UPDATE: The video from this speech is available here, courtesy of CeBIT.
Here is the text for the presentation I just gave to the CeBIT Australia Gov2.0 Conference being held at the Hyatt Hotel in Canberra today.The conference is streaming live and the hashtag for twitter users is #Gov2.
Originally I was going to chair the conference but Senate Estimates has begun and I am required in the Committee. I was really impressed with the live streaming so I will be able to catch up proceedings via my laptop during the breaks in the Estimates Hearings.
Thanks to Jackie Taranto and the tech team at Hannover Fairs Australia for making the conference a really good example of how to apply social networking tools to make the conference accessible online and interactice via social netwrking tools like twitter.
Gov2.0: Designing the government of the future.
Setting the Principles of Gov2.0
19th October 2009
Canberra, Australia
It is my pleasure to be here welcome you to Canberra and present some of my thoughts about Gov2.0. This conference is timely and relevant to the important challenges confronting government in the 21st Century. As usual CeBIT Australia are on top of current issues and has created this forum to allow the conversations to continue.
I am extremely proud to be a part of a Government with visionary and transformative policies such as the National Broadband Network and the Digital Education Revolution. These major initiatives deliver will a world class infrastructure, but vitally also support industry growth and broader innovative use of the infrastructure through much needed ICT skills development.
A less obvious, but key policy in the transformation of government service delivery is the ICT Reform Programme, which is the practical implementation of the Gershon Review. Many government departments and agencies are feeling the pinch as they work to reduce the costs of business-as-usual ICT expenditure.
While cost cutting usually doesn’t bode well for new innovation, Gershon did a very clever thing. He recommended (and the government agreed) that half of all the money saved would be reinvested in innovative new ideas with an emphasis on cross-jurisdictional collaboration. This achieved a number of things: First it targeted the cost inefficiencies that were there at the start of the larger contracts, or those which have crept in over time as out-dated practices have settled in; secondly it provides a source of funds outside of the departments and agencies that will be available for investment in innovative new approaches.
Importantly, a series of high level committees were created across agencies and across spheres of Government. In many respects, the responsibility for driving ICT reform falls to these committees and their agenda just keeps getting longer. I will explain why.
Government 2.0 in Australia will build on these three highly transformative policies for government and hence Australian society. It introduces an opportunity to improve how government engages with and serve citizens. It also introduces an opportunity to leverage a high bandwidth network to develop a trusted and meaningful relationship between government and citizen.
To harness and promote great ideas as well as the meaning and purpose of web 2.0 social networking and other applications in the public sector, the Federal Government has created the Gov2.0 Taskforce. I am sure my colleague, Minister Tanner will tell you more about the progress of the task force at lunchtime.
Today you’ll be hearing many compelling Government 2.0 case studies, ideas and successes in Australia and around the world. Australia has been a global leader in e-Government in the past: we have the smarts, the entrepreneurial spirit and now finally the infrastructure to back us up.
This is our opportunity to design how the government of the future will operate in a high bandwidth environment, where citizens have universal access. No-one is really sure what this looks like yet. And it will look a little different in every country.
We could choose not to do this. We could continue allow other countries to take the lead.
However, Australia’s system of government, our democratic processes and highly esteemed public service are often cited as being the best in the world: our system is stable, and compared to all others at the moment, so is our economy.
We also have social attributes as a nation that compels us to be leaders: we are a truly multicultural, compassionate and secular society. We have one of the best, most accessible and affordable education and health systems in the world.
Sometimes merely following others is not an option. In the US, for example, the use of online political communication has contributed significantly to the strong reputation of the Obama Administration. His endeavours are, quite rightly, inspiring me and my colleagues in Parliament to improve our use of the Web 2.0 tools.
However, here in Australia, there is an important difference between what the public sector does online and what politicians do online, and necessarily so. Our system determines that the Public Sector is apolitical, and yet the executive is constituted from elected members of parliament. We have to manage this distinction.
