Improving Access to Government through Better Use of the Web This document is an attempt to describe, but not yet solve, the variety of issues and challenges faced by governments in their efforts to apply 21st century capabilities to eGovernment initiatives. Detail and useful examples of existing, applicable open Web standards are provided. Where government needs in the development of eGovernment services are not currently met by existing standards, those gaps are noted. Current Web technology allows governments to share with the public a variety of information in unlimited quantities on demand. Technology is also available to allow citizens to bring issues of concern to the attention of local, regional and national governments. However, exploiting these capabilities within government systems is a challenge that encompasses environmental, policy, legal, and cultural issues. Establishing effective eGovernment requires openness, transparency, collaboration and skill in taking advantage of the capabilities of the World Wide Web. The rich potential for two-way dialogue between citizens and government creates a need for global leadership. The W3C has an opportunity to provide guidance in support of eGovernment objectives by promoting existing open Web standards and noting the challenges external to the Web and technology. There is also role for the W3C to facilitate the development and vetting of new open Web standards needed by governments in context. W3C eGovernment Interest Group eGov IG Kevin Novak Editor & Author Jose M. Alonso Editor & Author Suzanne Acar Editor John Sheridan Author Owen Ambur Author Miguel A. Amutio Author Oscar Azañón Author Daniel Bennett Author Rachel Flagg Author Dave McAllister Author Sharron Rush Author Better ways for governments to connect with their constituents via the Web To fill a distinct gap in the Web and technology standards space focusing on the unique and diverse needs and issues that governments throughout the developed and developing World face in enabling electronic service and information delivery and providing opportunities for discovery, interaction and participation. Web Standards [Foster] Usage of Web Standards 1 Best Practice Guidelines Gather information about the areas where best practice guidelines are needed. 1.1 Best practices will be drawn from the successes (and failures) of efforts at opening, sharing, and re-using knowledge about the use of standards and specifications by government applications that could be collected into a set of best practices with the intent of identifying productive technical paths toward better public services. Compliance Provide input to help governments comply with standards. 1.2 For example, standards bodies could provide training and outreach materials on best practices and tools, and improve the packaging and promotion of existing material. The work of W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) [WAI] is an example of a successful education and outreach program that helps governments achieve compliance goals. How Can Interoperability Be Achieved? Interoperability is by its own nature a joint effort. Sharing information requires sharing a set of common principles among all participants. The best way to achieve interoperability is through standardization. Transparency and Participation [Foster] Transparency and Participation 2 Transparency and Openness Identify ways to improve government transparency and openness. 2.1 Identify any gaps to be filled in creating a complete suite of standards to enable open government information and ease the goal of linkable Public Sector Information. Citizen Participation Identify ways to increase citizenship participation. 2.2 Recognize new channels, ways to get the information to the citizens where the citizens are looking for it, and make better use of tools as means to increase citizenry awareness and participation while supporting champions, i.e. acknowledge and help active citizens and public servants. There are three areas of public policy outcome where online engagement can play an important role: Enabling Citizen Choice and Improving Public Services, Providing Advice and Support to Citizens to Achieve Public Policy Outcomes, and Changing Behaviors and Establishing New Social Norms Usage of eGov Services Identify ways to increase citizens and businesses use of eGovernment services. 2.3 Get information on benefits of Web use for government services, identify main factors that are important for people and businesses to use eGovernment services such as time and money savings, simplicity, and identify ways to improve them. Access of Public Servants to Web Sites that Citizens Are Using Give public servants access to the Web sites that citizens are using in order for them to be able to engage. 2.4 The “lock-down” culture that exists in many government IT departments often restricts access to the more interactive Web sites for security reasons. This badly hampers the effective engagement with online communities by public servants. Many governments are blocking employee access to Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, and others where conversations occur, interaction is embraced, individuals align around similar goals, issues, and interests, and participatory and engaged communities are formed. Security issues, employee rights and misdeeds, and lack of familiarity with the tools are impacts that governments must content with, however, in taking time to do so limits the amount of participation, feedback, and interaction from constituents. Clear and Simple Rules for Public Servants Set clear and simple rules for public servants to follow so they can be confident about engaging online without risking their career. 2.5 Training, Support and Cultural Change Provide training and support for public servants in the use of appropriate tools and techniques to use the Web to engage, particularly for the development of public policy. 2.6 Engaging with online communities over the development of public policy will involve significant culture change in government. To achieve it will require clear leadership at senior levels. As the use of the Web for engagement is so new in government there are few people with both the practical knowledge and the seniority and experience to provide this leadership. Debates and Discussions Support open debates and discussions. 2.7 Many times citizens will self organize policy debates and discussions outside of government Web site. Governments should take a effort to recognize and point out forums that they are aware of on issues of concern. Governments should be mindful of these independent venues, both by openly showing interest in some of these external efforts. Correspondence Provide the institutional resources to handle incoming correspondence. 