Consultation

If we are to take these mediums seriously as engagement methods for policy development we must develop processes/systems to record, analyse and report information gathered in a format useful for policy writers.
This information also needs to be correlated with feedback gathered through complimentary engagement methods if a cross section of viewpoints are to be considered.

I think you are missing the target for collaboration here. Government agencies may draft policies but the Government of the day i.e. the politicians decide the policies. In Australia my primary path to policy decisions is my local member or the appropriate minister; it isn’t a Government department or agency. The politicians are supposed to represent my view and to take the views of their constituents into account when forming policy.

So the questions should be

1.How is Web 2.0 going to help me interact with my representatives in the parliament?

2. How is Web 2.0 going to help me obtain services from Government agencies?

In terms of collaboration across agencies, 2 initiatives first proposed 10 years ago might now find a more receptive environment.

1) ArtsCast was proposed as a cross-agency video-on-demand service, delivered across all digital channels, but couldn’t attract seed funding from governnment, despite the enthusiasm of a number of cultural agencies for it. The ABC has now built the technology (iView). Rather than just having to rely on YouTube or individual agency sites to obtain video content, citizens should be able to surf a video portal using consistent (high) standards of encoding and delivery. It would give the government a range of video content to deliver down the fat pipes of the near future.

2) ArtsShop was proposed s a cross-agency online shopping mall, but couldn’t attract seed funding from government, despite the enthusiasm of a number of cultural agencies for it. Its implemenation could conceivably generate higher revenue for agencies through the sale of for-profit physical content, offsetting some costs involved in providing not-for-profit digital content.

It is all very well to talk about the importance of Web 2.0 as a means of improving communication between governments and citizenry, but there are still basic Web 1.0 communication activities that government gets wrong. For instance, my best guess as to the number of replies I get to emails sent to government agencies is about 1 in 5. Even when one receives an email in reply it will often state, ’someone will contact you soon to discuss this matter’ and they never do. There must be more accountability in this area. My perception is that too often there is one testy, disgruntled, lazy or disaffected individual in charge of receiving general email feedback, with their finger poised over the ‘Delete’ button. Service charters for replying to emails must be both equivalent to those for the receipt of paper-based feedback and actually complied with.

‘Strategy 6: Ensure the Integrity of Australian Online Cultural Content’ of the National Office for the Information Economy’s 1999 document ‘Responses to a strategic framework for the information economy’ states in part ‘Statutory authorities could be required to include standardised online statistics within annual and other reports … The analysis of statistics so gathered would enable more rigorous and adaptable planning to take place at all levels.’

Most australian citizens are unused to being able to engage with ‘their’ government in any way; consultation ‘blogs’ (if we must dumb it right down) are just another way that they might (not).

The policy should be that no single agency should run an online engagement space. No online engagement space should be hosted on an agency’s web site.

I would have thought the thing to do would have been to take all the best ideas and build a platform for the .edu.au domain.

If ‘gov’ (whoever he/she is) wants to do a little outreach and consult around the global traps, that fine. That’s just cheap promotion and a good thing to do. But of we are serious, then we need to build an archive of stuff in a context, so you’l need to RSS back to the (official) ‘inquiry space’ in the .gov.au domain.

I agree. But this is only because producers often don’t know how to do something (easily). The bar will only be lifted by those who know (and are included).

People will trust in a domain with .gov.au on the end. This is where an SSO comes into its own. The usual reassurances apply (your email wil never be diisclosed). But i heard most of the excuses for not partcipating. They usually come down to “why bother, nobody listens”.

Easy. Do the broadcast circuit first. qanda or insight, a few radio programmes, a few newspaper articles (NOT ads). And point them all at a online environment manned by people from three agencies, who have committed to running three (related) inquiries over some timeframe. And then do something unheard of in .gov.au; talk to them, on a personal basis.

They will. There’s no doubt. But all this is saying is that people prefer different kinds of media as wel as different types of online tools. These days most people under (say) 25 are like pigs in mud; for the over 50’s it’s often just mud.
We’ll never replace face to face hopefully, and qanda has introduced a broadcasters approach. The only thing is to have a programme in place to start, which employs some people with very different skill sets, and emcompass all media kinds and types. As long as this is done in an initiative undertaken by at least three agencies, then it shouldn’t be too hard to handle.

One someone’s in the swing then yes, let’s encourage them. That’s why I’m suggesting it’s better to aggregate ‘related inquiries’ into one domain, which is shared by moderators from different agencies.
Most inquiries have limited terms of reference, which restrict any innovation, primarily because innovation comes up from the space between subjects (or sciences). It also helps the silo bound learn from one another, share the load, and collaborate, which is fun & time saving. This IS the new culture.

I’ll make a point on this one as the change in principle, as the web evolves, is from publish to collaborate. In video this means from produce to capture. This seems to be maturing in the .edu space now. I will only suggest that when you have a meeting then stream and capture (record) it, while taking emailed suggestion, and don’t put it on another site like youtube. Stream and playback from the same point on the same page of this site. And the networks will change by default. The are a bunch of technical developments which are yet to take place which will mean the real time comms and info of a community will come togther.

If this means different communities prefer to use different tools, and combinations of, then yes. That’s whi I always suggest an inquiry puts lots of combinations up. You’ve got a blog, this comment press, goodoh!So far you’ve only got a few comments on this tool. But if you were to leave this comment press up and open all the time, then you’ll being to get into the ‘perpetual beta’ mode, and people could get into the new swing of things. And the ones that aren’t used get canned.

