Also we’re trying to come up with a nice diagram to encapsulate our message which is summed up in the para below.  Haven’t read it?  No – that’s because since we’ve stepped back and had a look at our Draft Report we’ve seen that this seems to be our core message – from the current draft of the final (no promises it will appear in precisely this form). (And we’ve taken note that a blood feud will ensue if we remove the Google Group’s excellent definition of Govt 2.0 and it seems to be staying in – so far anyway). So here is the quote and the diagram. Please sing out if you can improve the diagram.

Government 2.0 involves a public policy shift to create a culture of openness and transparency, where government is willing to engage with and listen to its citizens; and to make available the vast national resource of non-sensitive public sector information. Government 2.0 empowers citizens and public servants alike to directly collaborate in their own governance by harnessing the opportunities presented by technology.
The three pillars of Government 2.0 are:

• The application of Web 2.0 collaborative tools and practices to the processes of government
• Open access to public sector information (PSI)
• Leadership, policy and governance to achieve the necessary shifts in public sector culture and practice

Government 2.0 will subtly change the relationship between government and its citizens.

The Taskforce has attracted significant public participation during its operation and will attract equal interest in terms of the legacy it leaves behind, both in terms of its engagement methods and approach to community management. The Online Engagement Review will provide an independent assessment of the Taskforce’s activities and the input of the community to date. This review will also propose and explore various options that build on the unique knowledge, networks and resources generated by the community via the Taskforce’s online engagement spaces.

As senior consultant with Collabforge I’d love to hear your views on a range of issues related to the Taskforce’s online engagement efforts including:

• Your views on the conclusion of Taskforce activities, and what, if any, transition measures should be implemented to protect the ‘network value’ (public goods, social connections & knowledge) generated by community participants.
• Reflection on pathways for sustaining the various existing web spaces that have been created (the blog, mashup contest, IdeaScale, Facebook & Twitter) with the express purpose of leveraging any future community participation in a structured and ongoing fashion.
• Consideration of legacy issues regarding the online initiatives and assets of the Taskforce .

Please fire away in the comments with your thoughts and reflections.

So, yes, please shout out with any thoughts, let’s get this right. What have you seen has worked for your agency or similar organisations – what hasn’t worked? Any expectations that you have toward a video.gov.au site?

While not belittling what governments have achieved, the steps into the video world have been tentative. We must remind ourselves that many of the steps we take today that we think are big steps will be seen in the future as almost trivial. Such is life in the digital revolution.

Most agencies have an enormous amount of existing or potential video material – educational content, marketing content, news content, recordings of events etc. Most of this content barely makes it to the Web. Even agencies that would seem a natural fit for mass online video effort seem to have not rushed headlong into it. As example (and not singling them out), the National Archives in the USA are somewhat restrained in their use of YouTube and their official site does not seem to feature video at all. We can only imagine how much video they would hold and how much public interest there would be in it.

So, what is the hold up? Kids are making and uploading videos at a startling rate. None of us live long enough to watch even a day’s effort. Video is, by far, the fastest growing media being consumed online. So, why are we not seeing from government anywhere near the volume that general trends would suggest we should be seeing?

Agreeing that government needs to publish more video, the next step is a decision on how to publish all this content.

Most agencies have decided to use video sparingly on their site – only where it is absolutely called for to make it a modern presence. For example with the introduction of a new service as an addition to a press release. One such example of an Australian federal agency’s video effort is the recently launched Social Inclusion Website, which features videos of conferences and launches around Social Inclusion.

Other agencies have decided to step away from having to solve the technical challenges associated with hosting video and make use of the free YouTube service, even though YouTube has been blocked for many government departments. The Department of Broadband, Communications, and the Digital Economy for example runs such a YouTube channel.

Incidentally, YouTube is very good at making sure the videos get a wider exposure, since YouTube is the default video search engine on the Internet, but may be a precarious situation for a government agency to be potentially seen to endorse a third party service.

In any case, it is actually a big challenge to even find videos that have been published on government sites – and they can help make government so much more accessible, which is our main motivation in analysing the possibilities of a video.gov.au. For an agency, the motivation may be different and part of it may be to take away the need to solve the technical issues related to publishing videos.

So, let’s assume that the call is made by the powers to be that a video.gov.au site be developed. How would people in the Gov 2.0 community go about this? Should we go with a mega-YouTube presence and does it have the tools to make for a flexible and well-structured video.gov.au? Or should we be thinking one of the more ‘commercial’ service offerings? Could we build it from scratch? Would this be commercial or open-source? Could we find an off-the-shelf offering that could get us underway instantly? Should it be a centralised hosting site, like a “YouTube for government” or should it be an aggregation site that pulls in feeds from all the agencies and makes content available in a standardised and searchable format?