2.8 One of the aspects of electronic communication is the often sharp increase in electronic petitions and other electronic forms of correspondence. Governments should recognize the importance in fielding the resources to consider the messages. Also governments should use technology standards to help ease the burden of communicating on the part of citizens and on government civil servants. When possible, citizens should have access to a way to bundle their communications so that they can decrease the noise perceived with a deluge of the incoming messages. Policy Documents Allow comments on policy documents 2.9 Policy documents need to be presented in formats which allows for comment and discussion in a granular way. Fragments within such documents need to be directly addressable. In consultation documents for example, the relationship between the questions for discussion and the proposals to which those questions refer need to be made explicit. The RDFa [RDFA-PRIMER] based ArgotConsultation Consultation [UK-ARGOTC] which was developed for the UK government is an example of the type of technology required for publishing consultation documents in ways that enable engagement. Governments can also enable commenting on official documents by providing reliable electronic citations, for example as a URL that points to an official or authentic version of the document and make specific fragments of the document addressable. Metadata and Communication Standards Promote use of lightweight standards for metadata and communication 2.10 Government can publish standards that it may already being used for internal systems of data storage and communication. Government can also create easy, cheap and quick methods of communication that make it possible for more people to be heard by their government. And the standards should include ways to classify or tag information correctly and in ways to allow tabulation and closer consideration of issues. Those same standards can also be used by everyone for their own system of publishing. Identification and Authentication Enable use of identification and authentication technology 2.11 What Public Policy Outcomes are Related to Electronic Identification and Authentication Technologies? Efficiency: By moving from paper to electronic transactions, both time and resources can be saved. Availability: By allowing government services that depend on identification and authentication, citizens will be able to search online for those services. Security of transactions: Technology offers many new methods of making transactions more secure, although there are many counter issues. Legal and Financial Liability: Depending on how laws related to identification and authentication are written and acted upon, there will be some shifts in the nature of liability. Also, some implementations of identity management will bring in mixed liability due to third party involvement of software, vouching organizations and network actors. How Can the Use of Identification and Authentication Technology be Achieved? Legal Dependencies: Governments may need to pass legislation that allows or provides the legal permission for authentication. In the United States, the Government Paperwork Elimination Act was enacted to provide the positive law to allow transactions that previously only been allowed with paper and pen, especially when identification and authentication were necessary for the transaction. Other government entities have created laws to allow for electronic authentication. Technological Methods for Identification and Authentication: Depending on the laws in a jurisdiction, either government or private entities must create the technology that would adhere to the law. In some cases, restrictive laws might necessitate using third parties to provide assurance of identity and authenticity. Additionally, legal requirements might shape what technology software or hardware is allowed. Providing Citizens Tools to Identify Themselves: Quite often citizens will have to obtain electronic identities before being able to complete electronic transactions. Government would need to help create an identity regime that would enable such transactions. Seamless Integration of Data Identify how to advance the state-of-the-art in data integration strategies. 3 This area would include addressing the needs of business cases through the use of XML, SOA, and Semantic Web technologies. What Public Policy Outcomes are Related to Open Government Data? Inclusion: providing data in open standard and accessibility supported formats allows anyone to use numerous software tools to adapt it to personal needs. For example, an XML [XML] dataset or RSS [RSS] feed could be transformed and properly available to various devices, including assistive technologies used by people with disabilities. Transparency: open and unobtrusive PSI increases transparency; interested parties can use PSI in the most appropriate way to achieve their purpose, getting a better picture of the government's work and customize it for their particular needs. Accountability: the appropriate open datasets properly mashed up can provide several views on information about the performance of the government to achieve its public policy goals. What Public Policy Outcomes are related to interoperability. Interoperability policies developed by governments generally address the following goals: Improve the cooperation of government services with the aim of delivering better integrated services in a quicker and more flexible way. Improve efficiency and effectiveness driving to the reduction of costs. Making life easier to the citizen by means of offering more choice and reducing the administrative burden. Collaboration with Researchers Identify ways for governments and computer science researchers to continue working together to advance the state-of-the-art in data integration and build useful, deployable proof-of-concept demos that use actual government information and demonstrate real benefit from linked data integration. 