Stap isi

26 July 2009

Hansard for commenters

A NSW public service manager made this comment on The Hon Penny Sharpe MLC’s blog post about NSW Public Sphere:

Transparency and access are both 2-sided. Somewhere, it would be great to see a discussion about how departments avoid being tied up by citizens who get new, ever more public channels to push their own grievance? Particularly when there is no underlying basis, as sometimes happens. This small percentage of people can consume large amounts of time at current levels of access and transparency. Look at how some are adept at getting issues into the media which is, after all, interested in stories that get attention in preference to injustice and inequity per se. The number of stories in the existing media is disproportionately weighted compared to the total volume of public administration, large parts of which are both efficient and equitable. Esp the more sensationalist media. Its the side to access that we don’t like to talk about much. What happens when these citizens participate?

I like the Guardian’s community features and particularly the way comments made across the site are aggregated and displayed on a page generated for the user.

… just as every guardian.co.uk author gets a contributor page in which their contributions are archived so that their participation can be explored across topics and over time, so should our users. — Meg Pickard, 19 August 2008

There are technical challenges – you’re publishing across multiple platforms (website, satellite sites, proprietary backend systems) and you’d want to consider extending aggregation to collect contributions from constituents’ own spaces.

But if we agree that OpenAustralia is ‘a good thing’ then we should start looking at the other side of the conversation.

Your comments stand as a public record of your participation on the site: think Hansard, for commenters. — Guardian Community FAQ

— b3rn   comments, community, identity, moderation, publicsphere   Jul 26, 10:44 AM   #   Comment

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).

Continued...

— b3rn   publicsphere   Jun 27, 12:14 PM   #   Comment

3 April 2009

What I'd like .gov.au to do

The push for a Gov 2.0 barcamp in Canberra got me thinking. What would I – web monkey number 54-46 – want out of it?

Thinking big picture advocacy, I reckon Jason Ryan covers it neatly in 5 Principles For Govt 2.0 – written 2 years ago!

But for a positive and immediate impact on my day to day work, here’s what I’d like to see from above.

Mandate open access to the internet for all employees of government at all levels
Set guidelines, monitor and enforce. But don’t tie one arm behind our backs. Security, bandwidth and (alleged) time issues are easily trumped by gains in knowledge, inhouse expertise and productivity.

Lead with policy on how government employees and elected representatives interact with constituents and each other online
We have draft protocols for public servants – and guidance from existing codes. But there’s a need to look at these again in the light of blurring personal and professional identities online.

Recognise web teams and those working in this new space
Engagement ain’t gonna come from IT or PR people. Give us our own classification – and more money! And require library professionals to play some of this role.

Provide clear and simple guidance on licensing data for reuse
By this I mean a Creative Commons or government-specific licence. The Queensland Government have a Licensing Framework that probably required considerable research and legal input. I’d like to see NSW local government working together to produce something similar. Especially for map and planning data.

Set up an authentication system at some level
We can have blogs, forums and white-label social networks up online in the twinkling of an eye. But you quickly run into the problem of requiring your constituents to register multiple times for different services. A whole-of-government online ID service might be as popular as a national identity card but … openID? Can’t see that working as-is. But state and federal governments have money, smart people and the ability to engineer or contribute to an acceptable, distributed solution that we can implement at local level. (I’ll get my coat.)

Give us basic spatial information via a simple API
It’s all about maps and location-aware services. I could do a bunch of stuff right now but I can’t resolve a street address to a latitude and longitude without accessing a commercial service. Give us an inexpensive, clearly licensed method to map our information to properties and other geographic points. Ideally each agency’s work makes the network smarter and more useful. Also I would prefer to be going down the OpenStreetMap path – not Google Maps.

But from the bottom up, just let us get on with it.

The Barcamps (and BBQs) should aim to foster strong, active networks of web workers across government.

— b3rn   government, publicsphere, web teams   Apr 3, 02:40 PM   #   Comment [3]