In the US, elected representatives have vastly bigger staffing resources at their disposal and the Executive are not elected members, they are appointed for the term from outside the legislature. In other words, there is a clearer distinction. To blindly follow the model of e-democracy in the US is to ignore these fundamentals. We have to work it for ourselves in a way that suits our system of government and administration.
Fortunately, there are some common principles that can inform us, regardless of where we live and the form of government.
I thought the most fitting contribution I could make to this discussion would be to discuss some core underpinning principles that I believe are going to be vital to ensure success in this transformative area of public policy.
The pillars of open government are three very important and interrelated principles that can assist in understanding at a very tangible level what Government 2.0 means.
Citizen-centric services: Government agencies and departments can deliver better services to citizens by designing systems that present information and service directly relevant and customised to the individual’s needs.
For example, by referencing data such as geo-location, web browser, possibly age or work status, surely we have the wherewithal to enable the citizen to receive accurate information about the range of services and facilities in their community from all spheres of government that may be relevant to their life experience at that point in time.
If the experience of engaging with government – whatever the need – is simple, effective and provides a compelling alternative to traditional modes of delivery, then citizens will be encouraged to interact more online. Government ought place the highest priority on building trust and confidence with citizens, and allow citizens to determine their level of comfort in sharing personal information.
Dealing with the Government in an online environment, be it service provision or community collaboration, it ought to be a trusted platform. This trust can only be built over time with transparency and accountability of policy and practice. Openness will be an important ally for online innovation.
Government as a platform for collaboration: The government can create trusted online spaces for collaboration and co-design. This can be internal to the workings of public sector agencies or across public, private, community and research organisations. Collaboration is the key. Research communities are well versed in using the internet to foster collaboration. Now the rest of society is poised to leverage the benefits of creating online communities pursuing common interests or goals.
Engaging citizens directly in the processes of policy making, and even decision making is part of the potential of Gov2.0. In return, citizens need to participate in a responsible and respectful manner. Online engagement can improve the outcomes of a consultation as more people are able to engage in the process, and possibly contribute in a more thoughtful way as they will be inspired by other contributions. Public trust in these processes will grow if they are completely open to scrutiny. Complete transparency will help the government protect the trusted platform against fraud or manipulation.
Open public sector information: An essential principle of Gov2.0 is ensuring all appropriate government information that can be made available to the general public, is made available. This is harder than it sounds. The human resources required to deal with the backlog is significant. However, there is much than can be done to ensure we are not contributing to a greater problem in the future: a higher priority on policies to address ‘whole of life information management’ does not require too much strategic forethought to make perfect sense. Open public sector information will encourage public and private innovation on top of government data, to the benefit of the society and economy.
Open public sector information is not limited just publishing spreadsheets or databases online. It means ensuring the users and innovators are empowered through permissive copyright, open data standards and formats that can be used in the future. In the case of online services, open Application Programming Interfaces, or API’s facilitate interoperability.
As we establish some basic principles, such as these three pillars, we can start to look at other areas that may need some attention. The online environment can be a dynamic, often unpredictable environment: how does this approach fit with the risk-averse culture that is a feature of public services everywhere?
It is not surprising that moving to new online platforms and experimenting is much harder and riskier than sticking with established processes, methods and solutions.
Political leadership and strong leadership within the public sector is definitely required to take some firm steps forward in the first instance. The Government’s rapid acceptance of the Gershon recommendations ought to be interpreted as permission to take these steps. And if that is not enough, the Special Minister of State’s statements about opening up information and the Gov2.0 taskforce’s objectives ought to get any risk-averse public servants across the line.
In addition to managing the risks inherent in change and reform, and the association experimentation and innovation, there are some other genuine social policy challenges of significant magnitude.
As the world gallops toward an array of previously unimagined online services we need to ensure that everyone can fully participate. The closure of the digital divide, which I am proud to say that with Labor’s NBN built over the next 8 years, is now within reach. However it is never merely a matter of ‘build it and they will come’: we have to create a compelling online alternative to encourage online participation over a generation.