That’s true, primarily for older people. But for the younger people it’s a matter of giving them a space to play in, and sometimes go to lessons. I really had hoped me.edu.au might have been such a (log in ) to various .edu spaces (K to u3A) . But as you can see, it was reduced to being a silo for ‘professional educators’, in the same way govdex has turned into a playground for ‘professional public servants’.

But yes, it’s called outreach, and it lots of hard work.

I can honestly say, none exist yet, as far as i compare a wikimedia culture to three layers of remote government agencies in Australia.
It was nice to see wikimedians, particularly the ones from san fran and berlin, introduce themselves to people from GLAMs (galleries, libraries, Archive and museums) who mostly reside in the country town culture of Canberra, and their ideas ideas of their very different worlds.

Pia (sen lundy’s media person) is one who seems to strap together a few web 2.0 tools in a useful manner, on a shoestring. And she’s the only one in Canberra, after living in syd for 10 years. Apart from Rose, the englishwomen who heads up the National Libraries news digitisation site (that has attracted 5,000 volunteers).

I won’t be critical of this taskforce’s secretariat, as it’s no fair to ask people with no experience of a different culture to understand it. But i can say this; if the tools and new culture don’t make it MUCH easier and enjoyable for a bureaucrat to do their job, then forget it.

And if their leaders insist on using shoeleather instead of (in addition to) using the tools to be more inclusive, they aren’t giving a good example.

There’s no ‘improvement’ to be made here. Cultures can’t be improved. One can only attempt to be understand them. Any tool will do as long as there’s an interest in both directions.

“a much richer mix of spaces”. I guess this writer has been reading about “rich multimedia” so yes.

The hardest part is opening a forum, for people with a particular interest, outside an institutional space, and then getting moderators from different agencies to collaborate in it.

Sounds like it written to explain the writer’s prejudices and display their isolation. Obviously no one who has an understanding of community – online or off line – would write a phrase “identify themselves before engaging with collaborative technologies”. Technologies are just tools, so one doesn’t enagage with them. They just use them to ‘garner trust and confidence’. And if one can’t, or people aren’t interesting or interested, then one just ignores them.

Embedding good privacy practice is quite easy. “Go away”.

It’s called cultivating a community of practice, so that it might attract communities of interest, which is made impossible if ‘highly distributed networks of knowledge’ are conceptualized in terms of “benefits to gov”.

Government is just one ’sector’ of a nation. It’s preparation takes place in a sector called education, and in Australia this is packaged into products for consumption. This is great for well entrenched sciences. But considering one in three jobs that will exist in (say) 5 years time can’t be taught, it’s an antiquated model preparing people for factories, which have been exported. Education is the main driver (or not) of this change, and Australia hasn’t even a National Reseach and Education Network just yet. (outside 39 unis)

This question misses the point to web 2. It shows that the questioner doesn’t “get it”.

Their is no “best practice” on the web. The web is about diversity, and the practices are as varied as the apps available.

The question should read, “how, when an approach ‘works’ can we spread the word without interupting busy institutions?” How can we assist the stratagists in silos to share the development of their strategies?

Most of the open and global info initiatives = flickr, photobucket, wikipedia, as well as social sites like facebook and baidu have the same limitation of language. So “interoperability” (in the technical sense) doesn’t really have a great impact initially. Multilingualists are in huge demand as one can’t talk about inteoperability in different languages.

That’s why senior project oficers who run these kind of events have to speak at least 4 languages. I can’t imagine an Australian taskforce being up to the task.

I think a great example of this is what is already being done by the OpenAustralia foundation with OpenAustralia.org

This comes down to the idea of a SSO for every (Australian) citizen. Every access to .gov.au info by an Australian presence should be free.

If a development is hosted on an Australian network it should be cheaper cost (to the provider) than hosting on a foreign network.

The real impact here will tend to come ( I believe), not by the supply of info, but by the provision of inquiries which compare datasets, techniques, etc (in real time) between countries. In other words the real opportunity is in hosting the global communities which already attempt to help their state and nation bound bureaucrats stay abreast of the times.

You’ll find that this would work a treat, especially if you ran it in conjunction with agencies like the Empire of the Toilets.

All most of these conservatives appear to want is for someone to take the “risk” away.

Re, the last question.
You’ll find that this comes down to including agencies in this inquiry. While all the talk is about information, the real key is using web technology to share the ‘real time’ communication, and streaming and recording it, and drawing the responses to this domain.
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that (IP) voice (and IP videoconferencing, etc) is just data. What we are trying to do here is align IP information networks with IP communication networks on behalf of National and global communities.

xtfer.
Yep this is the obvious way. We had the same conclusions made at the GLAM conference.

It might be good to encourage agencies by keeping a totalling list of downloaded files. This would not only encourage a little competition, but also recognise that their is a cost invloved by being successful. And that will lead through to conversations about “mirroring” their sites in different parts of the world.

Sometype of CC license on every .gov.au database is the key, if only because it gets the hoarders to understand the new culture.

But perhaps some measure of how often their databases are accessed is important, not only to encourage a little competition, but also to recognise that there is a cost involved in providing for lots of downloads. It might even get them thinking that It might make sense to allow different providers to “mirror” their site. i.e. reduce this cost.

Amazing! The Empire of Toilets.

As Jose says, “they” should contribute to “our” search. I’m sure the National library would say the same to their empire.
We had the same discussion with many of the GLAMs at the conference about getting them to open up their empires.

Again; perpetual beta.

The point aim is to make a public servant (student) feel a part of the (National and Global) community of practice and to include a community of interest around the construction of a datset, and its linkages.

You know, like a wikipedia, or this inquiry.

It’s really impossible to define this reasonably; there being too many variables.

