‘You Have to Raise a Fist!’: Seeing and Speaking to the State in South Africa

Since joining the Open Governance Partnership in 2011, South Africa has been committed to addressing the ‘grand challenge’ of open governance through improving public services, creating safer communities and increasing accountability. This article contrasts this supranational commitment to open governance with accounts of citizens’ everyday engagement with the state at a micro-level. Based on a year of multi-sited ethnography, the article highlights the value of bringing people – in this case, HIV-positive citizens living in Khayelitsha, Cape Town – into focus through a series of visual participatory processes in which they share their experience of public service provision and engagement with the state. The article reflects, first, on how citizens ‘see’ the state in relation to service delivery and, second, on how they ‘speak’ to the state as members of civil society. It offers an understanding of how citizens themselves perceive ‘open governance’ in their everyday lives

The cathedral and the bazaar of e-repository development: encouraging community engagement with moving pictures and sound

This paper offers an insight into the development, use and governance of e‐repositories for learning and teaching, illustrated by Eric Raymond's bazaar and cathedral analogies and by a comparison of collection strategies that focus on content coverage or on the needs of users. It addresses in particular the processes that encourage and achieve community engagement. This insight is illustrated by one particular e‐repository, the Education Media On‐Line (EMOL) service. This paper draws analogies between the bazaar approach for open source software development and its possibilities for developing e‐repositories for learning and teaching. It suggests in particular that the development, use and evaluation of online moving pictures and sound objects for learning and teaching can benefit greatly from the community engagement lessons provided by the development, use and evaluation of open source software. Such lessons can be underpinned by experience in the area of learning resource collections, where repositories have been classified as ‘collections‐based’ or ‘user‐based’. Lessons from the open source movement may inform the development of e‐repositories such as EMOL in the future

Cloudy in guifi.net: Establishing and sustaining a community cloud as open commons

Commons are natural or human-made resources that are managed cooperatively. The guifi.net community network is a successful example of a digital infrastructure, a computer network, managed as an open commons. Inspired by the guifi.net case and its commons governance model, we claim that a computing cloud, another digital infrastructure, can also be managed as an open commons if the appropriate tools are put in place. In this paper, we explore the feasibility and sustainability of community clouds as open commons: open user-driven clouds formed by community-managed computing resources. We propose organising the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) cloud service layers as common-pool resources (CPR) for enabling a sustainable cloud service provision. On this basis, we have outlined a governance framework for community clouds, and we have developed Cloudy, a cloud software stack that comprises a set of tools and components to build and operate community cloud services. Cloudy is tailored to the needs of the guifi.net community network, but it can be adopted by other communities. We have validated the feasibility of community clouds in a deployment in guifi.net of some 60 devices running Cloudy for over two years. To gain insight into the capacity of end-user services to generate enough value and utility to sustain the whole cloud ecosystem, we have developed a file storage application and tested it with a group of 10 guifi.net users. The experimental results and the experience from the action research confirm the feasibility and potential sustainability of the community cloud as an open commons.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A complex systems approach to e-governance adoption and implementation in Bayelsa State, Nigeria

Globally, public sector innovation has become a big issue as citizens demand for greater accountability, effectiveness and efficiency in service delivery, and the liberalisation of the governance system. Debate on e-government evolved in the last decade in parallel with a broader discussion on e-governance, where the concept and practice of e-governance further encompasses the e-government phenomenon. Because of the complexities of governance and e-governance, this chapter presents e-governance as a close, large integrated, open and sociotechnical (CLIOS) framework to meet present and emerging challenges of the e-world, as well as enhance good governance for sustainability.  Novel descriptions of e-governance, governance, CLIOS, complex adaptive systems, sociotechnical systems were provided from literature. From a socio-technical perspective, the design consideration for the adoption and implementation of e-governance architecture for a State in an emerging economy like Nigeria was provided. The contextual aspects that needed to be considered for the adoption of e-governance were discussed and citizens interface with governance through e-governance platforms were highlighted. Examples of countries implementing e-governance, benefits and challenges regarding the Bayelsa case were discussed

Sensing as a Service Model for Smart Cities Supported by Internet of Things

The world population is growing at a rapid pace. Towns and cities are accommodating half of the world's population thereby creating tremendous pressure on every aspect of urban living. Cities are known to have large concentration of resources and facilities. Such environments attract people from rural areas. However, unprecedented attraction has now become an overwhelming issue for city governance and politics. The enormous pressure towards efficient city management has triggered various Smart City initiatives by both government and private sector businesses to invest in ICT to find sustainable solutions to the growing issues. The Internet of Things (IoT) has also gained significant attention over the past decade. IoT envisions to connect billions of sensors to the Internet and expects to use them for efficient and effective resource management in Smart Cities. Today infrastructure, platforms, and software applications are offered as services using cloud technologies. In this paper, we explore the concept of sensing as a service and how it fits with the Internet of Things. Our objective is to investigate the concept of sensing as a service model in technological, economical, and social perspectives and identify the major open challenges and issues.Comment: Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies 2014 (Accepted for Publication

