Open Government Places allows civil servants to cut through the red tape, join forces, and share government forward. This project is called Deelstoel in Dutch (‘share chair’) and invites civil servants to ‘hack’ the government and share their workplaces. Government offices are invited to reserve a part of their buildings to be made available to colleagues from other public administrative organizations.
Open Government Places (OGP) targets the viability of interactive Web 2.0 communications, and provides the forum and logistics to align civil servants and what they do directly with the communities they serve. As both an in-person and on-line arena within a real-time dimension, OGP streamlines our way of working and redefines how management and leadership happen. By networking and pooling experience and insights for more effective solutions, Open Government Places accesses existing resources and capitalizes on the obvious!
Love it – is it ongoing experiment, short test?
Interesting concept, my questions would align more with; “What allowed the Dutch to do this?” Is their IT architecture and infastructure similar or the same across all of their government structure? Are their IT security requirements the same across their entire structure?
Don’t take this as nay-saying, I’m simply curious to what made this concept work so streamlined. (i believe it should be this simple, but even just the things i mentioned above makes our government doing something similar seem like a mountain more than an ant hill to over come.)
To me this story could actually show why data standarization and architecture standards would make things much simpler!
Great idea! This takes simple hoteling/office sharing to a whole new level. It makes a lot of sense! Thanks for sharing Kim!
@terrence Washington DC is welcome to join us 🙂
@govloop – It’s not a short test anymore, we already have 400 workplaces, and we’re still growing everyday…if you’re in the neighborhood, you’re welcome 🙂
@chris we bring our own devices, WiFi access is available for visitors. We overcome all problems (security, IT) and just did it
I love your “can-do” attitude! Wi-Fi is the breakthrough technology that will free us from the slavery of ethernet wires and lanline telephones.
Thanks for setting the example for us pedestrian, bureau-centric Washingtonians Kim! With our travel budget restrictions I’ll never be able to visit, but maybe we can hold a web conference to discuss. I’m very intrigued and can’t thank you enough for shining a light on your program. I even added this to the OMB SAVE Awards website.
@terrence Thanks for your lovely words! We’re able to visit Washington if you like 🙂
Maybe we can do an American tour, Washington, New York, more people interested? Would be great to launch it…please let me know!
@Chris, you brought up the right questions and I for one, would love to know the answers. Our IT would be screaming, “No wireless, for security reasons”! Not sure that we can be as “OPEN” as the Dutch. Sharing is great, and learning new things from people in gov who do a similar job across the country…wow! I would enjoy that.
We’re finalist for the management 2.0 challenge. We can use some votes 🙂 (Go to rate this, you can join the mix using your Facebook account) Thanks a lot!