While my colleague, Senator Conroy’s Digital Economy policy work is focussed on this broader challenge across society, it is the Ministerial, CEO level, interdepartmental and cross-jurisdictional committees created to manage the ICT Reform Programme that will be the key policy drivers and implementers for the public sector.
We need to take great care in ensuring a supported, friendly, confidence-building environment is available for citizens as services transition. The traditional roles of schools, libraries, community houses, shire and post offices will continue to strengthen into hubs of community activity around online engagement and digital inclusion and will warrant and deserve resources to ensure they are willing and able.
Our safety and security is essential. The government has a responsibility to ensure the public policy behind our law enforcement and crime detection agencies keeps pace with the technological tools we are using.
And I can’t omit the human resource challenge! New tools mean new ways of doing things. It changes time frames and expectations. Reform requires vision, leadership, thoughtful management and momentum. It needs a collective sense of purpose and the learning resources within agencies to ensure there is no disconnection between the policy goals and the capacity of the workforce. In this regard, it is the ICT professionals who have a strong grasp of the business outcomes and can articulate the tech solutions that will ascend in their relevance to senior management. Only managers with solid understanding that ICT is core business for everyone these days will grasp of the potential of Gov2.0.
The Public Sphere
I want to share with you m first hand experience in my small office regarding the change to online tools for managing and maintaining a social-network-enabled web site. In summary, every one of us is involved! That means a new way of thinking about how we work, new skills and new ways of doing traditional tasks. We are also experimenting with transparency through my website – i.e. – everyone in my office posts as themselves – and this has had a great response, because people like accountability.
And my office has also been experimenting with policy development, and how online tools and community collaboration – in particular crowd-sourcing – can improve the outcomes of a government consultation.
We designed an open, collaborative, transparent and highly participatory method for public consultation – and indeed for co-design – of policy and projects which we have called ‘Public Sphere’.
We borrowed the term from Habermas who defined the Public Sphere as a place which “… through the vehicle of public opinion puts the state in touch with the needs of society”. We believe that the combined online tools, social media and open community practices present government with a new range of opportunities to get in touch with the needs of society.
The strength of the Public Sphere is in a number of attributes: the combination of the traditional and familiar conferencing environment with new online tools to share the experience; the applied use of social networking tools to the task at hand; identifying, discussing, co-creating and finally endorsing policy recommendations; the accommodation of both a focussed real-time response and peer review during the conference, as well as more considered views over longer time frames; and finally, the openness and transparency of it all means that participants take responsibility for their contributions and everyone can see what is happening, from start to finish.
There have been three Public Spheres to date: The first on Higher Bandwidth Networks, the second on Gov2.0 and the third on the ICT and Creative Industry Sectors Each Public Sphere has been written up with respect to the policy recommendations and the methodology and can be found on my web site: www.katelundy.com.au .
It is my hope that the success of the methodology will inspire government agencies and department to explore the possibilities. We are delighted to see other representatives and govt agencies around Australia already starting to run their own Public Spheres for community consultation and co-design of government directions and services.
In conclusion,
For the first time, Gov2.0 provides the tools to allow us to offer a citizen-centric approach to government service delivery. With the technology available we now we could, via collaboration with state and local government, provide the first truly integrated personal web page, that citizens populate themselves with their own links across all spheres of government service. We can let the citizens determine the level of interaction they are comfortable with.
The concept of government creating the platform to allow the community to interact, collaborate and shape responses to their own needs is a wonderful evolution of democracy. Openness and transparency provide important checks and balances against manipulation and distortion as well as being a principle that fosters trust and confidence.
The tools for such collaboration include the availability of public sector information and open standards applying though all information systems of government. I look to these new opportunities with a sense of purpose and hope.
I believe we are on the cusp of a broader mindset which will see people engaging far more in the public policy that shapes their life experience. Hence politics itself is transforming, making politicians far more accountable and accessible to the people they represent than even before.
The era of the digitally enabled society will, with both goodwill and good policy, see Australian citizens empowered to continue achieving great things. The opportunity to design this government of the future is with us now. We are ready for this challenge and I commend it to you.
Kate Lundy