This rarely has a great deal to do with Information. It has to do with how students are educated, and how an (sometimes) older, and always conservative, generation finds it hard to adapt to a changing culture. It also has to do with what happens when public servants are separated from their community – they become functionaries who have no understanding of their actions. Making policy becomes their singular job.

The deaths from the victorian bushfires had little to do with ‘lack of, or imperfect, information’. It had to do with how poorly educated people were misled to believe that, because ‘their’ institutions provide professional sevices, their functioning management might have (the time to take) an interest in their personal welfare.

The problem here is lack of communication (infrastructure) between communities. That is never spoken about

This goes back to the idea of perpetual beta. In an industrial time, physical stuff was designed and manufactured. In the early stages one could have any colour of Ford = black. These days we have products with ‘value added’ elements, which are added to justify a research teams costs, and few understand what’s available.

In an information context we are all overloaded by connection, and governments produce referenced products (usaully based on other gov’s reports) which are revisions of what has already transpired. Although they are usually beautifully printed, or uploaded in a pre print format = an anachronism to behold.

The point here is that there is no ONE market. There are only progressives and conservatives who gather around (code and) information. The progressives trust no one and jump in. The conservatives buy ‘products’.

What he said

The hardest thing is that the content of domains constantly change. The idea of a persistant identifier seems to be constantly ignored.

With interactive stuff it’s about keeping things in the context in which they were created. That’s why it might more sense to reclassify inquiries under a bibliographic system (e.g. using the dewey code we might have a domain classified as 607.940.gov.au), which can be shared and reused for similar inquiries.

It’s amazing how fast these kinds of concerns evaporate when an edict goes out to “get it ALL out there”. The hoarders scream and cry, the perfectionists despair, and the community usually says, “hmm, there’s something to be improved here”, and gets to work.

Couldn’t you just get the National Archive to take a global snapshot ot the .gov.au domain once per month. a la Internet Archive. And build some tools to recognize non compliance.

Of course you’d also have to make sure the National achive site didn’t go down (globally) as it did last week.

Probably the easiest way is to take a snapshot on some agreed timely basis and back it into a national library or archive directory.

The aim is to make the escalation process transparent and trackable, and web is excellent for this.

It’s called evaluation by the world bank, and if the redress if hived of to a specialist department, it inflates into a report writer.

As long as it’s kept small. i.e. every domain has a redress, then it can work because the info issuer becomes aware of a problem, and can nip it in the bud.

The perpetual beta affect for government comes down to accepting a that the domain’s archive must be considered from the outset. Thousands of similar projects funded by .gov’s around the world (in both their edu and gov domains) get buried in some funding institution’s (SINGLE LANGUAGE) archiveS after their funding has run out. Many are buried in National libraries, in directories like Pandora.

This old habit of treating digital assets like physical ones, and moving them from a real time site to a dead one, is not perpetual beta. It’s reinventing the wheel, perpetually.

I’m not quite sure, by my interpretation of the network effect, and it’s change, could be illustrated by streaming the task force’s meeting to a “live” page on this domain. This changes the focus from individuals using a (videoconferencing) tool to a domain where the real action takes place. It also changes the focus of a community’s archive from some box = IP address = (usually) hidden inside an institution to the one (usually) used by communites which span institutions, and broadcasts.

True, But to work (easily), particularly for gov where records must be scrupulous, it needs a record of every re(mix) = the history tab on a Wikipedia article.

It also needs, particularly if one considers captures and mixes done in real time, an understanding of the quality of service between domains.

Collaborate, Cooperate. No real differences, apart from the access to an IP address, and who gets to do the tool configurtion, moderation and spring cleaning of course.

It’s not possible, on a wide ranging (across domains) and sytematic basis, unless the domains share a common sign in, preferably with two layers of authentication – one for everyone = an open ID, and one for trusted insiders (tool assemblers and moderators).
Wikipedia shows what happens with completely open global access (and a vision). And then you have the old network managers perspective.

This is definition gives the wrong impression. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing, and combining information on the web”. It’s use has never been proved in a wide scale adoption. It may turn out to be a waste of time for government.

Metadata is simply a way to describe data and give it a context.

Ask the National library.

The challenge is not just to make information available but to make it useful, and that’s in th eye of the beholder/researcher. The easist way is just to put it up with the disclaimer that “should it infringe your copyright, please inform us so we can take it down”. Experience shows that’s rare.

Absolutely. Although there is one technical aspect which must be in place before the “service delivery” culture can change. An SSO, or unified ‘presence’, which is common to insiders and outsiders, and offers equal degrees (levels) of access (to .gov.au and .edu.au domains’ (tools and info) is the basis of ‘cloud’ network architcture. Without it, governments and their agencies, authorities, etc are reduced to being delivery men.

David makes the points, so I won’t repeat them. Policy can never effect change. It is an attempt to describe how it might be handled. “Words can never describe the speed in change of meaning that words describe”. E.g. Service to anyone under 30 means self service.

Leadership comes by helping to “educate our leaders”, which we can see as Pia assists Sen. Lundy. We need more Pia’s.

The main principle demanded these days is “Inclusive”, which the taskforce might attempt by always streaming their (cisco donated) conversations or making notes on this blog while they’re on the road. Blog rather than email.

The hardest part, particularly with the web, is to believe that there might be a person, with solution which can solve a problem, if only their secretariat would ask. And often they won’t charge anything. For governments like we have in this country, which have been reduced to being funding agents and accountants, it will take time.

1. New information/entertainment/education services will be built.

Another way of asking this (of people like Nick) might be. What information, if made freely available, would enable you to make (silos of) information more accessible/understandable = build new services?

