---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Gannon Dick Date: Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 12:05 PM Subject: Mashups with Socio-Technical Systems To: "eGov IG (Public)" public-egov-ig@w3.org

The current lawsuits over voter ID[1] in the US and the structure of the Mobile Web represent two opposing facets of eGovernment technology. To "comment" on Government Policy, society holds elections. Governments are to deliver services to communities via the Mobile Devices. That is the plan, but not such a good plan if it entails modification of society and community to suit the (somewhat fluid) needs of the web.

Federal, State, County and Municipal Governments use the same delivery channel. Do they share it nicely ? Well, that is the problem. Two voters have a linked data relation via society at large, two trees in a forest, so to speak. However, two Mobile Devices do not make a household. A comparable linked data relation via community does not exist. The competition for the delivery channel leads to walled gardens, data silos and, for a time, multiple winners. Governments are a balance of Society and Community interests and cannot support winners and losers over any substantial length of time. Hence the term Socio-Technical Systems to denote trivial marshaling issues where the needs of society must come before those of community in time. First you build linked data, then if necessary, make repairs to hyperlinks, so it is with any road, river bridge or infrastructure project. eGovernment Apps with regional and local coverage have the basic framework for interoperability with both society and community as defined above[2]. The data need only be put into convenient form[3] for use in MashUps of socio-economic data. This is in the eGov Roadmap.

For the EU to avoid a "War Between the States" as the US Civil War is called, then both the US States and the EU Member States and must avoid a power struggle for the citizens' attention. If Federal, State, County or Municipalities are defined as a group of Mobile Device identifiers, linked data may fail since delivery channel conflicts remain.

--Gannon

[1] http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resource/the_challenge_of_obtaining_voter_identification [2] http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/ 3 http://www.rustprivacy.org/2012/roadmap/socio-technical-sys.zip