I was discussing the way in which the post was launching us on our own little journey of discovery in this sense.  I posted it before the secretariat had worked out how they might be able to implement one of the ideas in the post which is to make the submissions more easily searchable. I was emailed with the caution that we might not have the resources to do it (things are pretty flat out).  I replied “well if we can’t do it we can ask the community”.

So I posted and then we had to solve the problems – not huge problems I grant you – but it’s not the way the things are usually done in government.

In discussing some of this the next day with Peter Alexander of the secretariat we agreed that this was a slightly edgier but in this case more productive way to work.  And he told me that some solutions were already being sorted by our technical people.  Then an idea came to us. Right now we plan to email all those who have sent us submissions seeking permission to post their submission in the normal html format with a comments facility for each submission.  Then we thought it would be good to build a plugin to Wordpress to handle some of what we’d have to do manually. Ideally it would

• invite people to submit their submission in any acceptable format
• convert submissions into a range of formats for downloading from the site
• contain some tick boxes with which people could give us the various consents that we would like – to display their submission in different formats and append a comments threads to their submissions.

It could also invite them to provide metadata in tags and attend to various other possible ‘housekeeping’ matters.  There are probably other things such a facility would be useful doing.

Of course this is beginning the process of turning inquiries – well . . . kind of inside out – user driven inquiries where not only are costs for governments somewhat lowered and processes simplified, but, more importantly, those making submissions come to control just a little more of the process.

Anyway it seemed obvious from that point that that was just one idea.  It seemed obvious that we should see if anyone out there wanted to build such a plugin.  But not before we’d asked the community for other ideas that would be particularly good for Government 2.0. And then we thought we could have a competition to identify and perhaps build such tools. While we think about that, feel free to comment on these ideas, and if you want to propose ideas for other plugins for Government 2.0 and we mount a competition, any comments below will establish priority in proposing an idea.

As I said to her at the roundtable, I’ve been giving a fair bit of thought to that question myself. Having spent some time on the Productivity Commission. We were proud of the transparency of our inquiries. Indeed the foundational rationale of the Commission championed by the modern ‘official founders of the Industries Assistance Commission of 1974, Alf Rattigan and Bill Charmichael, was the idea that people should not come to government asking for favours – tariffs and bounties in the case of the Commission and its predecessors – without being able to defend their case publicly and subject to independent scrutiny.

Now we have the tools to turbocharge that openness and transparency and to take it further – perhaps a lot further. We’re trying to model what an Inquiry 2.0 would look like though I’m being made painfully aware of our shortcomings – of which more in a moment. I know this blog could be improved in various ways, and a blog is not the ideal collaborative tool for building towards a complex and integrated position on a suite of issues as various commentators have pointed out. We are starting to do that offline – I promise!

But I think our blog is already a site for frank friendly and respectful exchange of information and views, and for dialogue and debate. But as the CPD submission which was not up on our website when I was writing this but may be now points out, there are plenty of ways we can take things further.

The [Henry] tax review is one of the most important inquiries held by the Rudd Government so far, with over a thousand submissions. Yet a member of the public who wants to find out what ideas other people have submitted about the future of Australia’s tax system [on the Henry Review website] has nothing more to go on than the fact that ‘AAFCIS’, ‘ACT Peak Oil’ and ‘Adams, James’ made submissions that are 1.2MB, 51KB and 9KB in size, in November, May and April.

On the bus home the next day, reflecting on the inspiring ideas of the #publicsphere presenters and on Lindsay Tanner and Joe Ludwig’s encouraging words on the role of the new Taskforce, one of my fellow noodle-eaters tweeted to ask the name of the inquiry I’d been complaining about. He then proceeded to scrape the PDFs from the url I sent him, and turned them into a searchable database at http://ray.haleblian.com/taxreview/index.html. It’s a pretty basic site, but overnight, purely for the hell of it, Ray Haleblian transformed an obscure, inaccessible mountain of data into something that is just that little bit easier for an interested citizen to use.

In fact a standard internet search engine can do some of this work, particularly if all the files exist in the same folder on the relevant website.

Still it’s clear that it wouldn’t take much to provide much better searchability and access to searchability than is available. I’m happy to join in the CPD’s implicit criticism of the Henry review if only it’s understood that it is a criticism of us too. We had no plans to do anything particularly different on this site.  Actually we hadn’t planned to address the specific point raised in the submission, but I have already suggested internally that each submission have its own comments thread so that people could focus on particular issues raised in them. As has been pointed out to me, my suggestion raises a further issue of consent. People weren’t told that this would happen to their submissions. I agree with the point which suggests ethical and possibly legal concerns (for instance with copyright). So I’ve suggested that we contact people who have sent us submissions offering them an opportunity to opt out.

