue: noone can keep up with technologycal change. Passports were and have been unique IDs for years. Now, i.e. RFID based IDs will be obsolete long before they are even implanted. If technologies do not ease the way you’re doing things, what’s the sense in technology?

We’ve been talking about standards… but we cannot have one standard for each and every different service or public sector branch. This is not really one standard.

Change is right, but the economies of the public sector are not the economies of the private sector. So, efficiency should be though under this light, not under the competitive market light. And same applies when talking about ownership rights (i.e. of data).

Governments are due to provide (public) information to the citizenship, but the population does not go to governments but to “Google”, and this is a big concern in many ways: identification, trust…

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