Government 2.0 Public Sphere: Next steps

I am happy to report that yesterdays Public Sphere event on Government 2.0 was a great success! We had over 170 attend throughout the day, 300 people contribute on Twitter during the day (with over 2500 Tweets!), over 400 watching the live video streaming and already over 100 comments on the main page. We had over 1500 people watching the aggregated ‘Live‘ page on the day, which showed the Twitter feed (#publicsphere), Flickr photos (publicsphere) and liveblogging.

Update: We also had over 300 viewers of the liveblogging, and actually over 400 people who watched the live video streaming.

The contributions have been mostly thought-provoking, interesting and genuinely constructive to the goal of community collaboration on public policy and directions in this area. For that I want to extend an enormous thank you and shout out to everyone who has already contributed, and who intends on contributing to this Public Sphere.

We also had on the day, an increadible announcement about the launch of the Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce which was delivered in two excellent speeches by Minister Tanner and Minister Ludwig.

So the next steps for this Public Sphere are:

1. Contributions – any last contributions people want to make – blog posts, links, evidence, case studies – should be posted to the comments of the Public Sphere on Government 2.0 to be included in the briefing paper.
2. Briefing paper draft – we will put together a draft briefing paper on the wiki for public contributions on Monday the 29th June. It will include ideas, responses, evidence and recommendations from this Public Sphere topic.  It will draw on all comments, Tweets (#publicsphere), talks and blogs posts that people link to in the comments. Please check out the briefing paper from the first Public Sphere event on High Speed Bandwidth for an idea of the format. It includes two parts – 1) about the topic and 2) about the event/context.
3. 2 weeks to edit – the briefing paper will be open to public contributions for two weeks.
4. Finalisation of briefing paper – the wiki will be closed off, and the briefing paper turned into a beautiful to read PDF. The original wiki page used for collaboration will be left up for probity and to review the public contributions made.
5. Handover to Government 2.0 Taskforce – Senator Kate Lundy will hand over the finalised briefing paper to Nicholas Gruen, the Chair of the new Taskforce as community input to their work. They are very excited about the Gov 2.0 Public Sphere and looking forward to seeing the briefing paper.

So, the effort is not over yet! Please continue thinking about the contributing to this extremely important topic.

As we heard yesterday, Government 2.0 is far broader that just applying Web 2.0 for government delivery of services, it also includes looking at making government processes (such as policy development) more transparent and participatory, and opening up government data/systems to create the opportunity for public and private innovation. What does Government 2.0 mean to you, and what would you like to see? No matter how small or large the idea, it is worth getting down, and putting it to the Government 2.0 Taskforce, which is made up of an incredible group of people led by Nicholas Gruen who himself, has spoken on the the benefits of openness and transparency many times in the past.

Tagged: gov20