Yesterday Senator Lundy gave a speech in Parliament about the new opportunities presented to government with online tools and open community methods. She only got about half way through the speech in Parliament, so we decided to post the whole speech here.
Transcript
Today I would like to take this opportunity to recognise the ground-breaking work of the Government 2.0 Taskforce, the commitment to openness and transparency by our Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, the initiative and long term interest in open government by Minister Lindsay Tanner and the important inroads to open data from the office of Minister Joe Ludwig.
I’d also like to formally recognise the efforts of community organisations such as Open Australia who provide an invaluable service in making government information accessible to the general public, and of course the wonderful Gov 2.0 community in Australia who are passionate about open data and open government and who – through their efforts and advocacy – will drive real and positive change for us all.
I’d like to discuss some of the new opportunities presented to us for improving our democracy through online tools, open community methods, and through the enormous potential of a fully connected and empowered society.
Firstly, it is worth noting our community is increasingly going online because they are finding new opportunities for employment, peer support, education, services delivery and of course opportunities to engage better in their communities and areas of interest. Their expectations have started to change as they become online consumers and customers, and we can see almost every dustry responding to this new demand.
As elected representatives, we have always had the responsibility to engage with our constituents, to create opportunities for them to engage with us, and where possible to involve them in decision-making processes that affect their lives.
In Australia we have traditionally done quite well in citizen engagement and general openness, however we are finding ourselves having to adapt to the changing expectations of the community, and I believe we will also find online tools and open community methods to be extremely beneficial in the growth and evolution of our democratic system by presenting us some new opportunities.
I believe one opportunity lies around open data and the citizen innovation and value-adding that can result. Very recently around the country were a series of Mashup events, where software and web developers got together and created some truly innovative projects using government datasets in new and interesting ways.
A mashup is basically presenting and aggregating information in a new and useful way, for instance plotting the locations of health facilities or schools on an interactive map, or comparing Internet access statistics to family income numbers for a school assignment.
Opening up useful government datasets has proved extremely successful in the United States, where all government data – unless there is a security, privacy or business case – is made available publicly.
They have had several significant social and economic benefits from this approach. For instance, they found making geospatial data publicly available actually increased the value 20 times more than what they could have generated by commercialising the data themselves.
Generally the net economic and social impact of open government data is far greater than closed or commercialised data.
Open data doesn’t just mean putting a spreadsheet online. Serious consideration needs to go into permissive copyright, open data and metadata standards as well as ensuring data can be machine readable and aggregated so the data remains dynamic and updatable.
Open data creates both the opportunity for public value-adding, as well as the opportunity for government departments and agencies to more readily share information to better deliver services to citizens. Which brings me to the next opportunity.
The second opportunity presented is the ability to deliver truly citizen-centric services. Many of our government departments and agencies deliver great services for citizens already, and the online platform basically can enhance their existing efforts. Once you have access to geospatial information and other associated metadata you can bring information to life by presenting it in a contextually useful way to the citizen. For instance, a citizen can input their postcode and then have a map presented to them with the services closest to them. It changes the game in that it means services can be personalised and more accessible and useful to citizens.
Our Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd spoke on this recently in a speech to the Institute for Public Administration, saying:
The first impact if changing technology and changing expectations is in day to day service delivery – which is the starting point for improving the average Australian family’s encounter with government.
The Prime Minister mentioned Centrelink as “a model of a modern, more client-focused arm of government service delivery” and I fully concur.
They have had significant consultation with citizens around service delivery and even emergency response strategies, and have managed to nicely balance a commitment to good user accessibility and a highly functional web presence, with appropriate authorisation and security such that citizens can get general information as well as highly personalised services such as accessing personal records and submitting required information.
They are to be commended on their effort, and it is wonderful to see many other agencies and departments starting to look at how they can more personalise their services through extensive use of maps and metadata.
