It took a little longer than expected, but last Saturday was the first Barcamp Gov in the Netherlands. Barcamp Gov is an extension of the Barcamp concept for a meet-up. Around 25 people came, 7 who worked inside the government. Thanks go to Peter and Mieke for helping me into making it so. I wanted to create a govcamp for NL since i went to the one in Londonwhich was amazing.

Here are the slides to my own talk on hacking tax forms (I did these back in 2003 so they are quite dated). My approach comes from an citizen experience design angle. Where are touch points in relation to power and legitimacy for citizens interacting with government?

I decided to work on adding interactivity into the taxation process as taxation is following the money trail, it’s where policy ends up, in spending money on values and action. I don’t like election campaigns although they are still a vital part of the democratic process. I wander how corrupted they are and the disconnect between promises before and after the elections. Maybe I’m a bit too cynical here.

Tax Choice and Tax Report - a nation state scale approach to participatory budgeting
You can elect where a slice of your tax goes and the government is responsible to report where that slice of tax money was spent. As the tax forms are small inside this slide share you can open then as images here. Tax Choice & Tax Report

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The tax forms above are as much provocative as their potential consequences ill-thought through. The question is, whether allowing citizens to control government spending would be negative or positive or both? Would the ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ principle prevail? I believe it would be interesting to attempt some kind of pilot program, maybe even using just 1 percent of tax collected to allow us an ‘in’. If that were a step too far then we should at least take the principle of Tax Report and use this as a back channel for government and citizens to have a conversation on where money was spent in the fiscal year.

Back to the BarcampGovNL. We did end of an active note, with Ton, Arjen and I starting work on inventorizing data sets held within dutch government institutions as a first step before requesting robust APIs for civil society and business re-use. Let’s open up that data safely.