Boondoggle's website for Leuven = second best city website in Flanders

Indigov (a spin off of the Catholic University of Leuven) released the results of their annual research report "eGov Monitor Lokale besturen" yesterday.

In the past years the city website of Leuven, our hometown, has been in the top three of best sites. This year www.leuven.be reached the second spot in the ranking.
We are very proud that our work, together with the communications department of Leuven, has gained one place in the ranking. And we are aiming to take the top spot next year !

More information about the research is available via the indigov website.
Their press release is available (in dutch only).

The city's website.

NicoMarket

The European Union launched a new anti-smoking campaign. At www.nicomarket.com the dedicated tobacco-lover (or hater) can find several products, at least spoofs on real products, to enjoy the aromas of tobacco and even increase the effects. Looks kinda funny, check out the whole assortment.

My favourite: Discover your inner talent, with NicoVox throat-spray. Now with extra tar, your voice will never be the same again.

How interactive advertising could reduce Renaat Landuyt's headache

While our government is pestered by local action group, extortiating millions of euros a day, Schiphol does a much better job at explaining it's raison d'être.

In order to support future development of one of Europe's airports, they have devised this nifty little flash site that explains the importance of the airport in our everyday life. In the different sections of the site you can experiment and close down landing routes, which eventually leads to more noise pollution in other areas. Similarly you experience first-hand how the level of employment or the delivery of fresh food is directly related to the growth or decline of Schiphol.

Can't wait to see a similar concept (including interactive sliders) exposing the hypocrisy of the different action groups fighting the gouvernment, while basically just pushing the hot potato to another part of the city.

Via Adverblog

Hilarious: Belgian government informs

I've been enjoying the daily dosis of Youtube selections, chosen by the Standaard journalists and published here (Dutch). This clip was chosen by Guy Tegenbos, a journalist that I highly respect. It's a PR-clip, produced by the Belgian government in order to inform the public about Tax-On-Web, the digital tax service. I've never seen anything that clumsy. Enjoy and feel the embarrassment.

Become a hero - Nice Flemish gov campaign

This is a great government campaign by the Flemish Government in which they want to create awareness and enthousiasm for underevaluated professions. They supported the campaign site "wordeenheld.be" with several brilliant stop videos, staring playmobile characters.

Check out the other videos here. 

Campaign created by Big Bazart.

Leuven has the best city government website

Our biggest eGovernment client is the city of Leuven. During the 5 years we've been working on building, maintaining and optimizing the city's interactive communication, we had the opportunity to continuously tinker and improve the city portal. All credits due to our client here, who constantly confronts us with problems challenges and shortcomings.

Today research bureau Indigov presented their annual Monitor Local Governments, based on a research amongst the 327 Flemish and Brussels local governments. Leuven ended second in the overall ranking (after the municipality of Zomergem), but it tops the ranking of Flemish cities (with Ghent ranked 6th, Bruges ranked 8th and Ostend ranked 10th.

Indigov concludes that Flemish local governments still have a long way to go and I guess I can agree with this analysis. Jo Steyaert, head of Indigov says that the major problem still is a matter of lack of will and knowledge on a political level.

It struck me that so little local governments have a rating on the eCommunity index. I quote Indigov:

We have the impression that for a number of governments the world ends at the borders of the town square and the municipal football field. The initiatives we see on local governmental websites all arise from the administration, not from "the rest" of the local community.

I guess that's good news for me: My book entitled "From City Council Website towards Digital City" (Dutch) still has a future. Which isn't obvious when you write about a medium that is evolving at warp speed.

Link: www.indigov.be
Link: Removed from my "things to do in life"-list: To write a book

Web2.0 for people with disabilities

Smartmobs.com points at a winning entry in the Prix Ars Electronica, which is an European Award (Austrian to be precisely) for new media initiatives that aim at improving quality of life. One of the winning entries for the 2006 edition is Barcelona Accessible:

Barcelona Accessible illustrates how 40 people with disabilities use mobile phones to photograph every obstacle they come across on the city's streets. By means of multimedia messages they create a map of inaccessible Barcelona on the internet.

The result is a map of Barcelona’s inaccessibility for those confined to wheelchairs, a cartographic representation of the parts of town that are closed to people with handicaps. In this way, 3,578 architectural barriers and stumbling blocks have been documented on canal*ACCESSIBLE since December 2005

Link: Smartmobs.com
Link: Prix Ars Electronica 2006

The ultimate checklist for local eGovernment websites

Jan Van den Bergh mailed me a link to the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, a public academic journal on internet related communication research. He found this source through the Association of Internet Researcher mailing list., which is a very useful resource and I somehow lost track of it since I moved to i-merge almost a year ago. In this issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, an article called "metropolitan websites as urban communication" caught my attention. In this article the authors conducted a research on how municipal websites scored on a set of more than 50 functions they ought to fulfil. These functions are clustered into three domains:

1. Mass communication functions
2. Institutional communication functions
3. Community communication functions

Let me get a little bit more into detail...

Removed from my "things to do in life"-list: to write a book

It's finally there! This week we had a press launch for the publication of the new book I co-authored with Agnetha Broos, entitled "From City Council website towards Digitial City". Unfortunately for some of you, it's written in Dutch (entitled: "Van stedelijke website naar digitale stad"). Basically the book is about the power of social software and social networking for local communities, such as regions, cities, municipalities and neigbourhoods. The book is the result of a government funded research project I did in my previous job at Memori (pages in English: here) a research and consulting institute at the KHMechelen (pages in English: here), which is a Flemish institute for higher education.
The cool thing about this research project - and the book - is that it started in 2003, when the term Web2.0 didn't even exist. And when looking at it in retrospect, its essence is exactly all about what local governments can learn from this web2.0 revolution. And for all you Web2.0-haters out there: You won't find this meme in the book.

You can buy the book here on the publishers website. Many kudos to Uitgeverij Vanden Broele. It was very nice working with them.

Flemish Cities use Consumer Generated Content campaign

I haven't told this before on i-wisdom, but I co-authored a book that is entitled "From city council website towards digital city" and it's going to be released (in Dutch) on June 14th. It's based on a research project I  finished a year ago, when I was working at Memori. When I look back at it, it's basically all about the web2.0 framework applied to living in a local community. The book is all about how social networking tools can enhance the quality of life, the sustainability and the social capital of local communities. I'll be blogging more about it once the book is about to be released...

Anyway, I was going to blog about something else. Our Flemish Government has launched a campaign in which people are asked to take pictures of their city. The campaign is called "The city has awoken" and people have to take pictures in which this awoken aspect of the city is visualized. The best pictures are going to be published in Belgian newspaper and the one who took the best picture wins a workshop with one of Belgians most know photographers. Pietel, something for you? ;-)

Link: http://www.thuisindestad.be/html/fotowedstrijd/index.asp
Link:
PS: This is a presentation I did on the subject on an internation seminar on Virtual Communities (Pdf)