France has e-gov services! Well, on paper, where it should have stayed...

The busiest State Department in France (after the -no- Work one, needless to say) is the Health Insurance one (CPAM)who takes care of establishing people's rights to public health care and of the processing of the reimbursement requests.

A little while ago, to cut costs, the Government decided to close some of the centers where you could go to apply for a Social Security card or ask questions or submit your reimbursement requests. The remaining centers are not open full time due to the lack of man power (hu, remember they just closed centers!). To compensate, the Government decided to jump on the e-services band wagon and opened a website where people could login, access their files and see the status of the reimbursement requests they had submitted.

Sounds like a good idea, right? Well on paper, it is. However, this is a perfect case of how the poor design of a website can actually make life harder for its users and in this case turn interacting with the Health Insurance State Department an experience Kafka could have written about.

It is like if this site, highly transactional by nature since it's aimed at allowing health care insured and the government to interact and solve problems, had been consciously designed to keep the end user from getting any help. This is beyond poor usability, it is intentional sabotage or plain stupidity. Since it has been this way for a few years without any attempt to improve the efficiency of online interactions, it is probably stupidity and complacency. A hint that the situation could turn ugly for France CPAM customers is French vocabulary doesn't include words like "user centric" or "usability"...

Here are a few examples that would make any user experience specialist gasp in disbelief:

- There is no linkage between physical interactions with your local CPAM outlet and your web file: papers you submit physically or conversations you have with real people are not reflected in your intranet, and emails exchanges you have with face-less employees are invisible to the physical ones. 360 view of the customer somebody? Another concept to add to French dictionaries and minds.

- You have to use a web form to send a question to the face-less service. Fine. Except that a 1 000 characters limit makes it harder to explain your situation than to take the GMAT. It's Twitter meets Kafka. The result? The answer you get asks you for more details.

- So you submit a question online, sweating to condense it in 1 000 characters or less, and you wait on average 7 working days (vs. the 3 promised) to get an answer, via email. Chances are, the answer asks you for more details.

- The email you get are ones, so you go back to your little CPAM intranet to answer. Surprise: the email you just received is nowhere to be found. There is no email/communications archives.

- You go to the web form to answer the email you received and are now faced by a New and Bigger problem: how can you re-explain your problem, mention the email answer you received AND answer the questions it asked you in less than 1 000 characters? At this point, you are beyond sweating: you are drinking heavily. (I suspect it's part of the e-gov strategy to make you die quickly and avoid giving you retirement money, but it will be another post).

This surrealist situation can last a few months/years, during which the government can make interests on the money it owes you...

So, me, the absolute internet believer, had to actually print all my documents and go to the post office to send my file, certified mail, to the CPAM. I am not even sure this will get me anywhere as I don't have a case file number to give them, nor do they provide an address where to send inquiries.

Next time I go to their offices, I take my Flip cam with me and record the conversation!

I don't know when my problem will get resolved, but I am frustrated to see the administration misusing the web to abuse their customers. And I don't mention the potential human drama behind having to deal with the French Health Insurance Sate Government - CPAM: money problems, health issues, deaths....

In conclusion, the main risk facing e-government services is complacency:

1- The government has a monopoly and therefore no incentive to actually be efficient or helpful. After all, the "customers" are prisoner and loyal. Therefore it is easy to ignore their need and complaints.

2- Putting up a website, no matter how much worse it makes people situation, is a perfect way for the government to scale down on phone support and physical outlets, while touting that it is providing online support. I won't even ask how people with limited means/education can attempt to use this so-called support.

3- It would be about time the French Government, and France at large, "get" how online services work and recognize that building a website "experience" requires special skills and processes. It takes a little more than a sudo art director and a developer. Or you may just wait for the next revolution to wake up!

The French are known to be too bored to be concerned with any kind of efficiency but come on, we are talking about Health Insurance concerns and money. It is just a shame to use the web as a way to avoid making payments and deflect any kind of accountability. Without mentioning that most people will probably just blame the tool, the web, not the government and that will allow this vicious circle to go on.

Breaking News: Internet connects people

Hi my name is Fabienne and I am an internet addict. I met internet in the 90s. Remember those days? The sound of the dial-up modem connecting? Wasn't that so exciting? And this great AOL voice: Welcome! You've got Mail! And the sound of IMing?



And all these page with text from left to right? No IA. Few images. No videos. No Flash. Just text. And mostly from people who had found there a new place to share what was important for them.

If you think about it, the web has been created as a communication network. OK, military at first but then quickly opening to academics and later on to civilians. Then, years later, business jumped on the band wagon and the web became sort of The Mall of Internet.
If you were there in the 90s you probably remember the homy and laid back feel internet had at the time.
There was probably a time where you could do a full tour of the internet in a few hours or a few days. And actually get in touch with people all over the world.