As I was thinking about this I was registering online for the Government 2.0 Summit in Washington D.C. run by the redoubtable O’Reilly Media, Inc between the 8th and the 10th of September. And as I did so, the web page I was on didn’t just get me to give it my details. It gave me a profile. In fact the system didn’t invite me into a rich world of blogs and wikis hosted for the Summit itself (not that I could find), but it allowed me to set out some things about myself in the usual kind of way that a social networking site would. And I expect the only reason that the site doesn’t invite us all into a Summit specific blog is that the Government 2.0 community is already generously serviced (your increasingly time-poor Chairman thinks over-serviced) by a range of online communities with their profiles, blogs wikis and so on.

But that’s not always the case. And inquiries always generate their own communities. In addition to the blog we’ve provided here, there are plenty of other ways in which steps could be taken to help the community develop. The National Centre for Vocational Education and Research has recently published a paper of mine where I bemoaned the extent to which we suppress the release of data on student opinions about the quality of their higher education providers where the British take very similar data and broadcast it on a rich online database – www.unistats.com. This site enables students to ask questions like “Which pharmacy school (or any other type of school) has the most satisfied students?” and “Which pharmacy school rates best on the question ‘I was always able to get help with an assignment”. In Australia, we have similar data, and it’s made available to participating educational institutions, but then suppressed in the case of the general public.

In any event, my paper pointed out that we could take things a lot further than even the British have. The journey I sketched out – and I’m sure some people on this blog could help me sketch it out further – would be the transition from Gov/Web 1.0 to Gov/Web 2.0. This is how I concluded the essay (with apologies for the length it adds to this post):

One could permit users [of a site like unistats] to adopt ‘avatars’ or internet identities chosen by them which presented them on the Internet as a specific person, whilst preserving their anonymity to other users. However this is a structured and not absolute or anarchic anonymity. To acquire an avatar they would undertake to communicate truthfully and in good faith. Their identities would be known to ‘the system’ so that their privileges could be modified or removed for misbehaviour and they could be pursued in the event of defamatory comments. They would also be warned that it may be possible for other users of the system to work out or speculate as to their true identity.

For the sake of our example we have a student who is at the Mildura TAFE doing hospitality. He gives himself the avatar ‘Sunraysya’. When ‘Sunraysya’ contributes to discussion forums about the hospitality course at the Mildura TAFE, the system verifies that he is indeed qualified to comment – i.e. that he is or has been a student in the relevant course.

Scientist Michael Neilson has commented on “the untapped creative potential existing in latent connections between scientists, and which could be released using suitable tools to activate the most valuable of those latent connections”. Of course this is just an aspect of the greater value of human connectedness, something which is going through a epoch making step change. Once this system of avatars and permissions is established, it becomes possible to facilitate the evolution of very socially, professionally and educationally useful networks of information and communication.

They do not exist currently because the necessary ‘social networking’ technology is only just coming into common use on the Internet, and because to date, statistical systems established by governments have typically imposed a ‘one size fits all’ set of privacy protections on users. Thus most statistical agencies have strict protocols for preventing the release of any information that might enable the identification of someone contributing data. Yet amongst those whose privacy is being protected, there exists a possibly substantial number who would be prepared to forego some privacy in return for others’ doing the same. Indeed the way relationships typically develop, whether in our normal social lives or in cyberspace, is by a process of gradual and reciprocal revelation of information which remains private to others.

Thus people could choose to establish ‘profiles’ either in their own name or in the name of an avatar and to allow others to search them. They could elect to allow people to e-mail them (either directly or via their avatar which would still protect their anonymity) if viewers of the profile wished to contact them. They would then be able to respond as they wished – outing their identity, responding still in the name of their avatar or blocking the sender and/or ignoring the advance.

Such a system would facilitate the evolution of communities of interest and communities of common experience. A student having problems with an aspect of a course could search for mentors or seek private tutors ad hoc tutorial assistance. And it would enable the deep mining of the database, where people might interrogate the system to identify whether a course or a teacher had been well regarded by ‘people like them’ in some specified respect(s) or search for those who had made the transition from one area of professional training to another. It would likewise enable teachers and course administrators to identify some of the strengths and weaknesses of an existing course and/or teacher in terms of their appeal to different kinds of students at a much greater level of detail than is possible today.

