Stap isi

27 June 2009

Stimulating #gov2au

On Monday, Labor Senator Kate Lundy hosted the second Public Sphere event in a committee room of Parliament House. The speakers were sourced from her blog. If you wanted to have a say, you proposed a topic in the comment box. (The APS Commissioner and a few others might have been invited. Minister Tanner bum rushed the show.) The presentations were of variable quality, although mostly very good. (Unfortunately some of the more practical presentations at the close of the day had to be shortened.) Web comment – via Twitter, blogs and the official wiki – will feed in to the final report, so public participation has been invited at many levels. The topic was ‘Government 2.0: Policy and Practice.’

In general, I think we need:

• more critical analysis applied to existing or completed gov 2.0 projects in Australia and abroad;
• more specifics about what government can do to drive adoption within and without; and
• a moratorium on Mysociety mentions (replace with OpenAustralia).

My notes from the presentations

William Perrin said gov 2.0 boosters must demonstrate real value to politicians with examples they can understand. I think this means less slides with hyperconnected arrows and more popular projects that make politicians look bad (in both senses of the word).

Perrin also said that public servants should participate on the web. This is diametrically opposed to the prevailing trend of strictly limiting the number of employees authorised to talk to the media. Perrin says this approach was okay when the number of media outlets was limited (TV, newspapers) but doesn’t scale when almost everyone is a media channel. [Trust your employees?! Dynamite! I almost fell off my chair in ecstatic contemplation.]

On the flipside, are citizens ready for gov 2.0?

I especially liked the presentation from Michael de Percy. He questioned if Australians are averse to conflict, generally, and whether Australia has a democratic political culture. Anyone who has participated in online communities will know that conflict is part of a vibrant community – in fact it’s also an important part of its appeal! De Percy says learning and conflict will increase as the number of actors increase and sometimes things won’t work out. If we don’t accept some level of risk, how are we going to take advantage of the network? See his slides for some possible solutions. The issue for me is that constituents expect open government to be a California-style referendum model. See how California’s going?

James Dellow showed a picture of a WWI tank. It got me thinking military. Standing armies versus guerilla networks. The defence forces know how that one played out, someone break the news to politicians and management.

The guy from Google (a.k.a. alt.gov) spoke about the Victorian bushfires and data mapping. At one point Google was taking 60 hits a second. This load melts most public sector servers but it’s just another day for the G-men. Raul Vera said don’t beat yourself up about it, government servers shouldn’t be built for this kind of load. Rather, make your data open and its application can be shared across multiple servers and services.

The Google guy also suggested how to leap those hurdles – timeliness and privacy – often placed in front of open data. It’s called a licence! Include timeliness attribution and attach date ranges to data. You can also limit precision when necessary. For example, when locating urban fires, geolocate neighbourhoods, not houses.

Dr Owen Cameron made a neat point about the new state of accountability. CCTV was deployed to keep citizens under watch, now citizens are doing the same back. See also Demos – Who will watch the watchmen?

Lynelle Briggs, the Public Service Commissioner, presented via pre-recorded video. The content was similar to her recent presentation to the John Curtin Institute of Public Policy. All those who stand and wait—putting citizens at the centre is a bold statement of intent, but requires a mandate from above.

At the grassroots, James Purser made a great statement with OOOG – Open source, Open standards, Open Government – while the LG Web Network’s Reem Abdelaty & Diana Mounter outlined the challenges for local government on the web.

Finally, Minister Lindsay Tanner chose the event to declare a ‘presumption of openess’ and announce a government 2.0 taskforce that will report to him by year’s end. It has a budget, presumably to seed projects with value in the near or immediate future. Hopefully these will satisfy Perrin’s criterion of real-world examples that excite politicians and the public at large.

My contribution to Public Sphere

When a Gov 2.0 barcamp was first mooted, I bodged up this wants list on the back of an envelope. Today I’d probably add specific recordkeeping and data format specs for web workers but, for now, it’s what I think would make an immediate difference at the local level… What I’d like .gov.au to do

— b3rn   publicsphere   Jun 27, 12:14 PM   #

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