Consultation

Might this be expanded to discuss ways to delegate the moderation workload to “trusted” individuals/groups outside government (e.g. a uni department). Where might automated “sin-binning” be a disadvantage (such as a consultation about profanity or pornography what is inappropriate in either a forum or in the media).

Actually, National Archives Australia already developed a tool for long term preservation, “Xena”, now handed over to xena.sourceforge.net, which does bulk transforms of documents to ODF/OOo.

Similarly, the National Library of New Zealand have developed an open-source metadata harvester that can assist discovery – but only if it has been put into the document in the first place.

It’s the metadata and semantic tools… and the ability to filter out the stuff you don’t need.

There’s already the AGLS (based on Dublin Core) and the thesauri of various state/fed governments. However, this is SO poorly implemented in so many places.

The other thing, which the US OMB recognized ages ago with their FEA, is the BRM that breaks down all the stuff governments do. The Australia Government Architecture (http://www.finance.gov.au/publications/australian-government-architecture-reference-models/index.html) is better since the XML schema and populated versions became available, but the BRM side is WOEFULLY underpopulated (less than half a page, so there is no consistent way of tying things together – either by citizens, groups, or even higher levels of government trying to integrate things. I understand the AGIMO folk are working on improvements…. but the techies cannot populate a BRM in any organization – it’s the responsibility of the suits. (see http://balneus.wordpress.com/2007/06/22/aga-proves-government-doesnt-know-what-it-does/ for a longer discussion of this, picked up by Jacques Chester of Club Troppo later).

If higher levels of government cannot find the stuff and integrate it… what hope the citizens? And if governments can do it, it is trivial (apart from culture) to provide it to citizens.