MyGov Personal Government

Submitted by: Andreas Rindler

Website: http://mike2.openmethodology.org/wiki/OmCollab

Describe your idea. How does it work and who does it help?

This would be an interactive website with social networking where users are allowed to build/create what they want to display on 'their' Government portal choosing from a list of available mashup widgets and topics from different government departments. Think about all of the cool ideas that have been submitted to the "Show Us a Better Way" competition. We need a platform that could host these ideas, where users can pick and chose which of the services they want to see on their own personalised page, share/recommend services to their friends, family or business partners etc. So I propose to create a platform that enables users and developers to configure, develop or share whatever service they want.

Here are the key features of the site:

• Government IT has a platform to publish and document their data services
• Government departments can create and publish their own widgets to interact with the public
• Developers can find data source, develop their own widgets and publish them for users to select
• Users can find services and widgets published by the government and by developers, create a personal site which displays exactly what they want to know, share services, data or widgets with others, discuss services with other users or give feedback to the government department which published the service/data/widget in the first place
• Government departments can publicise new information, consult with the public on new policies (e.g. the Cabinet Office which has a requirement for a public consultation period) and solicit responses

This way, the Government does not need to make any assumption on what the public would like to see. It would purely be down to what the public likes and their preferences of accessing the Government information.

We have built an extensible collaboration platform called omCollab that is open source and freely available to the public. It provides wiki, blogs, mashup, search, social networking and other functionality. It also provides a framework to built new extensions (the widgets that I have described above) and make them available to users. The personalisation of what widgets a user would like to have isn't fully completed yet, but we would use the prize money to build this functionality.

What information or services do you need?

The community would build and share whatever services they think are the most valuable. I can see many people turning the great ideas of this competition into widgets and publishing and sharing it on MyGov.