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Open Standards & Open Source in e-Government

Open Standards & Open Source in e-Government. Who are we?. One of 33 boroughs that make up Greater London We have 52 elected representatives, a resident population of 200K which rises to 800K during the day. We have the 2nd biggest knowledge economy in the UK

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Open Standards & Open Source in e-Government

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  1. Open Standards & Open Source in e-Government

  2. Who are we? • One of 33 boroughs that make up Greater London • We have 52 elected representatives, a resident population of 200K which rises to 800K during the day. • We have the 2nd biggest knowledge economy in the UK • We have an annual budget of £1.3bn euros and deliver more than 500 services to citizens

  3. E-government in brief • We have a top 5 website (socitm better connected) • 9K pages of content • We can take payment for more than 90 different services • More than 10m euros collected in online payments last year • We have over 100K unique visitors each month • We have a web team of five people.

  4. How did we get there? • In 2001 the Office of the deputy prime minister (ODPM) instructed local authorities that they were to have all of their services online by 2005 • In 2001 we had an award winning website with just under 2000 pages of content • We had a web team of 5 people

  5. What happened next? • The ODPM issued a call for projects to enable local government to achieve its objectives • Camden entered a project in colloboration with four other London Boroughs • The project sought to create • standards for content management system for local government • An open source content management • system that could deliver the standards

  6. Why standards are important • The citizen should not have to learn a new way of navigating a website each time they go to a different municipality. • Interoperability becomes very complex without common standards. • If you don’t have a common way of identifying a service how can you know if you are delivering all of them online

  7. How were the standards created? • A core team work on developing the first draft of standards which were then tested in a series of workshops with up to 40 participants in each workshop. • The draft standards were then imported into a test system in which members of the public were invited to assign services to categories • Testing took place in Libraries in different parts of London • The results of the test were used to further refine the categories.

  8. Why the Open Source CMS is important? • In 2001 CMS were very expensive, costing in the region of 500K euros • No local authority had a cms • Proprietary vendors were unwilling to adapt their systems to incorporate e-government metadata standards

  9. What is the APLAWS cms? • It is a j2E based cms built on redhat technology • It can hold content in any language with an ISO font • It can display information across any device, mobile phones, digitv etc • It is semantic web compliant and completely interoperable • It is free

  10. What happened next to the standards? • The Aplaws category list was handed over to the Improvement and development agency (IdEA) and was refined to become the local government category list (lgcl). • Almost all municipalities in England use the lgcl as a basic navigation structure for their websites • Other CMS vendors have implemented it as an open standard, as a result of the open source competition

  11. What happened next to the standards? • The LGCL was taken on by another ODPM funded project called the local e-government standards body (legsb) • It then became the Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary • Legsb was disbanded at the end of March 2006

  12. What happened next to the CMS • The first versions of APLAWS was taken on by about 6 municipalities • A second version of APLAWS called APLAWS+ was released in 2004 • There have been 3 code releases since 2004 with a 4th due in July this year • There are more than 30 different public sector organisations using APLAWS, including 19 municipalities in the UK and the United Nations Development Programme

  13. What have we learnt? • That standards can develop a life of their own. • Don’t release a standard and then change it any more frequently than once every 2 years. It takes that long ot get everyone on the first version • That agreeing standards early allows for more interoperability between systems later • Creating a front facing standard allowed vendors of back office systems to provide local government standards for their own software. Such as CRM or EDRM

  14. What have we learnt? • That CMS systems require a different skill set to configure and maintain • Not all muncipalities have such expertise in house which makes an open source system difficult to implement. • APLAWS+ can create mulitiple sites • If we did the project again we would invite the smaller municipalities to utilise this feature to save costs and to share content production. East Riding county council have used it to provide sites for more than 70 schools.

  15. What will we share? Everything • Project documentation is available at • Join the user group - potential users or interested parties always welcome • Join the discussion groups on • Let you techies loose at • Contact us • Come and see us in Camden!

  16. Thank you for your attention Aingaran Pillai ainga.pillai@camden.gov.uk

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