Ladies and gentlemen,

Transcription

1 Opening Speech Minister Geert Bourgeois, Vice- Minister- President of the Flemish Government and Flemish Minister for Administrative Affairs, Local and Provincial Government, Civic Integration, Tourism and the Vlaamse Rand Ladies and gentlemen, I d like to welcome you to the first session of the Citadel statement lecture series. These lecture series complement the EU Ministerial Conference on egovernment, in Poznan. It s an honor to participate in this initiative that develops interest and attention in the European policy debates on egovernment. I would like to thank the VUB for the invitation. The Citadel Statement refers to the output of the European meeting the Flemish government organized, a so called preconference, during the Belgian Presidency of the European Union, last year. The name derived from the conference centre in the Citadel Park in the city of Gent. Originally Citadel comes from the Italian Citta Ideale, the ideal city. And that fitted perfectly with our ambitions: to help local governments provide better services and help them to achieve their goals by using of modern technology.

2 I hope after these lectures, we can further elaborate and develop the Citadel Statement, or at least build a strong strategy and framework on the European level to support the local governments in their e- government activities. E- government is a topic that everybody considers to be very important, but in the end it s left to each community, big and small, to face the challenges surrounding this topic on its own. Minister Bourgeois is responsible both for e- government and for local communities in Flanders. So it is an obvious priority for his administration to support local communities in their e- government policy. In a modest way we are already implementing some of the recommendations of the Citadel Statement. We have built some applications which we offer free to use to the communities (access management system). We are opening some of the public contracts to the local governments concerning ICT services and products and telephony providers. By doing so the local governments can benefit from the good conditions the Flemish Administration had negotiated. Although necessary, these are not the things needed to ensure that local communities can develop the necessary e- government services to improve their service delivery by a quantum leap.

3 Throughout the autumn of 2010, more than 120 users from 18 countries all over Europe including 64 organisations including every major local government association in Europe representing over 200 cities across 5 continents, collaborated on and offline to identify ways to help local government deliver on the key objectives of the Malmö Ministerial Declaration. The result of this effort was a pan- European Call to Action known as The Citadel Statement that identifies five core areas where European and national decision makers can provide tangible support to improve local egovernment: 1. Common Architecture, Shared Services and Standards 2. Open Data, Transparency and Personal Rights 3. Citizen Participation and Involvement 4. Privacy and Identification of Individuals 5. Rural Inclusion Let me demonstrate why these five area s are so important by telling you about a process in Flanders that on the surface seems easy to digitize and simple to automate, yet continuously runs into the problems that the citadel statement addresses: building permits. Building permits are basically a local process. The architects and citizens send their request to the local government where they are processed. The provincial government serves as the court of appeals.

4 The Flemish regional government screens some categories of application on their compliance with the proper rules and regulations. After the permit has been issued and all parties involved are informed on the result, the information is also sent to the federal government, mainly for tax purposes. The Flemish government is currently working on a project the digital building permit to digitize this particular process. To do it right you need to involve the local communities in this project so we got the city of Antwerp on board as a partner. What are the issues we came across?: Lack of a common architecture amongst local governments. We wanted the project to deliver something that all local governments, large and small, can use. Different standards: when the federal and Flemish government talk about building permits it turns out we speak a different language: we each keep different information, in different formats because we use it for different purposes. We ll need to straighten all that out before we can meaningfully and efficiently digitize the process. Open data and transparency: local governments differ widely in the degree of transparency they offer to their applicants/citizens. Citizens nor architects are today able to track their applications throughout the process. Once we agree on shared services, we

5 can offer to our citizens, the simple service of tracking their applications through local provincial, regional and federal bureaucracy. Citizen participation: once you have building permit application information registered in an agreed upon format, accessible by shared services, it becomes possible to inform, even warn citizens about possible construction works in their neighborhood, enabling them to better exercise their right to comment on and object to the planned works. Today this is still done by a paper poster which tells you in hard to understand legalese to visit city hall if you wish to view plans and make comments. Most of the time the paper billboard is made unreadable by rain. Goodbye citizen participation. Privacy: This is a very important issue. Every e- government project or policy runs into it and many even get broken by it. It cannot be denied that digitizing information when it is done well enhances the quality of information, but renders it possible for someone with enough access to the data to gain an enormous amount of information on private persons. On the other hand, if privacy regulations are too strict, you end up making it impossible to build new e- gov projects, or in the best case, lose all efficiency bonuses in privacy red tape. This is not only the case with e- government projects but also has an important impact on safety. Last year my portable was stolen

6 from my car parked in one of the best protected underground public parking in Brussel. I went to the police and although there were about six camera s focused on my car, they did not bother to get into the case because it would take them too long to watch all the video tapes. When I asked if there could be a delegation to the two men sitting in front of their huge video wall with an overview on the whole parking, the answer was no because of privacy. Only police personnel can break into the privacy and review video, the men sitting in front of their video wall can only notify the police when they see something happening on their screens but never touch the rewind button. In this situation I wondered who s privacy was protected and the conclusion was, that of the people who stole my portable. For me this is an example of how guidelines are not translated into practical solutions taking into account ICT- applications. The last issue we came across with our digital building permit is: Rural inclusion: building permits are a core business for local communities. But the local governments differ very much in size and capacity. From central cities like Antwerp or Brussels to small rural communities, we need a solution that is applicable to both. Otherwise we end up creating better government services only for those people living in central cities. Well conceived local e- government policies can help rural communities by easing their