Policy should apply to any publically funded organisation/authority. It might be useful to compare the education and government sectors here as both have the same ends in mind. Just as most uni insist that their authors must publish in an open access repository, so should PS. No policy will help their institutions catch up with their commnities new social habits of course. But it may enable them to be more relevant.

One aspect which is always left out of these inquiries is the (real time) Communication which must align with Information to make it clearer/understandable, and by which it is diseminated.
The World Bank makes this clear when they talk about their global Communities of Practice. “If I read something, i want to contact the writer”.

International access and use cannot occur untlil Information Networks revolve around National and Global Communities of Practice, and Communication networks are aligned with them. This is not a policy issue. it is an engineering issue.

This cultural change is being driven by modern education practices and networks. This taskforce, as it contains no professional educators or aarnet engineers, is hampered a bit.

The cutler report is a good example of an inquiry getting close to what is possible. A few shortcomings.

1. Yes, something like a creative commons license needs to be applied.
2. The domain for an inquiry MUST NOT be hosted on an agency web site. It must have it’s own. This because it becomes an archive which may be used as a reference for a similar inquiry by another government later, or may encourage their inclusion. The domain name should be classified by a librarian so it can be discovered readily.
3. All submissions and related materials need to be archived at the site in order to retain context.

Failing to understand how gov works is one problem . Failing to make policy makers understand that their policy making is not the end of the cycle is another.

Sorry about the above. What I mean is that bureaucrats, like teachers, will be criticized regardlss of what kind of tools are used, particularly at a time when the choice is often driven by fashion = twitter is the latest. The easiest thing to do is put as many possible tools on domain, and let people drive the preference. Its messy, but democratic.

One opportunity here is in introducing more linkages between “the box” and these kinds of online forums. Qanda & Insight type programmes are very popular. They fall down in that there is no systematic linkage between watching a TV/radio programme and being directed to the appropriate community’s online space.

But you’ll have to capture the imaginations of public servants to encourage participation. E.g. You know you can stream to the web live from Cisco’s teleprescence, when the taskforce is getting together, don’t you?

Perhaps the greatest barrier is the idea that any initiative should be “within (a particular department or agency of) government”. The problem is that few departments collaborate in running user forums, which defeats their purpose. Enid points out that the will is there, and that there is a need for moderators.

Each deprtment has plenty of media people/secretariats who at present snow their common communities with PR, brochures & reports which are rarely delivered, less read. (Policy suggestion; Every web engagement must include (say) three agency’s media people)

Cultural change happens when an older generation begins to understand how the education of their (grand) children works. It’s not like it used to be. Theirs is an education through collaborative enquiry, which includes other classes and schools (departments and agencies). Delivering a report or writing a policy no longer works when there are so many to compare, globally.

Belief is an impossible obstacle to overcome. All you can do is provide good examples. Of course getting every Canberra public servant to live in another town for a year would work just as well. Either that or stop demanding that people in federal public service should attend the office every day.

‘Strategy 6: Ensure the Integrity of Australian Online Cultural Content’ of the National Office for the Information Economy’s 1999 document ‘Responses to a strategic framework for the information economy’ states in part ‘Australian online cultural content creators and providers should be encouraged to employ comparable statistics packages for recording user activity within websites. Such packages could be developed in consultation the Australian Bureau of Statistics… Statutory authorities could be required to include standardised online statistics within annual and other reports.’ If such a recommendation were to be expanded to cover all government agencies it is possible that peer group pressure amongst CEOs, Secretaries and Directors would result in the thoughtful analysis, not just reporting, of such statistics.

‘Strategy 6: Ensure the Integrity of Australian Online Cultural Content’ of the National Office for the Information Economy’s 1998 document ‘Responses to a strategic framework for the information economy’ states in part ‘Australian online cultural content creators and providers should be encouraged to employ comparable statistics packages for recording user activity within websites. Such packages could be developed in consultation the Australian Bureau of Statistics… Statutory authorities could be required to include standardised online statistics within annual and other reports’. If this approach were to be extended across all government agencies you might see some peer group pressure amongst CEOs, Secretaries and Directors being brought to bear on the thoughtful analysis, not just reporting, of such statistics.

Hmmm, it seems to me that these days, if a group of people feel passionately about a subject, they’ll pretty much set up a way of communicating about it between themselves, while encouraging others to join in. A lot of government attempts to seed this sort of discussion are pretty naff, as they are often perfunctory, or not thought through. Maybe best if government were to spend most of its efforts monitoring independently-created forums to guage the level of community interest in a topic and/or learn something new, rather than feeling it had to invent and run them.

Otherwise, yes, the seed funding of an arms-length arrangement with an engaged and interested person or group can be highly beneficial, without the need to directly spend money on moderation, but on this topic, can we see some statistics on the amount of moderation necessary on the average forum? My guess is it’s actually pretty low most of the time, but that’s only a guess…

Otherwise, the self-censorship of a community seems to work pretty well in the case of Wikipedia, so maybe that is the model to follow…

Not sure if I understand the question, but basically there is no need to worry about parallel publishing information across multiple free and not-free platforms, as long as the not-free platforms don’t contain any information not available on the free ones…

This is plainly outrageous and indefensible, but not an isolated case by any means. In the area of arts and culture, for example, look how few institutions have made arrangements to contribute their collection datasets to the Collections Australia Network federated search. Government agencies should not be allowed to pick and choose in this way. Appropriations should be tied to demonstrable reporting of information transparency and transfer.

