I agree that ‘trust’ in government will return when Government information is available publicly. Is our society mature enough like our New Zealand neighbour who allows access to all but the most current of Cabinet decisions? While will always be genuine privacy concerns I believe much is protected only to safe face.

We probably exist simply because the the data are collected for one purpose (accountability and transparency in relation to procurement), and in its original format for that purpose, the data are pretty turgid and unattractive. So we try to make it meaningful. No doubt the Government could do this, too, if it was minded, but that would mean it must understand the various requirements of other users of the data other than themselves. Is that the business of government?

There’s some brilliant, similar examples elsewhere in the world. Have a look at http://www.recovery.org, established by Onvia, a US firm with similar interests to ours. Through that site, they aim to track the spending of all US Federal funds allocated as part of current economic recovery projects.

I am personally very excited by the establishment of the Government 2.0 Taskforce. It has the potential to change the way government works, how citizens interact with government, both politically (as we’ve seen with the US election) and with government agencies.

I will be very interested to learn of the Taskforce’s proposed workplan (and I don’t underestimate the challenge of identifying projects and priorities!!).

You were wondering what the private sector does when it gets access to PSI. One of our companies was working with a government agency that needed to geocode thousands of sites. The government agency staff didn’t have access to their own PSI, nor did it seem possible to buy it. So we bought a licence ourselves and built several tools: a free online geocoder and a batch geocoder. For several years the online geocoder has been available free as a public service (where we pay for a licence to PSI in order to make it available to the government and its clients). The geocoder is at https://egrants.com.au/geocoder.

We were paid to build a derivative based on the geocoder (a system that estimates water savings by geocoding where you are, finding the nearest BOM station, estimating rainfall and water saving etc). The client’s need for that ended years ago, but we’ve continued that online as a free public service: https://egrants.com.au/watertankmodel.

The licences and service fees cost us thousands of dollars to provide this free access to PSI. We get no business value from these systems, other than the satisfaction of knowing that people use them and get some value from them.

You’ll find many more important examples of private sector contributions “for the public benefit” … just start with Google’s free Earth and many other products.

You say you want PSI to be freely available. Much information made freely available by government is quickly locked up for profit by entrepreneurial businesses who patent or otherwise copyright what is often the only logical/practical process to make sense of that information for public consumption. This is particularly true of data sets, and Google has built much of its success around such ventures.

Is it really possible for business to participate altruistically in the birth of Gov 2.0? Or will its participation be primarily driven by the need to identify and exploit new business opportunities?

I am impressed by what was achieved in the UK by letting private developers loose on government datasets in the form of a Web 2.0 developers’ competition, but I am also unhappy that some of these developers don’t feel able to share their code or even illustrate what they achieved with this data beyond the competition.

It is a brave new world. I just hope it doesn’t turn into the new ‘wild west’ frontier.

I can not agree more with you and it is going to be a steep learning curve for all involved.

One thing that does strike me is that the tagging of the initiative as “2.0″, while being understandable, should not detract from the work that governments need to do in getting up to speed with “1.0″.

While many department sites are getting better, most gov.au sites are woeful. Their IA is still often organisation centric and confusing. Often one needs to know which section of an agency is driving something to find info.

Of course the australia.gov.au and many of the service agencies are exceptional exceptions but there is hundreds of agencies that are not up to scratch.

One of the things that is holding this back is the efficiency dividends. I hear a lot around Canberra that agency websites (and their program sites) are being seen as soft targets to apply the efficiency dividends to.

So, we need web 1.0 to get right first across the government while this great journey into web 2.0 is under way.

Best of luck with the work you are doing.

The CFA has a number of great services available.

I follow @cfa_updates and use the number of bushfire map mashups available (which use the CFA data).

I wish I could view CFA data and MFB data together, as I live close to the CFA/MFB border.

This is a great map, from MFB, with filters available to use on the map.
http://www.mfb.vic.gov.au/Incidents/Major-Incidents-Map.html