About the open declaration
 
Every two years, EU Ministers gather to agree on a Ministerial Declaration on e-government, which is the main European strategic document. This is usually accompanied by an Industry declaration.

Building on the Public Services 2.0 Workshop in Brussels, we feel the urge to add an open declaration, collaboratively built and endorsed by EU citizens who share the view that the web is transforming our society and our governments.

We feel e-government policies in Europe could learn from the open, meritocratic, transparent and user-driven culture of the web. We also feel that current web citizens should engage more positively with government to help designing a strategy which is genuinely difficult to adapt in the traditional culture of public administration.

In view of this background, this initiative aims at:

a) making the voice of the European citizen heard in the context of the EU ICT policy

b) ensuring the next European ICT strategy and in particular the parts that relate to public services grasp the opportunities offered by recent web 2.0 developments.

We trust that if we manage to deliver quality of insight and quantity of endorsement, we will present this declaration officially at the EU ministerial conference on e-government, in Malmo on November 2009.

In practice, we want to leverage collective intelligence through an open process that aims to answer this question: How should governments use the web to improve public services and deliver greater public value for citizens?