Under Annex A of ‘Strategic priority 2: Ensure the enablers are in place’ of GovernmentOnline: The Commonwealth Government’s Online Strategy’ you’ll find the line ‘All new non-commercial publications released by a Minister or agency must be made available online concurrently with other forms of dissemination…’ One way to get more information out there would be to remove the words ‘non-commercial’ from this stipulation, and to create a definition of publication that addresses multiple media.

Yes. Everyone talks about risk management and nobody much talks about opportunity management.

Get over it. All printed information is inaccurate the moment it’s created. The advantage of the online medium is that information can be made progressively more accurate, in theory. A major issue is that the same editorial standards that are brought to bear on print publications are not necessarily put in place for the management of online information. This is a matter of culture change – not an overnight proposition… Oh, and, make sure you carry a good disclaimer…

In the realm of arts and culture, for instance, it is impossible for the public to view a digital representation of the vast majority of the collection assets of government institutions, due to 1) the costs involved in creating and managing these assets and 2) lack of competency within institutions. The creation of a centralised digitisation fund that agencies could bid for would encourage agencies to get their act together, and would assist in addressing the fact that there is always another worthy way to spend appropriations.

Opportunities like this one to comment on policy in the making and review the comments of others are a great step forward. More of this please. What I’d really like to see, also, is thoughtful and thorough explanations from government to the citizenry of why particular suggestions are not taken up, to close the feedback loop, as it were.

I would have to say that the major obstacle to date that has prevented the fostering a culture of online engagement within government is the inability of senior managers to engage with the online medium, to understand its importance, and to recognise how it can be utilised to create efficiencies. The amount of government money that has been spent on the online medium over the last 10 years has been phenomenal, but it hasn’t always been spent wisely… On the other side of the coin, so to speak, a lot of money has been spent on non-online activities that would have had far more positive public outcomes if directed toward the online medium.

The National Gallery of Australia adopted a Parallel Publishing Policy in 2005, making available free online all public information produced by the NGA (regardless of whether or not the NGA is selling a different version of the same information), recognising that, among other things:

1. this would echo the policy of allowing free physical access to all national cultural institutions
2. this would maximise the public utility of this information, by making it accessible to as many people as possible
3. staff and consultants who create information are funded by the taxpayer to do so
4. to restrict access to this information by charging an additional fee to gain access to it is artificially restrictive and ultimately inefficient
5. information produced by the NGA should be regarded as a ‘value-neutral’ commodity
6. the way the NGA packages information and the channels through which it is supplied ‘value-add’ to it, determining whether consumers are willing to pay for access to it (a la tap water vs bottle water)
7. the additional resources needed to repurpose information for the online medium are minimal, provided a coherent thoroughly thought through communications strategy is developed and complied with
8. information does not exist if it is not on the internet – ask any student.

This policy is a bit of an exemplar answering part of the question at para 28. In short, all information should be available in one form or another (e.g. images available free online at 72 dpi as well as available for an appropriate cost printed at 300 dpi). As to what might be made of it, as long as they’re acting within the law I’d just leave that to the people to decide…

Two major barriers to the reusabilty of government information are 1) the current copyright regime and 2) the propensity of government agencie to charge each other exorbitant fees for non-commercial access to digitised assets.

1. Recommendation 7 of the Attorney-General’s Digital Agenda Review: Report & Recommendations 2004 [tiny.cc/DigitalAgendaReview] stated, with regard to Cultural Institutions, that ‘provided that the provision can be drafted in a technologically neutral way, and that no owners demonstrate, within the course of public consultation on the amendments, that their interests are likely to be adversely affected, sections 49 and 50 [of the Copyright Act] should be amended so as to allow low resolution reproductions of the whole of an artistic work to be copied and communicated, without infringing copyright’. This suggested amendment did not find its way into the Copyright Amendment Act 2006, but should perhaps be revisited, as more evidence mounts that the free availability of images online results in greater revenue being generated through image sales – evidenced by the Powerhouse Museum’s recent Flickr-related successes – a phenomenon that should benefit artists as much as institutions.

2. Every Government agency should stop charging every other Government agency for access to materials (save the basic costs of accessing the stuff in the first place, which in a digitised environment should be minimal) in order to massively increase the usefulness, useability and mashupability of assets nominally in the ownership of the people.

To quote Brant Trim, Manager of DEEWR’s Communication Delivery Branch, in a recent email to me, ‘You need to come see our xxxx. You can have it all’. Shorthand for ‘I’m willing and extremely happy to share with you any code for any services we’ve developed. This sort of offer shouldn’t be down to the generosity and community spirit of an individual, but should be a mandatory requirement of all Government agencies. The manner of the sharing, whether by a wiki or any other means, is kindof beside the point. It’s the fact that people have to do it somehow that really matters. This approach should extend across federal, state and local government juristictions, so that smaller-scale agencies can benefit from the R&D done by larger ones.

What about certifying or at least providing recommendations for the different platforms, FOSS software and other technologies that agencies can use? Perhaps through AGIMO.

What about using co-creation models, ideagora’s or peer creation? Let the community loose on an “open source” policy, using a collaborative process.

This doesn’t mean putting forward X ideas and asking them to be prioritised. This means asking the community to put forward the ideas, decide their importance, and form this into a workable policy. Difficult, yes. Impossible, no.

A government policy on use of Creative Commons and GPL-like licenses would be useful, as the current defaults of Commonwealth IP are not suitable.

There has to be a real sense of value for investment – if I invest time in participating, I need to know that what I say will either trigger an action to remedy a wrong, or be seriously considered as an innovation in a policy if it’s backed up. I think arms length NGOs where government is a partner but not a controller should be considered. The ICD project (in collaboration with the Australian Human Rights Commission and with support of the Attorney General’s department points the way to the innovative use of web 2.0 with diverse communities. The ICD recognises it has to create value that will draw participation – both contributions and resource use. Government is good at allowing and supporting such work, not that great in doing it.

