I challenge everyone in Bermuda to create social mashups to help Government provide better public services to people.A ‘mashup' is the melding of data with internet services to produce useful information, or an application that is more than the sum of its parts. For example, a civic-minded person could make a simple online mashup by putting location information about potholes on a Google map. The information could indicate whether a problem has been fixed, or remains as a danger to scooter riders.Those with a hole in the road to report could see whether the problem has already been reported and if it is being addressed, thus saving them time and reducing the number of calls to road works about the same issue. We would also get to see how long it takes to get a hole fixed.Your inspiration and source code could come from UK site www.FixMyStreet.com, which does exactly as described above. All reports get sent on to the local councils responsible for a particular area. Check out how easy it is to make a report. You can see all the reports of holes or damaged public property by looking up your favourite street in Britain. The site received 2,047 reports over the past week and claims 3,318 problems were fixed in past month.It was created by a UK charity as a non-profit with an international mission to supply public service software and sites to governments. It has so far built WriteToThem, HearFromYourMP, WhatDoTheyKnow, the FreeOurBills campaign and the official No 10 Downing Street Petitions Website.Then there is www.pledgebank.com, which allows anyone, anywhere, to start a pledge, and by the looks of it, gets all sorts of people to contribute. It's not rocket science, and is perhaps rough looking, but it's mostly all open source you can download.FixMyStreet is one example that could be adapted in a number of ways by a sufficiently knowledgeable team willing to fritter away their time on democratic principles. You can download the code right at the site.Many governments are coming around to the idea of making government data more accessible and open, to be used freely by individuals and businesses. But don't wait too long for it. There are simple sites you can make right away by leveraging information input by ordinary people mashed up with freely available tools already on the web.Germany's Fraunhofer Institute is giving this approach some legs by developing software for smart phones. Damage reports can be assigned GPS coordinates by phone and entered in the system, which then provides an overview of reports and fixes about the same problem.Fraunhofer has two advanced demonstrators for mashups in the works. One allows people to to take a photo of pothole on a smart phone and send it to a city authority as a complaint. Another does a mashup of statistical data from the World Bank allowing it to be seen in a more understandable manner through graphics. The software will be made available to public services around the world, when it is ready.Mashups could help save government money because they link up internal and external data quickly and cheaply and without having to extensively train staff.What else can be mashed up? How about linking restaurant reviews with the results of food hygiene inspections. That might encounter some resistance. How about environmental statistics and maps? Or current building sites on the island?Such mundane information is not what immediately springs to mind when government pledges transparency, but it is exactly the sort that touches people directly, and gets them actively participating in their neighbourhoods, hmm, island.According to an EU report released this week, the average availability of online public services in the 27 member countries and five others went up from 69 percent in 2009 to 82 percent in 2010. The majority of the 20 basic public services benchmarked by the yearly study are fully online in Italy, Malta, Austria, Portugal and Sweden. Services are increasingly interactive and transactional and the quality of service delivered has significantly improved.In addition to citizen services, e-procurement is a hot topic for saving money. The UK and Scotland report audited savings of almost £800 million over four years. Sweden says reductions of between 10 percent and 30 percent are realised when an entire tender is processed online. Ireland has registered 62,000 suppliers in its national e-procurement system.Send any comments to elamin.ahmed@gmail.com.