*** Democracies Online Newswire - http://www.e-democracy.org/do *** An interesting article in Stateline sparked my interest: Pennsylvania, Washington Take Different Paths To E-Government http://www.stateline.org/story.cfm?storyid=82768 My comments: The governments that seek to use the Netscape Open Directory model (distributed aggregation of directory content with open syndication for content for reuse by multiple web sites) to expand and develop "public portals" will win my vote. Net-era public/private partnerships should not involve government grants of exclusive contracts to specific commercial entities. The public-private partnership models of the 1980's should be cast aside in the new Internet century. This will only happen if citizens within their own states and nations work positively with governments to help them to learn about and apply working Internet-era cooperative models in public services. Governments can make mistakes and when the only people knocking on their door on these issues are companies looking for exclusive deals, inevitably that is what we will get. Without a citizen or user voice calling for the right kind of better e-government will see this fundamental opportunity for service and information access reform disappear. When I coordinated the State of Minnesota's government online initiative (94-97), I hid my understanding that control of the top interface to government will become the number one interface through which most citizens will interact and view their government. To allow the front-end to become politicized or commercialized would damage future public trust for generations. As the Internet has evolved, we can now encourage efforts where governments fund non-commercial public portals to cover all public services and entities be they local or state government or non-profits/civic organizations. The trick is to encourage private sector competition through aggregration and distribution of accurate, up-to-date, well structured directory and essential public service information on an open basis. Allow those commercial sites with eye ball traffic to integrate the best of "public service" content and services. Get the private sector to compete over who provides the most added value and only worry about bring citizen traffic to public sector/non-profit sites when it really matters (i.e. who care if the school lunch menu is read on the local newspapers web site or digitally broadcast by the morning TV talk show). Creating competitive sites that seek to draw traffic away from commercial sites that don't have the benefit of special government treatment is the wrong way to go. Don't pick winners, make people compete so the citizens can win. Humble opinion of, Steven Clift Democracies Online Newswire ^ ^ ^ ^ Steven L. Clift - W: http://www.publicus.net Minneapolis - - - E: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota - - - - - T: +1.612.822.8667 USA - - - - - - - ICQ: 13789183 *** Please send submissions to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** *** To subscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** *** Message body: SUB DO-WIRE *** *** To unsubscribe instead, write: UNSUB DO-WIRE *** *** Please forward this post to others and encourage *** *** them to subscribe to the free DO-WIRE service. ***
