Towards e-Participation in the Netherlands

Vienna.
The next speaker at EDEM 2009 is Matt Poelmans from the Dutch Burgerlink initiative. He begins by suggesting the e-participation is a prerequisite for a mature form of e-government, and that do date, the citizen is the missing link in this picture. Well beyond e-anything, there is a need to relink citizens and government - and this is a challenge which is at least two millennia old.

In the Netherlands, there is a Burgerlink (i.e. Citizenlink) project aimed at improving public performance by involving citizens in innovative ways; it runs from 2008 to 2010 and aims to design and develop basic infrastructure for cooperation between all levels of government. The project aims to deliver generic components and standards compliant with the Dutch Interoperability Framework. This involves promoting service quality (through an e-citizen charter and a service quality code), measuring customer satisfaction (based on a study of life events and delivery chains), and stimulating citizen involvement (through the development of e-participation instruments).

The e-citizen charter specifies ten quality requirements for service delivery, covering infromation, transaction, and participation elements. It is not mandatory, but was adopted as a standard, and provides a basis for the measurement of citizen satisfaction. The charter won an European e-Democracy Award in 2007, and has been recommended by the UN, OESO, the Council of Europe, and the UK government. Its ten principles are: a choice of channel, a transparent public sector, an overview of rights and obligations, personalised information, convenient services, comprehensive procedures, trust and reliability, considerate administration, accountability and benchmarking, and involvement and empowerment. (The latter of these again require a shift in conceptualising citizens, from clients or customers to citoyens.) These service quality codes make concrete promises about service quality, and establish transparent and meaningful requirements for government services.

Second, citizen satisfaction is evaluated by service customers (both citizens and businesses), evaluating how life events - from birth to death - are handled by public services. The e-citizen charter is used as a criterion for evaluation, and the process uncovers delivery chain deficiencies and provides solutions - with lowest ratings received usually where the most number of government agencies are involved, pointing to a substantial need to improve cooperation between goverment services (there was no correlation between satisfaction ratings and the inherently positive - birth, weddings - or negative - death, divorces - nature of the event itself, incidentally). This was implemented variously as a national survey or through local and sectoral evaluation, and most services scored between 6 and 7 out of a maximum 10.

Further, there were surveys about what priorities citizens saw as most or least important (personal information, considerate administration vs. overview of rights and duties, accountability and benchmarking) and where they were most satisfied (trust and reliability, transparency vs. accountability and benchmarking, involvement and empowerment). This also allows for the creation of a priority initiatives matrix, aimed most immediately at keeping high ratings for important areas high and improving ratings for poolrly performing important areas.

Finally, the third step in this process are improvement initiatives, of course: here, what becomes important is the exchange of knowledge and the development of new tools. One example for such tools is a Website tracking flights to Amsterdam's Schiphol airports which plots the noise generated by aeroplanes (tracked through systems placed on people's rooftops) onto Google Maps, and was thus able to influence the further planning of approach flight paths to Amsterdam. This also enabled the participation of citizens in municipalities outside of the Amsterdam area itself, who are usually excluded from the planning process. The same system is now also available for residents in other cities, of course, and could also be used for other noise measurement cases (nightclub districts, motor race courses) - and overall, the site offers a transparent, real-time tracking system for noise.

Overall, the steps of this process which Matt and Burgerlink advocate, then, are to adopt an e-citizen charter, publish a quality code, measure citizen satisfaction, involve citizens, and account annually for improvements. If implemented effectively, this provides a workable framework for achieving better e-participation.

Technorati : EDEM 2009, e-government, government, participation, public services, quality, service improvement
Del.icio.us : EDEM 2009, e-government, government, participation, public services, quality, service improvement