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Providing A Hand Up

Eliminating Child Poverty through Open Government Cloud Computing –

I have just finished the description of our ‘Open Government Cloud Computing‘ best practice program, and one of the key ways we’ll be taking this forward is through a non-profit campaign: Campaign2020.us

As the headline suggests the objective is to apply modern technologies and Government policies to address the situation of child poverty, an issue promoted by Campaign 2000.

The central idea is to re-state the objective, and that through a fresh initiative using new technologies and models, the goal can be achieved, that child poverty will be eliminated by 2020.

And it requires team work by all of Us to do it.

Open Government

As I highlighted in a previous blog, the purpose of the Shame of Canada campaign is to highlight the key areas where certain aspects of Canada fall below the high standards we know and expect of the country, most notably the work of Campaign 2000, an organization where their name entirely sums up the issue; ie. they were formed to eliminate child poverty by 2000 but by 2011 are still nowhere near this target.

It’s not their fault, they’re simply an advocacy group to promote and report on the issue, it’s ultimately the responsibility of Government which means fundamentally it’s our fault, we’re not doing enough. As their report highlights Canada voted back in a political party who has no policy to address the situation, so it’s our fault, we voted for them.

So we’re not doing enough directly ourselves and more importantly we’re not doing enough to demand it of our politicians. This highlights a number of critical points about Open Government.

First the key role of ‘Open Policy Innovation’, meaning that the public becomes directly involved in defining, promoting and implementing new policies. It’s hardly surprising we have a state of child poverty if the ruling political party has no policy to address the situation, and given it’s been 20+ years of operation for Campaign 2000 without any policies to do so, it’s unlikely we’ll see any soon, if we wait for Government to originate them.

This leads us to the second essential point, that there’s little point in waiting for Governments to create Open Government, there’s an inherent resistance to change embodied within their organizational nature, especially a move to Openness. Instead citizens need to directly create the Open Government they want, and from soup to nuts: From policies right through to procedure to implement them.

Cloud Computing

This is the basis of our Open Government Cloud Computing campaign; it is to operate a non-profit campaign which is funded to deploy the applications that enable new processes.

This will begin with ‘Open Grantmaking‘, the use of the technology to enable fast-tracking of social enterprise business plans and funding applications, which we will iteratively enhance to add more capabilities that can help achieve this goal, such as:

Campaigning – Tools to help promote the cause
Open Policy Innovation – Make it easier to gather and work on new policy ideas for tackling the issue
Open Case Management – Make it easier to identify and help those people in these situations
… etc.