Of course this may remind readers of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. Facebook began in a tertiary institution – Harvard – with the initial goal of facilitating social, professional and pedagogical networking and communication. It has been built into a vast network with over 150 million users. And Facebook now hosts applications, of precisely the kind – though I doubt yet of the scale – of what is being proposed here. It may well be that the most efficient and effective way to build the capability described here is not to build it on the analogy of Facebook, not to build it like Facebook, but to build it as an application in Facebook.

I wrote the concluding paragraph not to necessarily advocate the course of action contemplated, but to get people thinking. On reflection and taking the example explored in this post, I expect that while individual inquiries are likely to benefit from using facebook there are plenty of good reasons why it may not be sensible to migrate such a central feature of the running of inquiries to Facebook.

But my experience registering for O’Reilly made me realise how easy and cheap this stuff has become – as one would realise on a moments reflection – if it’s being found useful by a lot of parties, particularly parties who have a penchant for open source software, pretty soon it will become commoditised and accordingly cheap. O’Reilly presumably has adapted some software package to its needs and there it is – a capability that can be wheeled out for next to nothing for every function it runs.

Shouldn’t Australian Governments build a similar Inquiry 2.0 capability – not to mention Parliaments which conduct their fair share of inquiries? What other ways could would it be worth moving towards Inquiries 2.0.

Postscript: there are two follow up posts to this post here and here.

Now it’s time to release the Paper formally.  Remember we can’t promise to give your input proper consideration if we receive it after the start of business on 24 August 2009.

And may I draw your attention to the beginning of an introductory box in the paper which reads as follows.

The Paper is available in the following formats:

• Microsoft Word DOC format (377k)
• Portable Document Format PDF (224k)
• Rich Text Format RTF (171k)
• OpenDocument Text ODT (244k)
• Online at our consultation page

There are a few ways you can respond to the paper, including:

• sending your response by email (or attached to an email) to submissions@gov2.net.au
• lodging a written submission by post to
  Government 2.0 Taskforce Secretariat
  Department of Finance and Deregulation
  John Gorton Building
  King Edward Terrace
  PARKES ACT 2600
  AUSTRALIA
• submit your comments online through our Consultation page

We look forward to your responses.

Postscript: We have created a Submissions page where you can view submissions made to the Taskforce.

However both because some people prefer other methods of communicating and because even some commenters will want the opportunity to send us their considered and consolidated thoughts in an official submission, we have prepared an Issues Paper to introduce people to the issues as we’re seeing them now at the outset of our inquiry, and to help them make formal submissions to us.

Because we are trying to get things done at a fair clip, we are seeking submissions by start of business Monday 24th August.  The Issues Paper as it now stands will be a good guide for you if you want to get cracking right now. However we’re also aware that some of you may want to comment on the issues paper itself. As such, we are releasing the issues paper as a Beta for a few days to give you the chance to help us best reflect our terms of reference in this document.

We also welcome your input to refine the discussion questions we have posed. The Issues Paper as it now stands can be found as the first item we’ve posted on the part of this site devoted to consulting on specific documents and draft documents, or you can click through to the Issues Paper directly. We’ve used the WordPress theme CommentPress to mount the Issues Paper to enable you to comment paragraph by paragraph.  Please bear with us if and please contact us on the contact email below if you notice any bugs.  We will be posting our current draft of the Issues Paper in .doc and .rtf formats very soon.

Feel free to tell us whether you think we’ve done a good job or not and why.  But unless you uncover any major problems, because of time constraints, we are not contemplating any major re-writes.

If you think we could improve a section, please suggest how. If we’ve blundered on some matter of fact or interpretation, please tell us where and (even better) how we can fix it.  If we’ve left something out that is sufficiently important to go into the paper, please tell us what and how to put it right.  But remember two things.  Firstly this exercise is not about debating the substantive issues; it’s about identifying and introducing them, and in ensuring we’ve posed the questions the way we should have.  And secondly it’s not about mentioning every possible issue or question.  Indeed, we have already culled about one quarter of the questions in an earlier draft.  The role of the Issues Paper is to be a reasonably concise guide to the issues and prompt for those contemplating making formal submissions.

We intend to post the final Issues Paper by start of business on Thursday 23rd July 2009.

Postscript: I’ve just noticed that the CommentPress format makes it difficult to format ‘boxes’. The Issues Paper has several boxes including for instance a box on “Apps for Democracy”. This is not clear from the formatting on CommentPress, but it is in the documents we intend to publish.  If you are in doubt, please check the paper in a paper bound format.

Alternative versions:

• Microsoft Word DOC format (122k)
• Rich Text Format RTF (234k)
• Portable Document Format PDF (314k)