This week, the W3C's eGovernment Interest Group published a good document called Improving Access to Government through Better Use of the Web, describing the variety of issues and challenges faced by governments in their efforts to apply 21st century capabilities to their eGovernment initiatives. It provides examples of existing, applicable open Web standards. Where government needs in the development of eGovernment services are not currently met by existing standards, those gaps are noted. Admittedly, the work has the W3C's signature tech heavy prose. However, there are traces of our efforts to reach a non-tech audience through clear examples, explanations, definitions...and fairly few specialist terms.
Some highlights include the value of publishing open government data using truly open standards, the benefit of good interoperability frameworks and management processes than ensure IT makes business sense, and making sense of the emerging paradigms of openness:
The desire for an open and transparent government is more than open interaction and participation, appropriate data as products of the government must be shared, discoverable, accessible, and able to be manipulated by those desiring the data. The data as well must be linked via subject, relevance, semantics, context, and more.The document is part of the W3C's eGovernment Activity.