3.1 These proof-of-concept tools ought to be targeted to applications that will show real improvement in areas that elected officials, government officers and citizens actually need. (X)HTML Publish (X)HTML 3.2 Even when the data is found on the Web in hard-to-reuse formats, third parties are finding their way through it. One common practice is that of screen scraping, in which tools [TOOLS-SCRAP] are used to separate and extract the data from the HTML code. This data is then transformed into a more automatic reusable format, usually XML or RDF, and then mashed up with other sources. Coding and maintenance is costly, requires great work on the side of the consumer. Usefulness of the existing applications (some examples [GOV-MASH]) is high. This shows the potential that providing easier access to the information in a reusable open format has. Accessibility Ensure Accessibility 3.3 Adherence to Web standards allows an array of various devices, including assistive technologies, to effectively access Web content. eGovernment initiatives must not only be required to conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 [WCAG20], from W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) [WAI], but must validate conformance and maintain the standard over time. Only in that way can government maintained Web content and applications ensure access by all citizens. In addition, government bodies must be given the training and understanding to develop partnership and purchasing requirements that reflect the need for partners and vendors to conform as well. Harmonization with W3C's international standards for Web accessibility has emerged as an important issue, since fragmentation into divergent standards slows the development of supporting authoring and evaluation tools. APIs Provide application programming interfaces 3.4 There are already cases in which the government is providing access to information through APIs. In most of the cases, this means that the consumer has access to the data only in the way the producer thinks it should be accessed, e.g. through certain methods, but the consumer does not have access to the raw data or a holistic view of it. APIs are usually provided in Javascript or similar languages to integrate in Web pages and applications and in some cases provide access to an XML view of some parts or the whole dataset. Some examples are the ones offered by the UK Government for the Show Us a Better Way [UK-SHOWUS] competition, from health statistics and geospatial information to postal codes, but also those from the third sector, such as the ones provided by the Sunlight Foundation [US-SUNAPI], that offer from congress records and events to census data. RSS/Atom information Distribute government information as news feeds using RSS or Atom. 3.5 Many pieces of information provided by governments are suitable for distribution as news feeds using RSS [RSS] or Atom [ATOM-SYND] that are supported by a great number of tools including built-in support in most modern Web browsers. In this scenario, people subscribe to a set of channels and get the information about e.g. government news, job openings, grants or acquisitions. One of the core benefits for this approach is update notifications - when a piece of information is added or modified, subscribers can easily get to know this. Information consumers only need a news feeds reader, which they use to subscribe and read the information. The number of feeds provided by governments is constantly increasing and thousands are already available [GOV-FEEDS]. REST Provide REST interfaces 3.6 REST [REST] provides an architecture to create Web applications, using standards like HTTP and XML. Basically, a "resource" is associated to a URI that can be used to access or modify its information following certain design principles [REST-PRI]. Under this paradigm, a Web site can publish a set of URLs that provide a real programmer's API that 3rd parties can use to build applications that extend the site's capabilities - perhaps by mixing several different sites. This model is highly suitable for the development of mashup applications and can also provide data in open raw formats as the following example shows. The Seniors Canada Online Web site currently provides such interfaces to perform searches on their databases - for instance, on leisure and sports information [CA-REST1] and also more sophisticated database-query-like services, such as all keywords starting with letter 'L' in french language [CA-REST2]. Other agencies could use this API to publish the information - perhaps mixing several sites and putting the data on a map on the Web. The World Bank API [TWB-API], allows to tap into indicators from data sources like World Development and Governance Indicators. Semantic Web Technologies Support Semantic Web technologies. 3.7 Semantic Web technologies can provide a huge development in the way the Internet is thought and used. Take for instance, the process of booking a flight with current technologies: access a search engine to locate a couple of online travel agencies access some of them using a Web browser, and using their HTML Web interfaces, gain access to the information, compare the results, and book the flight. If all the information could be stored in a single relational database, the task could be automated with a series of SQL queries. However, given the distributed nature of the Internet, this kind of automatization is not directly possible with current technologies. Semantic Web technologies could provide a means of implementing such a solution in the Internet space. The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries [SW-ACT] and there are several technologies [SW-FAQ] that allow to describe, model and query these data. Multi-Channel Strategy Develop a multi-channel strategy 3.8 What Public Policy Outcomes are Related to Multi-Channel Delivery? Facilitating e-Inclusion, avoiding digital divide and reaching the disadvantaged citizens. Making available eGovernment services and information to large part of the population. Expanding citizen's choice, extending and providing citizen centric and personalized services. A closer government to the citizens, providing transparency and openness and expanding citizen participation in public policy decision making. Re-use of governments' information. Combined service delivery across different administrations. Re-using data and applications independently from the channel, reducing the costs of providing services, included in policies oriented to efficiency, effectiveness and transparency. Relationships and Collaborations Work with, form relationships, and collaborate with governments and other organizations, e.g., the World Bank, EC, OECD, OAS, ICA, CEN and OASIS. 4 Activities throughout the World on the issues, challenges, and work required to aid governments in achieving the eGovernment vision is consistently recognized by the eGov IG and its partners. http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/NOTE-egov-improving-20090512/ Owen Ambur Owen.Ambur@verizon.net