7 bureaucratic burdens, by simplifying procedures and making information flows transparent. With examples like the digital building permit in the back of our head, it is clear that there is a great need for a common framework for all levels of governments involved: local, regional and national. The Citadel statement identifies the necessary components of such a framework. Too often the European statements read as a collection of noble intensions and admirable goals, but only very seldom do they include tools to realize them. It pleases my minister and me that the launch of the Citadel Statement generated widespread interest across Europe from sponsor organizations and external observers. Senior officials at the European Commission have called the Statement an excellent piece of work, and have asked to work with those supporting the Citadel Statement in order to re- use the knowledge and experience available via the various organizations of local and regional administrations. The Directorate General for Information Society and Media (DG INFSO) has launched the Local 2020 programme to focus the Digital Agenda 2020 of the European Union more on the needs and possibilities of the local level. And we have seen that several groups have introduced projects for European financing referring explicitly to the principles set forth in the Citadel Statement. One of those

8 projects is named Citadel on the Move This project is led by the Flemish Egovernment organization CORVE, and we are partnering with the cities of Manchester, Issy (near Paris), Athens and Gent as well as with a number of organizations and enterprises across Europe. The project received a very positive evaluation from the EU and is now in negotiation about the grant itself. Citadel on the Move will unite Europe s leading local government organizations with Living Lab experts, ICT specialists and expert SMEs in a common effort to harness the power of Open Data and User- Driven Innovation Systems to develop high speed Mobile Applications that can be shared by citizens across Europe. Nowadays, mobile phones are widely used and hold the key to ensure e- inclusion of every European citizen. At the same time Social Media and the Open Data Movement are rapidly joining together to unleash the tremendous innovation potential of citizens to build the type of mobile services they want and need. Three major gaps must be filled to realize this potential: TECHNOLOGY: there is a need for standard mobile applications that citizens will be able to access easily and use anywhere, INNOVATION: there is a need to create a specific link between the Living Labs methodology (which harnesses the collective power of citizens and SMEs in the co- creation of services), the Open Data movement and the Mobile world

9 OPEN DATA: there is a need for standard templates to aggregate data from various sources and transform it into a publicly useable format or to move beyond open data towards open access. The goal of Citadel on the Move is to demonstrate that it is possible to combine Open Access Data and Mobile Application tools to create smart, innovative citizen- generated services that can be used in differed European Cities. Ultimately, Citadel on the Move seeks to advance nothing less than digital materialization of European integration through the creation of smart mobile Services that, in conjunction with high speed broadband access, can be shared and used anywhere. In so doing, Citadel on the Move aims to help deliver on the key objectives of both Malmö and the Citadel Statement by empowering citizens to use open data to create smart mobile applications that can be potentially shared across Europe cities large and small. It cannot be stressed enough that to realize the potential of the statement of Malmö, we need the citadel statement as a counterweight. It is not enough for Europe to define lofty goals, it must now give us a framework necessary to enable member states to realize those goals. Especially in the area of e- government, where

10 citizens want cross- border information about mobility, about commerce, about real estate and about rules and regulations. Local communities own a great deal of that information and they are the level of government closest to our citizens. We need to give them the tools and the support they need to develop e- government services necessary to release that data, to give citizens and companies well structured access to this information, to realize efficiency and transparency, to in fact build a better democracy. Ladies and gentlemen, The Flemish strategy is clear: egovernment is not digitizing bureaucracy. Our principles are: don t ask what you already know (or should know). We want to diminishing administrative burdens via proactive rights (e.g. people with a low family income get their financial support from the Flemish government automatically and proactively instead of having to fill out a form every year asking for the support). Therefore we use modern technology to achieve these public goals. The Flemish egovernment Authority, CORVE, under the direction of Minister Bourgeois will drive the overall innovation effort. CORVE, a service within our ICT entity, established its pioneering MAGDA

11 platform for integrating and sharing data in an open innovation environment. CORVE s key areas of focus will include: respect for the sensitivity of some of the data and the privacy of the users of that data, awareness of the need for setting up organizational mechanisms to guarantee the quality and linkability of the data, building experience with different technical approaches to integrating data coming from different data sources. But even in Belgium we are subject to inefficiencies that prevent our administrations from generating a vast range of e- government services. On the federal or national level there is a vast experience of linking and providing information in specific sectors like healthcare and social security. The Flemish government is becoming more active in e- government project and wants to integrate different datasets also from other government levels. And then we are faced with different opinions on how the linking of information, the systems to be used and the processes to be followed. It has come to a point that e- government on our regional level has been slowed down too much and the Flemish government is considering to go its own way. This will result in the services that we want to provide to the local governments and citizens but it will be within yet another regional framework and by definition less efficient compared to a framework

12 where all government levels are included. Now projects are postponed and time, money and opportunities are wasted it seems impossible to think rationally about what an e- government framework should be in the future and some players involved prefer sticking to their own systems and opinions regardless of the effect on others. In this context I am convinced that the effect of the European level on all levels of this domain should not be underestimated if a European framework, principles and guidelines were to be put in place. Ladies and gentlemen, to conclude: E- government now is too much a result of a few individuals within the European and the national context who are really going for it. Those people we should appreciate and thank, e.g. Geert Mareels of CORVE who took the initiative for the Citadel Statement. But we need to build e- government into a real profession and therefore it needs a framework, standards and support from local, regional and national governments but also from the European level. E- government is mostly delivered locally but without and international context we lose a lot of efficiency and potential.

13 The Flemish government is only a small player but we want to provide as much support as we can to make e- government progress and make governments more efficient, transparent and client oriented. Thank you for your attention and I wish you an interesting journey of lecture.