Or should it be a hybrid of all of these with a Twitter on top?

We would love input on these questions!

So, wish us luck and please do let us know your thoughts on the stuff we have raised here or any other areas you think we should be looking at, remembering the scope of our brief. Please feel free to post here or email us directly.

Emergency 2.0 Australia is a project examining how Social Media can assist in Emergency Management. It is about how Web 2.0 tools and technologies, emerging all around us, can help improving location enabled information sharing between Emergency Management Agencies and the affected community.

For example, how do Twitter, Facebook and Mash-ups help getting flood-warnings, information on evacuation routes etc. out to the community better and quicker? Conversely how do agencies further improve their Common Operating Picture with timely community input on roadblocks, damage reports, or stranded cattle? This story contains a more extensive example.

The project website is here to inform about the progress and outcomes of the project. But, more importantly, it is here for your input. In true Web 2 fashion, we will (and quite frankly: have to!) rely on the community to show us what is needed, what is happening, and what can be done in this area.

We therefore ask for your help. Whether you’re working in the emergency services, are a volunteer or an interested citizen, we are looking for your ideas, comments, or pointers to any leading or emerging practice examples. Throughout this site there will be opportunities to leave your thoughts online. Of course, you can always contact the team directly.

The project is supported by the Government 2.0 Taskforce, and will deliver a report on leading and emerging practices in Australia and abroad, recommendations for follow-up activities, and (with your help), a vibrant community of interest.

On behalf of the project team, I am looking forward to working with you all, and help Australian Emergency Services do an even better job for the community.

Maurits van der Vlugt, Project Lead

As we explained in 2006

The process embodied the strengths of blogging and more generally of the new wave of “user-produced content” on the Internet – the most spectacular examples of which are open source software such as the Linux/GNU operating system and the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia.

Where it had taken Black Inc many months to produce its anthology of essays, BB06 was compiled in a little over two weeks. And you won’t have to pay to read them. They’re all already available right now on the Internet – if you know where to find them. And you’ll know where to find each of them as they will be published again in On Line Opinion throughout January.

Of course there were the obvious arguments. We were being elitist, we were being partial, etc etc. The complaints were true of course, the collection came from a particular perspective and was thrown together by a bunch of people many of whom had never met (physically anyway). And all other anthologies suffer from the same problems to a greater or lesser extent.

Anyway, Best Blog Posts is now in its fourth edition! Yes, that’s right folks, in January On Line Opinion will be hosting the forth annual collection of best annual blog posts.*

I mention this because I think we’ve come up with some really good posts here, and I wanted to invite suggestions from you guys as to which posts you think are the best. I already know a thread I’m going to nominate, not really for the post itself (though of course it’s a fine post) but for the really extraordinarily high quality discussion it engendered.

What are the highlights of this blog for you. And since Best Blogs has always had an unfortunate bias towards the political/cultural interests of the old farts on the judging panel who these days are usually only ever seen on Anzac Days down the pub reminiscing about the good old days of the Battle of the Somme, I expect we’d be interested in the best Australian blog posts from the Web 2.0 and Govt 2.0 communities posted anywhere on the net this year and not published in the MSM.

* Declaration of interest, I am the Chairman of National Forum which is the non-profit that runs On Line Opinion.

Not a topic that has inspired much discussion so far! But here at eKnowledge Structures, Dagmar Parer and I have been wrestling with our brief under Taskforce Project 7.

The proposed new Freedom of Information legislation, together with the Bill establishing the Office of the Information Commissioner (OIC) are scheduled to come into Parliament by 2009. If the Bills are passed, the Commissioner will have some fairly wide powers relating to Commonwealth information management. The Information Publication Scheme (IPS) will be mandatory for all Commonwealth Departments and agencies. Queensland has been in the forefront with such Schemes, basing its approach on the UK model. It has clearly influenced not only the new Commonwealth legislation but also the Government Information (Public Access) Act in NSW, and the Right to Information Bill in Tasmania.

We are considering how these schemes might be constructed and implemented in a way that actually results in assisting the Government’s objectives for more pro-active and open disclosure of, and around, information held by Government agencies.

