A little more than four years ago David Osimo convened a workshop in Brussels with the title Public Services 2.0. It was quite new for the context, both in method (the European Commission was asked only to provide e room and wi-fi connection, while speakers and participants donated their time and even paid their own travel expenses) and in content (a peer dialogue among person that were already delivering – as opposed to proposing public policies through the Internet. Many Commission officers showed up, probably moved by curiosity: who were these people who dared to mix two ingredients coming from two totally different spheres? Why did they seem not to ask anything of the Commission itself, and seemed more motivated by talking to each other?

That workshop turned out to be foundational. With some of the people and the projects (like MySociety or Social Innovation Camp) that I met there for the first time I started a dialogue that continues to this day, and from which I learned much. At the time I was the director of Kublai, a much-praised but little imitated (or at least little wellimitated) project: in Brussels I found out that my team and I were part of a global movement, still tiny but determined to change forever the way to think about public policy.

Our small “homemade” movement has grown a lot, though it remained a minority. And today it prepares yet another step: Policy Making 2.0, a conference that wraps up two years of preparation of a road map (commentable here for research on public policies in the Internet age: what are the trends? What the promising leads, the main roadblocks? What is missing? No way I am going to miss it. This is an interesting and urgent discussion if the open government community is to work side by side with the scientific community.

For good measure, David has added a prize for policy making 2.0, and even asked me to be one of the judges. Any project out there that wants to claim it? I would be delighted to support some intelligent, brave civil servant.
A questo giro, David si è inventato anche This entry was posted in Open government and tagged CrossoverEU, David Osimo, MySociety, Policy Making 2.0, research, Social Innovation Camp on 2013-05-13 by Alberto.