Government Bits

Tracking how technology is transforming interaction between governments and citizens.

As we’ve posted about several times in the recent past (including here and here), the Adobe Gov UK team has been holding a series of webinars focused on the public sector.

The importance of open standards to the future of public sector ICT was the latest topic, for an event that took place on August 31. The event covered whether open standards finally allow the public sector to join up service delivery, what standards are key, and how will they be decided.

The panel included:

• Bill McCluggage, Deputy Government CIO and Director of ICT Strategy & Policy at the Cabinet Office
• Mark Brett, Policy & Programme Manager at Socitm
• Marc Straat, Adobe’s European Head of Standards
• Helen Olsen, Managing Editor, UKauthorITy and IT in Use magazine

An on-demand version of the webinar is now available here; we encourage you to check it out. And to participate in future webinars in the series see the ITU Live registration site here.

As always, keep in touch with the AdobeGov team on Twitter @AdobeGov.

How can we address digital exclusion and encourage the mass channel shift to low cost online service delivery that we all need?

Digital Champion, Martha Lane Fox, is calling for ‘e’ Revolution not Evolution with online becoming “the first point of contact” for public services. And the new Government ICT strategy states that the government “will work to make citizen-focused transactional services ‘digital by default’ where appropriate” – but enable a network of ‘assisted digital’ service providers for those who are unable to access this brave new world.

There is, however, much work to do in understanding the user’s needs and experience of online public services with the goal of making them simple and accessible to all.

On the panel:

• Graham Walker, Government Director for UK Digital Champion (Martha Lane Fox)
• Dr Lorna Peters, Connect Digitally, Department for Education and Hertfordshire
• Gilles Polin, Adobe’s European Head of Government Solutions
• Helen Olsen, Managing Editor, UKauthorITy and ITU magazine

An on demand version of the webcast is available from this link.

If you are responsible in any way for sharing information, whether within government or to the public, appropriately classifying information is always a challenge. There’s a full spectrum of possibilities between full, open disclosure and compartmentalized “need to know”. Especially post 9/11, most US agencies have worked hard to establish guidelines and best practices to allow access to the right information to the right people at the right time. To that end, many agencies have created what in the private sector would be called, proprietary classification schemes. Like any proprietary approach, it works very well within a certain scope, but, it breaks down quickly when confronted with a similar, but, alternative approach. The consequences of such a breakdown can vary from something as simple as an embarrassing situation to a life-threatening scenario.

So, as of November 11th, an Executive Order was signed named “Controlled Unclassified Information” (CUI) that is focused on solving this dilemma across the entire federal government. Assigned by the President, NARA will act as the Executive Agent for this Order, driving a process intended to rationalize the various approaches already in place across the agencies.

Standardization, what a good thing! Not only does this Executive Order pave the wave for a common taxonomy that can be explained, understood, used and defended by everyone, it also sets the stage for the ability to apply automation. As digital information has become the norm, replacing paper as the means to create, store and share, the need for better control mechanisms has never been greater. We see evidence of this in the news all the time. Leaks, whether intentional or not, have become more pervasive. However, without a standard approach to classifying information, leveraging technology to help mitigate the risks has been a challenge.

Imagine if you will, the ability to integrate enforceable, digital policies directly into information in a standard fashion that would be recognized government wide. Such policies would give the government the ability to dynamically control who can see information, how long the information is visible, what people can do with it, etc. Wouldn’t it be useful to have policies automatically assigned to documents to minimize the risks of information traveling to the wrong places?

I am quite encouraged to see policy standards such as CUI come about. What are your thoughts?

To learn about technology from Adobe to help, please take a moment and visit this link.

Perhaps you are aware of the National eID cards that have been issued to the majority of Belgium’s 10 million citizens. With the genesis of the idea going back to 2001, citizen’s have been using their eID cards to help with tax filings, job searches, social services, permits, licenses and other government provided services.

More recently, the Flemish E-Government and ICT-Management Unit launched the digital signature platform of Flanders. Leveraging the existing eID infrastructure, users of the platform now have the ability to easily apply digital signatures to PDF documents. By simply sending an e-mail with a document attached (most common formats are accepted), the platform converts it and returns to the user a ready-to-sign PDF document.

It doesn’t get much easier than that! Yet another great example of eGovernment at work! To find out more, click here.

Earlier today, Adobe announced the next version of our Acrobat family, Acrobat X. We sat down with long-time Adobe veteran Rick Brown, who runs product management for Acrobat, to get his perspective on the new release and how the software is used by government agencies.

• 0:03 – Rick’s responsibilities and background
• 0:45 – Acrobat X: what drove development; some of the new capabilities
• 2:50 – Acrobat in Government, including how agencies use it today

You can follow the Acrobat team on twitter @acrobat, and check out their blog here.

In the final installment of our series, Dave McAllistair, Adobe Director of Open Source and Standards, talks about open government, standards and open source.

Full transcript: OpenSourceStandardsPt3of3.pdf

Dave McAllister, Adobe Director of Open Source and Standards, continues his perspectives on “open” at Adobe. Today, Dave discusses PDF and Flash.

Full transcript: OpenSourceStandardsPt2of3.pdf

Recently, we sat down with Dave McAllister, Adobe Director of Open Source and Standards, to get his perspectives on “open” at Adobe. This is the first segment of a three part interview. In parts two and three, coming later this week, Dave will cover:

-Recent developments at Adobe re: open source and standards
-Discussion of PDF and Flash in terms of open
-Obama’s Open Government Initiative
-What’s next for Adobe in terms of open source and standards

Full transcript: OpenSourceStandardsPt1of3.pdf.

I’ve written about this elusive word “open” in the past. My point was the word can mean many things depending on context and perspective. I think it has become a widely over used, misused word. That said, I was very happy this morning when Adobe took a shot at providing an explanation of what the word “open” means to the company. Even Adobe’s founders, Chuck Geschke and John Warnock, weighed in with their thoughts on the topic. (Check it out here.)

Putting this into my own words, to Adobe, “open” equates to freedom of choice. It is a spirit that permeates the culture of the company as well as the technologies it creates. Adobe’s definition is not limited to “open source” or “open standards”, but actually supersedes and embraces these ideas into a bigger concept. Does Adobe take the steps to make every single one of its technologies available as open source or push every one of its protocols into the open standards arena? Of course not. However, many of its core technologies HAVE been offered as open source (Flex, AVM+), granted to open standards bodies (PDF is now ISO 32000) or, at the very least, openly published as specifications (SWF, FLV/F4V, RTMP, AMF) for others to use to create new and unforeseen solutions.

And of course, always remember Adobe’s continued commitment to support and participate in the development of open standards.

So, does it really HAVE to be “Open vs. Choice” or should it be “Open = Choice”? The beauty of this is, everyone gets to decide for themselves!

Jim King, Adobe’s PDF Platform Architect, discusses how the PDF standard can be used to reach both beneficiaries of the Open Government movement: those who are looking for raw government data to examine and interpret; and the general public who expects information about their government to be relevant to their needs and easy to consume.