KUALITAS LAYANAN PORTAL OPEN DATA BANDA ACEH (ODBA) DALAM KETERBUKAAN INFORMASI PUBLIK DI DINAS KOMUNIKASI INFORMATIKA DAN STATISTIK KOTA BANDA ACEH

One of the goals of the reform program in Indonesia is the realization of good governance. The Indonesian Open Government Movement (OGI) is a form of movement between the government and the community to realize good governance, namely through principles based on public information. One of the OGI programs to achieve this is through the open data project portal, one of which is the Banda Aceh Open Data Portal (ODBA). This study aims to find out how the quality of ODBA Portal services in public information at the Department of Communication, Informatics and Statistics (Diskominfontik) of Banda Aceh City and the strategy of Banda Aceh Diskominfotik to improve the quality of ODBA Portal services. The research method used is descriptive qualitative. Informants in this study were determined by purposive sampling technique. Data were collected by interview, observation, documentation, and triangulation techniques. Data analysis techniques used are data reduction, data presentation, and drawing conclusions. The theory used is based on three dimensions of the quality of a portal site proposed by Rocha (2012: 374-382), namely content quality, service quality, and technical quality. The results showed that the service quality of the ODBA Portal was quite good. However, there are several things that need to be improved on the ODBA Portal, such as the availability of features for proposing datasets, features for feedback, special personnel to handle open data portal maintenance, and others. To make the ODBA Portal have a better quality, the Department of Communication, Informatics and Statistics of Banda Aceh City needs to provide expert programmers, especially in the field of maintenance and add the main features that must exist in an open data portal. The City of Banda Aceh Diskominfotik has also implemented several strategies to improve the quality of the ODBA Portal service. Keywords: ODBA Portal, Open Data, Open Data Portal, Public Information Disclosure, Quality of Website Porta

Transparent and open governance : web content analysis of metropolitan infrastructure development and investments information at local level – a comparative study of four metropolitan cities of South Africa and India

The efficient municipal service delivery, expectations and perceptions of citizens are one of the important issues which are central to any municipality across various parts of the world. Among these issues, the transparency and accountability, management of funds for local development attracts special interest among citizens, organization, NGOs, and other stakeholders involved in the development process. The vicious cycle of financial constraints and poor service delivery often results into diversion of funds from earmarked development areas to the areas demanding priority attention. These issues still remain unaddressed and hidden in the absence of appropriate transparent and open government accessibility at internal as well as external levels within the municipal context. The paper highlights key findings from selected metropolitan cities of South Africa and India by doing exploratory comparative analysis about to what extent are the municipal websites addressing the issues of transparent and open governance. The assessment of municipal websites is focused on the issues of access to information on development funds and projects at local level to citizens and other stakeholders. The web content analysis on selected cities provide a background for discussion on the areas of concern to address the key gaps and initiatives for enabling transparent and open governance through municipal websites

Nongovernmental Organizations and the Global Governance Institutional Gap

Global governance refers to global cooperation through existing and developing structures, groups, and initiatives, yet little academic research focuses on the role of international nongovernmental organizations in promoting global governance. Using Benet’s polarities of democracy as theoretical foundation, the purpose of this qualitative, critical case study was to explore why and how INGOs address the gap in global governance institutions in terms of humanitarian support. Data collection involved open-ended interviews with 12 members of an international, nonprofit service organization providing humanitarian support to a global community. Interview data were inductively coded and subjected to a thematic analysis procedure. Findings revealed four key themes outlined in this article and may be used to promote increased provision of global humanitarian support

From Public Value to Social Value of Digital Government: Co-Creation and Social Innovation in European Union Initiatives

This paper discusses the development of key features in European Union policy and service redesign, based on social innovative practices where co-creation and the related phenomenon of digital social innovation have a high potential impact. The idea underneath this claim is that information and communication technologies are becoming increasingly pervasive in the design, development and delivery of social innovation and co-creation initiatives which should not be limited to service delivery, rather serve as the driver for opening-up governance systems and change the way public organizations are structured and policy designed and implemented. Consequently, the paper discusses the key elements identified for setting up open and collaborative governance systems, while, taking stock from the analysis of policy experiences and practices funded by the European Commission, an overview of main drivers and barriers are presented. The paper concludes outlining recommendations for future research, as well as implications and possible directions for policy