If I didn’t have the photos I wouldn’t have believed it happened… apart from the thumping head and the cigarette and alcohol induced voice which has tuned down several octaves from usual; at last I sound authentically French.

Spent the whole of yesterday in a dungeon like basement discussing e-government at a national, international and indeed pan-galatic level. Can any of us mere mortals rise to this challenge? This was good stuff, zilch management speak and some high level discussion about building online communities, or building any sort of communities at all. I actually learned a lot of very useful things and had not one, but several epiphany moments.

Gert Koerselman kicked off with an outline of using KPO in the Dutch town of Deventer, describing how they have been using an OAS platform first for an intranet, then an extranet and have slowly but surely built up user interaction. Not without setbacks, not without problems, but with steady progress. No one said it was gonna be easy. Sustainability is an issue; Gert pointed out that in Deventer they can read paper documents from the 1400s but can’t read electronic files from the 1980s. They had tried a more open access approach but had scaled this back because of the amount of rubbish and abuse that were posted. There were also issues with people setting up too many communites, and to manage this process a form now has to be completed. A problematic issue is getting people to use online communities. There has to be a need for them. Some of the lessons learned from this experience is that it has been stimulating and useful training, but it has also required a lot of investment. Unexpected benefits are that it has been successfully expanded to become an extranet environment.

Tim Willoughby from www.lgcsb.ie gave a tour de force and neatly explained the entire history of online community development in Ireland in about 20 minutes. We even got a free pen.

The working ethos in Ireland is to get maximise the use of resources. By having a collaborative approach, local authorities find themselves in the powerful position of being the single biggest customers to the suppliers of hardware and software. Good strategy.

I noted with great interest that the four key targets for e-government in Ireland are GIS, finance, intranet and infrastructure. Good ideas, many council intranets in the UK are simply a waste of time and money when they could be central working tools across organisations.

Again, the point was stressed that a community cannot be forced to come into being, and if it does get set up, it can’t be forced to share anything. Building trust is also a key componet.

Jerzy did a good job in explaining the complexities of not just the NHS, but of building online networks between the different parts of the health service. The NHS is apparantly one of the biggest organisations in Europe and employs around 8% of the UK workforce. The technical issues are that the same work gets carried out over and over again. Lots of different systems have been bought in and then the local IT departments have to try and stitch this all together and make it work. One of the current goals in the NHS is to try and consolidate ICT in the NHS to produce savings in procurement.

Christian has been developing online communities for the National Association of Counties (NACo) in the USA. Part of the success of this has been to get the community to own the resource for themselves, rather than imposing a solution. I certainly learned a lot about local politics in America as well as about collaborative projects.

Linda Morris is an academic who has taught in universities around the world. She has been involved in developing a tool called the Playbook. The research she has been involved in shows that one of the key things that workers want is technologies that save them time.

Greg Curtin from the University of Southern California woke everyone up with a rousing call to arms. It had never occurred to me before, but sharing and co-operating on an international scale actually makes perfect sense. What acts against this? Political issues, jurisdiction and policy issues.If only our respective politicians could set the rest an example by just getting along, all the techical stuff could be easier – but how long will the existing status quo remain as it is? As technology continues to restructure society, that will occur as much at an international as national level. Joined up government apparantly does just not happen in the USA. Brings to mind the joke that the TCP/IP pioneers used to make about he application layer, the transport layer, and the most compex of all, the political layer.

I did wonder about the focus on taxonomy construction. Having been a taxonomist at one time but increasingly thinking that the cake has been over egged and far too much time and attention has been focused on this one particular aspect of information management when there are many other metadata elements which demand belated attention. Make mental note to self to send Greg the IEDISS research where for once the end user – the citizens (or comrades) were asked what they understood of the peculiar and esoteric language of modern government.

The day was rounded off with a (powerpoint) preview of the next release of OAS. Unfortunately it won’t be ready for Monday when we’ve got an installation happening on a new server.

Well I learned a whole heap of stuff, not just about e-government in Europe and the states but plenty of ideas which I can take back to work and various things I’m working on.

After an entertaining evening drinking a couple of halves of lager and sampling the night life of Nice it’s time to go home and I’m on the TGV to Paris gazing out of the window on a glorious day on the French Riviera. The sea is sparkling in a diamond crystal way, early risers hanging washing out over apricot coloured stone walls. Me? I’m taking the last refuge of the innocent abroad; Joni Mitchell on the walkman and lashings of Orangina, that perfect French hangover cure.

If only we had wi-fi everywhere I’d post this now, but will have to hope that I pick up some unsecured wireless network between here and Avignon. At last I have theEnglish papers to peruse, just so I can check whether anyone from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister has been punching the electorate…