Then it grew. It exploded. It became both a bazaar where spam and scams are the kings and a place where nobodies could gain some fame just for being famous. Yes, I know it's a weird one, Darwin gave life to s new specie: famous nobodies who haven't done anything.
OK, there were also some great things happening like YouTube or Facebook or Twitter and blogs.
And somehow we're back full circle to communication. To connecting with people. It's all about social networks these days. Sharing information. Connecting. Sounds familiar?

if you look beyond the annoying noise (the inept ramblings of D-list lost souls and famous nobodies, and shameless pseudo marketing) and the armless self centered postings (I am the King of Foursquare! I got the latest iPhone app!), you'll realize that internet and social media are actually playing a fundamental role in giving a voice to those who don't have one.
I recently discovered a site that does just that: GlobalVoices.org.

In their own words: Global Voices is a community of more than 200 bloggers around the world who work together to bring you translations and reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media.

Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online - shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard.

Millions of people are blogging, podcasting, and uploading photos, videos, and information across the globe, but unless you know where to look, it can be difficult to find respected and credible voices. Our international team of volunteer authors and part-time editors are active participants in the blogospheres they write about on Global Voices.

So next time you get fed up or bored with what you see on internet, and before you start singing "Internet is for Porn", go to Global Voices read some posts and have a thought for how useful the internet can be. It's a fantastic tool to connect people and share information. But like any tool, it only does what it's used for.

Twestival, real world meets virtual one

Do you know Twestival? Twestival™ (or Twitter Festival) uses social media for social good. It's a great example of a physical extension to an online event, in this case to support a charitable cause.... We've all heard of or attended virtual events like concerts (U2 in Second ife anybody?) or political or social events. It's a unique way to share an experience.



Twestival brings this concept one step further by letting people around the world organize local physical events to raise funds and create awareness for a good cause. In 2009 it was @charitywater and this year's events are supporting education. Visit their site or follow @twestival to see how you can contribute between 2 virtual events!

Search Engines Design: a walk down memory lane from the 90s to today

Jacob Gube, Founder and Chief Editor of Six Revisionhas put together this awesome visual showing the evolution of search engines design from the 1990s to today. Some of them are not around anymore and it's nice to see them again, thanks to the wayback machine.
I used to love dogpile! Anyway, have a look... warning: nostalgia may get you!

The future of Augmented-Reality Maps

OK, I love TED Talks, in fact I could spend my days watching their talks. In other words, I need an avatar to take care of the mundane things of life such as going to work while I can actually do interesting things! In the meantime, fresh from the TED2010 conference: here is an amazing talk by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, an architect at Microsoft Live Labs, in which he demonstrates how Photosynth software is transforming cartography into a user experience: first by stitching static photos together to create zoomable, navigatable spaces, then with superimposed video for a swear-you-are-there experience.

Geolocation, geolocation, geolocation…. the new credo

Despite the controversy surrounding Foursquare and the likes still heating up - see PleaseRobMe.com coverage in the news i.e. is it really a good idea to broadcast to the world the fact that you are not home for an extended period of time? - more established social tools are adding rushing to add geolocation to their arsenal of capabilities.
With SXSW just around the corner, the timing is crucial and everybody is in the starting blocks, from Twitter to Facebook.

So what is the real motivation behind this new trend? Of course there is the goal to create a more appealing experience for users: the social factor aspect -seeing where your friends are, sharing tips on places, getting local news about what is happening around you- as well as the fun aspect like with Foursquare points system that gets you free stuff. But I suspect that interesting and entertaining users is just the tip of the iceberg.

The real money to be made here is in geolocated, real time and (more or less) relevant to your interests, advertisement. Isn't that every marketer dream to be able to talk to you about her offer just when you are thinking about it and happen to be close to it?

So that will probably be the price to pay to use these services: accept to be the target of personalized advertisement. But then again, aren't we getting increasingly trained to ignore those, therefore pushing marketers to find new ways to get our attention and pushing further the technology.

But the beauty of it all is that users seem to be far from passive spectators and always find ways to high-jack these new capabilities for their own benefit: think Twitter becoming a local information leader or crowdfunding.

Visit www.brainpickings.org for a good article about the crowdfunding landscape.

FBI ‘s most wanted fugitives list makes it into social media

The famous list turns 60 on March 14 this year and definitely knows how to get its message out and get tips from the public. With the large exposure given to this list by the new communication tools available to the FBI has well has to wannabe onlookers, being on the list is becoming a heavier burden every day!

• Twitter: 31,416 followers for breaking news tweets

• Facebook: 18,601 fans for updates and video

• Iphone App: 736,806 downloads in first year

• E-mail updates: More than 150,000 address

For mode details on the list's history and current top 10 most wanted list, go visit the FBI site.