One of the problem with large interlinked data sets is that they are almost NEVER complete.

But, the impetus for data to be timely conflicts with the desire for extensiveness.

Everything that government uses taxpayers’ funds to collect, create or produce should (subject to privacy) be available for public perusal. In particular government social research is enormously valuable for communities across Australia and should be easy to access and usefully framed.

Don’t forget JSON and RDF!

The standards exist already… the Australian Government tries to reinvent standards more often than it should… mostly unsuccessfully.

The Institute for Cultural Diversity has been developed because it is doing something that governments cannot do, it is empowering people from many diverse cultural backgrounds to engage with each other in forming their ideas about the future Australia they want to live in. The Institute () is an NFP company, dedicated to the idea that Australia can be a more democratic, creative and productive society if it pursues policies of social inclusion and cultural diversity. So the critical issue is trust — and building communities of interest online that allow free frank but protected conversations means that trust can be tested and built incrementally. Government cannot demand it, nor is Government automatically a trustworthy partner.

AGLS has been largely a failure. I’m not aware of ANY search service that uses is, and research by the CSIRO-developed Funnelback search (as used BY the Australian Government) showed that it reduced search accuracy when used.

Also AGLS, while expressable as RDF (which is good), is designed to be interpreted by Humans. Its not actually particularly useful.

For example, some of the spec mixes datatypes or uses for fields. A machine can’t make a decision in this case, only a person can, making AGLS problematic when used with RDF.

We have our most junior people working in RM in most organisations. It is not seen as a sexy as writing policy or even as service delivery and the only time that senior execs engage with records mgt is when the Harradine report came around or when we had to go to court or was subject to external review. RM is not seen as a value-adding activity and until we can ’sex it up’ and acknowledge the role RM can play, particularly within a ECM or business transaction space, we will continue to limit the scope of the return we could gain from our record keeping capabilities.

Innovation is a two part process – creative thinking and implementation of the idea. The governance and risk management should be applied at the implementation process (at business case development) not at the creative thinking process. See Winning through Innovation by Tushman and O’Rielly.

My observation is that innovation is a process and a capability that needs to be developed by an organisation. I particularly likek the quote by Dr Robin Wood ‘‘The single biggest missed opportunity for leaders of for-profit and non-profit organisations is the failure to capitalise on the collective genius of the people in their organisations and communities’.

Like any other organisational capability, it requires leadership, governance, resources, training, procedures and supporting technology. The greatest barrier to innovation in the APS is not providing people with permission to fail safely.

For innovation, we also need to look at the spaces we have people working in and how conducive that is to creative thinking and implementing good ideas.

We should also be looking at how we deal with complex challenges and not apply a strategy only suitable for complicated situations as implementing Gov 2.0 is a complex rather than complicated situation.

I am disappointed to hear that govt does not have a culture of compliance with information and records management policies and best practice. Surely the Archives Act should be brought to bear. I’m amazed that we have almost now forgotten the Palmer and Comrie reports and the impact they had on RM at Immigration!

potential for a ‘garbage in, garbage out’ scenario. Haven’t we had enough of failed data warehouses? It would be good to see some examples of where this has delivered benefits.

Govt should be responsible for developing the marketplace (as it does for water and CO2) for govt information. This should include the necessary principles, rules, standards (metadata) registration, licensing?, platform, specs, training, advice, support, protocols, sanctions, etc.

There was considerable discussion (and confusion) on copyright issues at the Canberra forum yesterday. This seems to be a bit of a storm in a teacup. After reading the copyright guidelines on the AGD site (again) which states “Copyright does not protect ideas or information as such but only the original expression of ideas or information” I think that the current arrangements are reasonably robust to cope with Gov 2.0 and we possibly just need to provide some good examples/case studies and guidance. Charging for information is the big issue.

There was considerable discussion (and confusion) on copyright issues at the Canberra forum yesterday. This seems to be a bit of a storm in a teacup. After reading the copyright guidelines on the AGD site (again) which states “Copyright does not protect ideas or information as such but only the original expression of ideas or information” I think that the current arrangements are reasonably robust to cope with Gov 2.0 and we possibly just need to provide some good examples/case studies and guidance.

I agree that there is minimal capacity left in many govt organizations to enable web 2.0 and so applaud the govt for freeing up resources for specific projects. The hardware and software costs are minimal and the infrastructure in many agencies is often sufficient. What we need to focus on is building the skills knowledge and experience of, not our IT people, but our service delivery and policy people. IM should become a core APS/EL competency and management of intellectual capital should be a component of the SES framework. All agencies have a CIO – but most of these are CTOs and focus on the infrastructure and applications. Few agencies have an information architect (CIO) to drive strategies for the management of the organization’s information.

I don’t think that the imagination of the citizens needs capturing – they just need the opportunity to participate.

Blogs are beneficial between citizen and government but wiki’s are great for use within government agencies to share information. Sadly, govdex isn’t a great example as in the real world every damn vain agency wants information within their own branding. Provide that option and govdex usage will increase within government.

More importantly though, start a wiki for government agency web teams to share templates, graphics, CSS, accessible versions of jquery etc. To encourage re-use of code and save time.

1. the re-use industry is THE most important middle-man between Government and citizen. No citizen has time, money and experience to aggregate hundreds of public databases, even not in his local vicinity in order to establish a NAVIGATION application for his car. Thats the job of Navteq or Garmin and citizen may use that convenient service.