The third and I believe most exciting opportunity presented to us is that of a more open and participatory democracy, an environment where government can co-design policy future directions in collaboration with citizens. We have some work to do in this area.
Again I would like to briefly reference Prime Minister Rudd who spoke about a recent report launched on the DPMC website comparing the Australian public service to eight of the world’s best public services:
The report also found Australia’s public service to be less adept than other nations at incorporating non-government expertise and the views of citizens into its policy development and service design process.
This is a clear area where we have a great opportunity to leverage the reach and capacity of online tools and methods to engage with citizens and draw them into government policy development.
In my office we have been experimenting with our “Public Spheres” initiative, wherein we are crowdsourcing policy ideas, with some excellent results! 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”.
I believe that the combination of online tools, social media and open community practices present government with a new range of opportunities to get in touch with the needs of communities.
The Public Sphere process is roughly as follows, and incorporates a number of online tools and other technologies:
- We propose a topic and approach the appropriate Minister or department/agency to see whether community input could be useful. Then we launch the topic on a blog, and encourage people to post their feedback, ideas, talk submissions and any existing writing on the topic. We also actively find and engage with interest groups and individual champions to develop a community of interest which can engage in the topic.
- We run a semi-traditional conference, which is also made completely accessible online through video streaming and by pushing the discussions online wherever possible. This event consists of talks from the community on the topic, and is meant as a focused point in time for people to put forward their views and provide a very basic peer review on other ideas put forward. This gives something of a sanity check to ideas going forward.
- Finally we aggregate all the input online in a wiki, and/or ideas management tool where people can discuss, modify, rate or add to the input we’ve pulled together. All talks, Tweets, blog comments, posts, documented discussion and other input to the Public Sphere is taken into account, and all interested parties are encouraged to oversee and contribute to the final briefing paper. The briefing paper is then handed over to the appropriate Minister or department/agency.
The results have been great. The three Public Spheres were on the topics of High Speed Bandwidth, Government 2.0 and most recently ICT & Creative Industry Development. All three have yielded extremely useful briefing papers, each with a list of policy recommendations for the three Ministerial offices involved. The most recent Public Sphere on ICT & Creative industry development is being formally handed over to the office of Minister Carr later this week.
Here I would like to add a short personal thank you to Minister Conroy, Minister Tanner, Minister Ludwig, Nicholas Gruen – the chair of the Gov 2.0 Taskforce – and Minister Carr for their interest and support with the Public Sphere’s to date.
I have always held that if empowered to contribute in a meaningful way, so long as the barrier to entry is as low as possible, then the broader community will do so and will provide enormous value.
This process is very much in its infancy, and yet I’ve already had enormous support both in Australia and from overseas for this initiative. I am very pleased to see others starting to pick up the model, including Penny Sharpe from the NSW Legislative Assembly, the Australian National University, Queensland University of Technology and now the Department of Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy with the much anticipated Realising our Broadband Potential Forum in December.
I hope to see in future a way to make final policy development more collaborative such as we have tried to achieve with Public Sphere. I look forward to further improving the Public Sphere recipe for community engagement and consultation, and I particularly look forward to co-designing the future directions and decisions of government.
So these are but three areas of opportunity I believe will fundamentally improve our democracy and society. Of course in all of this lies the assumption that our community will broadly be online in the first place to engage. The Digital Divide has been a considerable social equity issue, and I’m believe for the first time it looks like it could be bridged. The combination of the new infrastructural platform of the National Broadband Network and the skills development and access delivered through the Digital Education Revolution are a great start. The Government 2.0 agenda also opens up the door to fundamentally revisit accessibility and usability of government services online. Online tools and open communities also offer some groundbreaking ways to bridge the divide for people with a disability, which is very exciting. I truly believe that unless all people can have equal access without those with special needs having to pay a premium, then we will always have a Digital Divide.
If we bridge the Digital Divide and embrace online tools and methods in government, then we will have a stronger democracy, combined with true social equity for all Australians.