Some questions to kick off discussion are:

• There is a risk that the IPS will be seen by agencies as just an additional compliance chore to add to their existing list – Annual Reports, Senate lists of files, etc. How can we minimise this risk?
• Can the IPSs be implemented so that they act as a catalyst for more integrated agency information management planning and practices, and clearer information pathways for the public?
• The Bill (section 8A) refers to ‘operational information’ which must be published, and allows that ‘the agency may publish other information held’. Is there a right balance between maximum pro-active disclosure under these clauses and the potentially extra costs of publishing and maintaining very little used material on agency websites?
• Can we use IPS’s to advance the visibility, availability and utility of government data from a much wider range of agencies?
• How best can the OIC create initial momentum for a positive roll-out of Schemes across government, and then assist agencies in the on-going plans required by the new Act?

Or any other comments!

Only this week, at a conference in Canberra on Government 2.0, Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner (one of the Ministers who commissioned this task Force) said that public servants “should feel free and encouraged to engage in robust professional discussion online.” Yet as discussion later in the conference bore out, the reality is that doesn’t always happen.

The question then becomes how best to provide guidance to public servants so they can be more active and confident as contributors to the conversations and interactions in the spreading online communities of influence and practice?
Many organisations in public, private and community sectors have developed guidance about social media and online engagement (http://laurelpapworth.com/enterprise-list-of-40-social-media-staff-guidelines/or http://socialmediagovernance.com/policies.php.) And there are guidelines already in place from the Australian Public Service Commission, currently under review (Circular 2008/8: Interim protocols for online media participation).

But imagine for a moment it was your job to create the guidelines that will help public servants engage online. Although you have the examples from other organisations, you are given the rare luxury to start with a blank sheet of paper (at least for this exercise). What would you write? What issues would you include? Where would you start? Who would you talk to?

We’d like to hear your ideas about the kind of guidelines you think would be most useful. You can either write a full set of guidelines or just offer some ideas or items that you think could form part of a larger set of guidelines. And if, in the process, you have any thoughts about the underlying values which the guidelines should reflect and reinforce, feel free to say something about those too.

When you are offering your thoughts, please keep these three constraints in mind:

1. The guidelines and values statement should be as short as possible – probably no more than one sentence for each principle, with maybe a few sentences to explain if you think that’s needed.
2. Write the statements themselves in a clear, simple style that avoids too much jargon
3. Put your ideas to a simple test – would the statements provide useful and reliable guidance to a public servant who wants to get involved online, to be engaged, but wants to do it with confidence and impact. And feel free to illustrate in ‘cameos’ which could be incorporated in supporting materials.

Look forward to your ideas and suggestions.

Location of cholera infections by address (London)

Ed Parsons of Google Europe gave the Taskforce an excellent presentation last Friday and it began with a telling example. In the nineteenth century the epidemiologist John Snow mapped the places in London where there had been incidents of Cholera.  An opponent of the ‘miasma’ theory which held that cholera spread by people breathing foul air, his map demonstrated pretty powerfully that the cholera outbreak in Soho was related to a single water outlet on was able to argue convincingly that the source of the outbreak as the public water pump on Broad Street (which Wikipedia helpfully informs us is now Broadwick Street).

The anecdote appealed to me because it made the point that the information agenda is ageless – information has been improving our lives for a very long time. The example also shows how much information improves our lives, not just the bottom line. And it shows how setting information out in some new way can ‘unlock’ its worth to us.  Snow’s 19th century equivalent of a ‘mashup’ gave us eyes to ’see’ the evidence in a powerful new way. It’s stories like this that will be crucial for getting our message across.

I can think of plenty of examples like this, but I wanted to ask you guys if you can give us your favourite examples. We’re after examples where ‘mash-ups’ or other Web 2.0 phenomena have made a big difference to some aspect of economic and social life.

There’s also what we’ve called ‘online engagement’. I’ve already used the example of the National Library’s use of online volunteers to correct digitised newspapers. I think such examples could be taken much further, with pathways to involve the best of such volunteers who were well disposed to the idea to greater levels of involvement, including in a deliberative as well as a ‘service provision’ capacity. But at least in the case of the NLA so far, that’s hypothetical. Who has taken this further and how?

Another example that’s often mentioned is the way the NZ Police used a pubic public wiki to help refine their new Police Act. It’s a good story, and good on them for doing it, but in fact when talking to the people there, its motive was a ‘marketing’ one, of getting the story of the consultation out there – and it succeeded brilliantly – all the way to the New York Times. But the public deliberation on the wiki did not lead to a substantial number of refinements to the Act.

So where are some better examples of the potential for online engagement to improve the outcomes of government service delivery and policy making?

Anyway, I’d really appreciate as many compelling examples of Government 2.0 making a difference as you can provide.

(I wonder if there are any stories which can be told in some kind of repeated form – “before Government 2.0 this agency did that with this effect, but now it does this with much better effects”.)