ICT-enabled open government

Specific challenge: Public administrations need to address the new challenges posed by the evolution of society. Financial constraints are making this task difficult. At the same time, expectations - in terms of burden reduction and efficiency of public services - are growing.

The take-up of new technologies, such as social media and mobile technologies, leads to increased connectivity.

The availability of open data and open services, in an open government setting support the collaborative forms of service design and delivery and they increase transparency.

Personalised public services can arise from enabling and empowering citizens and businesses to directly participate in the design, creation, selection and delivery of some of the public services. Collaboration with users plays an important role in the transformation of public services. Public services delivered or enabled by ICT need to be easy to use and shall increasingly focus on flexible and personalised interactions with public administrations. Given the availability of data, users may be provided more pro-active, higher quality and valuable services, avoiding new divides. This can make services more attractive and increase collaboration. While creating growth and jobs, M-government can make services effective by adjusting them to the way citizens are communicating and delivering them to a variety of mobile devices in order to accommodate the on-going transition from stationary to mobile.

Transparency is an important element of the open government approach. Open data and information lead to more transparency. Openness and technology tools can also enable monitoring of the public sector and its performance. Transparency helps to increase accountability and trust in administrations.

Scope:

a) Innovation actions

The actions should address at least one of the sub-objectives (i or ii) below, which should be piloted against a set of clearly defined goals:

i) Pilots on personalised and mobile public services which will aim to benefit from one or more of the following:

         Intelligent and innovative use of large volumes of publicly available data for new, smart and mobile public services;

         Using open services and enabling any actors, including NGOs and users, to create or co-produce new public services in all fields;

         Pro-active and personalised citizen-centric public service applications; this can be according to a user profile created and controlled by the user and structured around modular public services;

         Following changes in user behaviour in accessing and using such services, understanding when relevant which citizens are able to/excluded from active and informed use and supporting the organisational and back-office implications, including privacy.

ii) Pilots on transparency which will aim to benefit from one or more of the following:

           Actions will aim to pilot tools to increase the transparency impact of ICT-based technology platforms of the public sector;

           The transparency tools to be piloted will benefit from open data and could help in monitoring, enhancing accountability and fighting corruption (e.g. through data mining and other tools).

           Examining how transparency tools bring benefit to different sections of the population and establishing practices to challenge emerging inequalities.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of between EUR 1 and 3 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

These innovation actions should include an assessment of the effectiveness as well as social and economic impact of using these approaches to deliver the public administrations' goals. The results of these assessments should also provide feedback into a set of recommendations for future use of these approaches to deliver more effective public administration.

b) Coordination and support actions[1]:

The activities should aim at encouraging networking of relevant stakeholders and teams working in these areas and to support constituency building. The dynamic, multidisciplinary network will include social, creative, humanities, ICT and economic expertise across the interface of research, technology and design in addition to other relevant stakeholders. Following an assessment of the needs, the network will carry out a gap analysis and identify potential applications for their successful implementation in the public sector. The activities will include the mobilisation of developers and civil servants (through events, hackatons, etc.) and awareness raising among end users in order to increase take-up of relevant newly developed eGovernment applications.

Expected impact:

           Stimulating the creation, delivery and use of new services on a variety of devices, utilising new web technologies, coupled with open public data.

           More personalised public services that better suit the needs of users.

           Reducing the administrative burden of citizens and businesses (e.g. collecting information from citizens only once).

           Increased transparency of and trust in public administrations.

Type of action:

a) Innovation actions

b) Coordination and support actions

[1] This activity directly aimed at supporting the development and implementation of evidence base for R&I policies and supporting various groups of stakeholders is excluded from the delegation to Research Executive Agency and will be implemented by the Commission services.