2. Government faces three major types of customers: re-use industry; the business sector; citizen. – Web 2.0 supports primarily the communication to and with the citizen, but does not provide substantial benefit for the first two target groups. No one in the business sector has time allocated to read thousands of pages and to aggregate databases. Therefore, the re-use industry comes in.

Almost every dataset is going to need custom interpretation, and usually the time saved from using standardized metadata is quite low compared to the time spent analyzing it.

The Semantic Web is a great idea, but the costs associated with transforming data from whatever form it is in into RDF triples should never be used as an excuse to avoid making it available.

I believe that data should be made available as quickly as possible in whatever form in convenient, provided is is readable by freely available tools.

RDF triples, Custom XML dialects, CSV files and raw database dumps are all acceptable.

The value is in the data, and other people can easily convert it to other formats if needed.

One set of data which is becoming increasingly important is geo-spatial data.

Cost recovery should not be allowed as an excuse. Government data is paid for by taxes and so should be freely available.

I concur with yvonne – get out there – fail early and fail often – and people will respect you more, then hiding behind a faux wall of omnipotence. The role of the opposition will change, becoming more useful – as it will be able to have greater say in policy development through collaborative efforts and input rather then us vs them – which question time seems to typify in all the worst ways

I think making govt information more accessible is an essential first step in moving toward gov2.0 – it will allow third parties to publish in easy to access ways the end products of govt policies – making it much easier to organise people to support/ advocate about issues – the data needs to be access via standard web/tech protocols and not locked up in reports – which provide a barrier to access in terms of republishing data.

The main obstacle to fostering a culture of online engagement within government is financial. Both in acquiring the hardware and software to allow this engagement and in providing sufficient staff time to engage!

I have witnessed government departments desperately wanting to open up user forums and blogs but knowing that in the government domain these need to be moderated – and not having the human resources to achieve this. The government workforce is struggling to cover its existing workload and there is just no “fat” left in the public service to take on new tasks.

I forgot to mention, also measure the return on investment. So many focus on the graphics and after spending thousands of dollars haven’t even tested users nor measured the success (or lack of) a website.

Before government can tackle web 2 responsively I feel the following needs to happen.

1. All of government including government business enterprises and statuary authorities need to take on more accountability for their websites in terms of accessibility and usability.
2. Someone more important than the agencies own web team should go speak with every government agency and tell them they must comply or they’ll be publicly shamed or pay a penalty.
3. Government agencies need to have competent people and access to the right resources. Some agencies have huge web teams while others have one person. This doesn’t mean they don’t have the money…
4. Usability testing should be mandatory at least twice a year and a usability test team should be made available for government agencies, including users with disabilities. This should include testing web 2 technologies.
5. Every government agency needs to remember why citizens come to their website. Usually, it’d be to access a service or obtain information.Web 2 technologies such as online chat can be useful for providing technical support as used by e-commerce websites. What I’m trying to say here is use the right web 2 technology for a useful purpose rather than for the sake of it or because it feeds the agencies ego instead of focusing on user needs.
6. Fear needs to end. If a user makes a negative comment, learn from why they are being negative and fix the problem and realize it can be an opportunity to provide re-assurance to others.
7. Government shouldn’t charge other agencies for re-using information or code. In fact, it should be encouraged. As for security issues, if something happens – just deal with it!
8. Vanity needs to end. When the Nation Building stimulus package was released, government did the right thing by putting a website together and getting agencies to link to it. However, I’d say many agencies did the wrong thing by confusing users and wasting time – instead of getting all the info they need off one site which covers what all aspects of government is doing, they had to go on an ego trip and put their own resources together just because they might impress some minister.
9. Government should allow non-government website owners to utilize web 2 technologies to bring in data from government websites.
10. Government should provide a number of templates and resources for agencies to use such as menus / navigation, photo galleries – which expands as new trends and better practice approaches are discovered. This would be helpful for agencies with little web resources. Identifying talented individuals from agencies and getting them to blog on techniques would be useful.
11. Be prepared to adapt. Trial different approaches on websites and learn what works well.

For video accessibility, there are many ways of providing captions and also audio annotations to content. I think the government is doing far too little on this today. For example the recently released Social Inclusion Website at http://www.socialinclusion.gov.au/Pages/default.aspx provides videos and transcripts in text documents, but not captions that actually play at the same time as the video. This is not a difficult technical problem to solve, but needs to be made part of requirements for publishing video on government websites.

The Community Technology Centres Association represents a network of not-for-profit community organisations in small rural, regional and remote communities scattered throughout NSW. For our member organisations, and the communities that use them, the issue is making sure that rural citizens are able to “join the conversation”.

The “digital divide” is a cliche now, but for us it is a very real thing, and not one but multiple layers of divides. Community Technolgy Centes are still putting numerous rural citizens in communities with no adult education providers, through beginners computer courses – teaching them how to double click and use a keyboard.

At the next level are people who use office and accounting software but have not learned to safely use the internet. Many rural people are restricted to dial-up access at home, so they have never fully engaged with the internet. Anecdotal evidence from our communities indicates a lack of “street wise” skepticism. Sites purporting to be “government” sources of information are perceived as safe and credible, and rural communities need a great deal more access to community education programs around privacy and credibility issues with the internet before they can safely engage with government.

Maintaining a core of accessible technical support skills in each community is another key Web 2.0 access issue.
There is a severe skills shortage in many rural communities of IT technicians capable of setting up internet connections and firewalls etc, and resolving virus and other infections. Community Technology Centres are often the only local source of technical support and advice for the public and small business.

