I owe the readers of PdF Europe an update on the Open Declaration on European Public Services. This is a case of "public innovation without permission", where a groups of Gov2.0 enthusiasts tries to disrupt the EU policy-making process from the outside, by creating a bottom-up declaration which will be presented alongside the official Ministerial Declaration on e-government in Malmo this week (www.egov2009.se).

Since my last post, we published the Declaration in draft for public review, which generated 58 good comments. We then published the final version of the Open Declaration, which focussess on the need for TRANSPARENCY, PARTICIPATION and EMPOWERMENT. We ask people to endorse it on http://www.endorsetheopendeclaration.eu .

Sofar we collected 1200 endorsements, which is great. We are receiving comtinuous support and enthusiasm from the people involved, also through a Facebook group that counts 1400 members. We were published on countless blogs and several newspapers. Yet we are struggling to get to the stated 2000 signatures. We manage to get the endorsement of gov2.0 enthusiasts (the Lisa Simpson) but struggled to involve the wider public (Bart Simpson).
This is why we asked all facebook members to reach out and explain why gov2.0 is important for people daily life. The best effort so far is by FrankWatching in my opinion: http://www.frankwatching.com/archive/2009/11/10/open-de-overheid-van-eur... .

This exercise of reaching out is a very important exercise in itself: all too often we govt2.0 enthusiasts preach only to the converted.

We also had, predicably, plenty of unpredicted positive developments such as
- the creation of a video on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcW3_qryVJc
- the endorsement by MPs, cities and foundations
- the translation of the declaration in 10 languages
and many more I can't recall now.

Friday 20th is the big day, where we will present officially the Open Declaration at the EU ministerial conference. Our perception is that there is a positive attitude by both the European Commission and the Swedish presidency of the EU. For example, the recent Visby conference conclusions had a strong emphasis on re-use of public data http://www.se2009.eu/en/meetings_news/2009/11/9/visby_agenda_creating_im... .

And then, straight from Malmo I will fly to Barcelona, where I will tell you all about the outcome of the discussion and future perspectives at our session at PDF Europe http://personaldemocracy.com/schedule-pdf-europe-day-2

Please endorse the declaration and spread the word: www.endorsetheopendeclaration.eu