Dialing 311 has changed the way citizens around the U.S. and Canada interact with their local governments by making it easy to call in with questions or complaints.

These days, city and county officials are upping the ante by making it possible for residents not just to send queries down the line, but to see what their fellow residents are reporting too.

The result? Community mobilization, faster resolution of problems, and even the occasional good Samaritan solution.

Join the PdF Network on Thursday, April 1 as Ben Berkowitz, Founder/CEO, SeeClickFix shows us how technology is "peeling back the layers of bureaucracy," one pothole at a time.

Thursday, April 1st at the PdF Network
Your Town, Online: The Future of Internet Community Reporting
1-2 p.m. Eastern

Join the call!

Check out our upcoming PdF Network calls...

My trip to Gov 2.0 Camp LA commenced with a comedy of errors: lost luggage, a flooded hotel room and flooded streets due to the rains. After a night of little sleep, I arrived at the BlankSpaces co-working location to the company of like-minded people from diverse professional backgrounds but all joining the search for using technology and innovation to improve government. In camp style, we each used the 3 word model to describe why we were there. I thought the focus really centered around engaging new paradigms since people from government, major corporations, start-ups, film industry and media were all together to learn and share ideas.

While there was no shortage of technical expertise present, most of the concepts discussed spoke to a high level of education and interest in the Gov 2.0 space, with sessions ranging from how to properly define gov 2.0 to specific tactics to use in social media within government. The biggest takeaways from the event: focus on people, build replicable solutions, and engage in expansive, multi-pronged outreach and public awareness campaigns.

The forthcoming edition of the European Journal of ePractice will focus on government 2.0: hype, hope or reality? http://www.epractice.eu/en/node/288847

It is a good time to start taking stock of government 2.0, distinguishing between fulfilled and unfulfilled promises. We can see great momentum now, with countries like UK and US putting gov20 at the heart of their modernisation agenda, and the EU Ministerial Declaration putting transparency and participation as first point.

Hi everyone! Welcome to Spain 2.0, it’s only 1 day to go and the Personal Democracy Forum Europe will begin. With this entry I will talk about the situation of Personal Democracy in Spain, covering the relevant laws, the Spanish Government ministries that touch on the subject, then through the Parliament and finally I will talk about the different Regions.

Almost three months ago, the City and County of San Francisco launched a site called DataSF where they publish data sets from a variety of city departments for public consumption and application development. The initiative, led by Jay Nath in the Department of Technology, was inspired by President Obama's transparency directive on his first day in office. They then looked at what had been done with Apps for Democracy in Washington, D.C.

While we all know where to find the number one Euro (w)e-gov event next week (*cough* Barcelona), there is also another *fairly* important conference going on some way north around the same time.

Next Thursday sees the start of the 5th Ministerial eGovernment Meeting and Conference, which will be taking place at the Malmö Exhibition and Convention Centre, Sweden. As the event page says:

“It will be one of the major events of the Swedish EU Presidency and will include a Ministerial Meeting of ministers responsible for eGovernment, a Ministerial eGovernment Conference, and an exhibition of more than 50 finalists of eGovernment Awards.”

The conference is intended to agree a Ministerial Declaration that will set out the roadmap for eGovernment across Europe up until 2015. The Ministerial Declaration will be presented jointly by the Swedish Presidency and the European Commission on the first day of the Conference.

Straight forward enough, right? Well not exactly. The event has provoked plenty of agitating, with some prominent We.Gov figures intending to shake things up a little and disrupt proceedings from inside and out.

Tom Watson MP will be speaking at next month’s Personal Democracy Forum Europe in Barcelona. In this short interview we give you a quick run down on Britain’s first blogging minister, the man credited with bringing digital engagement to government in the UK.

A survey released today by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) shows that citizens' views of government websites are moving up to being on par with their opinions of private sector sites for the first time. Measuring 291,000 citizen responses to 104 federal agency websites, the E-Government Satisfaction Index reached 75.2 on a 100 point scale, vs. "e-retail" at 82 and "online news and information" at 74. (It should be noted that offline government came in at 68.9 on the scale.)

Wednesday Aneesh Chopra returned to San Francisco to meet with tech leaders and innovators about where we are re: national technology planning since he's now been CTO for several months. An eternal optimist, he spoke with Tim O'Reilly on the Web 2.0 Summit stage at length about the work ahead, wooing the crowd with his positive energy. But the message is clear: he's dedicated to getting things done in Washington.

Why isn't there a Sunlight Foundation in Denmark, a MySociety in Sweden, a FarmSubsidy in Norway?