There is now a third “divide” in use of Web 2.0 technologies, which in many cases depend on fast broadband without latency. In most of the communities we serve, the only option foreseeable in the medium term is publicly accessible broadband. The NBN project will not deliver broadband into rural communities for some time. Rural communities must breach divides one and two, and then have public access to fast broadband, before they can begin to participate. Leaving them out is a major equity issue, particularly as government moves more and more into delivery of community consultation through Web 2.0.

Community Technology Centres are the access centres that can facilitate rural communities engaging with new communication tools. The can enable rural citizens to connect with federal and state government online content and policy, and override the barriers that distance puts in the way of conversations. They can help close the several layers of divide between the digital haves and have nots.

CTCs are currently being supported by local advocates and volunteers within their communities. They need technology refreshing and significant federal funding to enable them to continue providing public access to broadband, and community education in how to engage with it, in order to support the Gov 2.0 initiatives. The alternative for government is to duplicate Web 2.0 channels in other mediums accessible by rural and regional communities, or risk disenfranchising rural communities.

think there needs to be a recognition that some information would need to be digitised as well

I would say in answer to this question that when information provided for policy formulation by a department contradicts the govt’s policy decision that there is pressure on the APS to keep such information private.

Hasn’t cost recovery as a concern been soundly debunked because of the economic benefits to the community at large? how is it possible to quibble of a few 10 of thousands of dollars to make data available when the potential benefits to the overall economy have been shown by the UK and US to be in the 10 of millions and more?

Rather than ultimately aiming to give citizens a “insight into the policy making process and greater appreciation of the complexities of policy decisions” I would hope we’d be aiming to make the policy making process transparent in order to clarify policy decision making processes and simplify them where possible.

Add GML, KML to that list

http://au.nationbuilder.com/priorities/39-geocoding-and-timestamps-of-all-possible-government-data

Lead by example.Eat the elephant one bite at a time.

The ‘culture’ is based on the fears of individuals (various, eg loss of control over the information threatens sense of job security…ie if other people know as much about this as me then I’m no longer needed; fear of getting in trouble for allowing access eg what might they use it for? will I be blamed if there is a mistake?).

Any strategy to change the culture must allow for overcoming fears by showing that information can be released in a safe way. That releasing the data doesn’t cost you your job, that rather you have more interesting feedback and the data gets better, is used by more people, and your job is more important not less.

Thus, find every opportunity in government to walk the walk. For example, identify some young leaders / innovators in government and get them actively blogging. Insert some web 2.0 ‘doers’ in government to start disclosing and show that it can be done and that the world does not collapse. Actively ferret out interesting data to release, and release it in a Web 2.0 environment that allows feedback to the data custodian.

We sometimes forget that citizens and government should not be a master-slave relationship. Each needs the other: Good government and good policy depends on an informed citizenry.

When government is secretive and fears to share or expose its information to the public (lest it be criticized or fallibility exposed) then government reinforces its role as slave to an uninformed citizenry. The result is bad policy.

Forgive me an over-used bit of reality television jargon, but good policy development is journey that citizens and government must take together. The reality is, this rarely happens, and ‘consultation’ is notorious for being a cynical and artificial ruse.

Government policy-wonks leap in, do the hard yards, research and often produce some pretty good, well-informed policy. All too often they are blind-sided by some misdirected outrage or political maneuvering from the opposition.

This may all be a fun game of poke and jibe that’s served politicians well, particularly in an environment of a lazy and biased media, too many spin doctors and a penchant for opportunistic sound-bites. The result is often that years of good policy work are shelved because a couple pollies and a few talk back radio ferals exercized their larynxs.

I am of the view that trust with citizenry will only build slowly through sharing and exposing fallibility. This is what allows citizenms to begin to grapple with the cpomplexity that policy makers deal with every day. Education, real xcollaboration, and sharing of informationas well as sharing responsibility for hard decisions with citizenry makes the public a true partner, not a master.

The alternative is what we have now, which operates as an implicit contract of the type of a service level agreement, with citizens cast as unhappy customers, and government in the role of evil secretive service-provider out to rip people off.

Either we oputsource governmnet entirely (maybe India would do it less expensively?) or we forge a new kind of understanding. Government must take the first step, through the actions of the bureacracy, not through words or political announcements. This implies that bureaucrats must freed from the shackles of fear of political or other retribution that corrodes their initiative and innovation.

To a degree. It’s about rigour, and I don’t mean about “developing a policy”, which is about a useful as educators talking about “developing a curriculum” these days.

I mean de rigeur = “necessary according to etiquette, protocol or fashion.”

I’m not so sure. Progressives and conservatives lurk everywhere in a society.

The greatest change comes about through “education” and “governance” and how we conceptualize the terms. If, as we talk today, everything is a service, to be delivered, then you can’t blame a bureaucrat for performing their old routines.

If we couch the terms as an enquiry, which must be completed (before it’s taken up again), then they might feel a great burden taken off their shoulders.

Yep!

I think it’s called leadership. One only has to look at this taskforce’s member’s blogs, or not. Give Kate Lundy (and Pia) a gold star.

The terminology which miight hep accelerate this is to begin to talk about Community Hubs (software producer’s speak) or Communities of Practice (world bank speak).

These will be the interfaces between institutions and their common publics. The only question is how long it might take for network managers and librarians to systemize their directory. (and put it at australia.gov.au)

Perhaps you could broaden this to include ‘communication’ (somewhere). ICT has been accepted for some years now, and the (real time) C is always ignored. If you listen to people from global orgs like the world bank (mike foley at that questnet uri) most knowledge is tacit = people need to speak after they’ve read something.