This morning I presented at the National Records and Information Officers’ Forum 2010 in Melbourne. The Forum also had speakers from a range of private and public organisations covering innovations in digital record-keeping, standards and future directions.

My presentation traversed a range of issues including the importance closing the digital divide through the national braodband network, my three pillars of open government, the outcomes of the Gov2.0 taskforce, some of the technical nuts and bolts for government addressing the digital transformation of their business and closed with some of the specific challenges to be overcome if we are to achieve an open, engaged relationship between citizen and government.

There was time for a few questions at the end and a few themes developed really quickly, including the need for more specificity in standards for record keeping. This was seen as important and directly relevant to compliance: how can organisations comply if there is ambiguity in the standards?  I was particularly interested in this given my role as a parliamentary member of the National Archives Advisory Council.

In order to learn more from those with experience I committed to doing this post to keep the conversation we started at the forum going, so I look forward to your views and insights into this important issue.

Update: Speech overview of main points

The pillars of open government

1. Citizen-centric services:
   The three spheres of government in Australia: local, state/territory and federal, has over the years created inordinate complexity for citizens organising their lives and an avalanche of information and forms to shift through to get anywhere. We now have the technology and the wherewithal to resolve this citizen interface with government, regardless of the complexity behind the scenes.
2. Citizen engagement:
   This pillar builds on the principles that citizens have the right to participate fully in the democratic process, and by engaging public expertise and opinions, government can make better decisions. It is vital that government engage with the broader community not just for a conversation, but in genuine partnership between political leaders, government bureaucrats and the Australian people so we can – as a society – respond most effectively to the specific social and economic challenges communities confront. Localisation of policy solutions by tapping into the wisdom of the crowd, ensure relevance of government solutions to real situations. EG: Local knowledge and the ability to tap into it, is essential to reasonable response times to emergencies.
3. Open and Transparent government:
   This refers to the government responsibility to ensure the opportunities are made available for public and private innovation that adds value to government data and systems. This of course takes into account the fact that there are specific data and systems that cannot be openly accessible where there are privacy, security or commercial responsibilities. However, as has been evident in the US for many years, open access to government data can dramatically increase the value created from the data both socially and economically. This means the society as a whole benefits from access to the data. It creates opportunities for new public and private innovation, as well as places into the hands of citizens the information and transparency they need to trust in the work of government, and to make good decisions that affect their lives. A general policy of openness in this area would create a culture of scrutiny and collaboration rather than a culture of secrecy, and policy changes in this space towards openness would simplify knowledge management as well as create significant opportunities for public innovation, aggregation, mashups and other activities of economic and social value.

I concentrated on the last of these pillars in this talk, as open data and the application of open principles creates great opportunities for the records sector. Opportunities to contextualise, meaningfully archive and present, aggregate, contrast and ensure sustainable access to important knowledge for which you are our trusted caretakers.

The Technical nuts and bolts

I’d outlined a few basic technical principles that I believe are important in this area:

• Sustainability – All government data should be stored in openly documented and freely available standards to ensure future access to government data as well as access for people who may not run the same software or systems. In this way, Open Standards and formats become the public insurance policy to ensure perpetual access to government data.
• Discoverability – Government information and services should be easy to find, be it through websites or search engines. This means establishing good systems and processes for metadata, geospatial information, Search Engine Organisation and ensuring information is translated from government language into English, just to name a few. It also means developing skills around how the Internet and search engines work at a basic level.
• Personalisation – with the immense about of metadata you can generate, especially around geographical information, you have the opportunity to dramatically personalise data delivered to citizens. The combination of internal metadata, and information you can collect or request from your users means you can put the citizen at the centre of each exchange, and more rapidly and efficiently get them where they want to go. For example, imagine your website prompts visitors for their postcode, work status or year of birth – all optional of course – you can then return to them the actual programs or initiatives in their area related to their specific circumstances. Delivering better results will mean growing citizen trust in and use of your services.
• Automation – where possible you should consider how people, or more accurately the systems people build can interact with your data. For instance, you should ensure data can be subscribed to, is updated in a way that can be tracked digitally, is machine searchable and can be aggregated by others. If you are releasing data sets, is the data consistent such that a program written to analyse one data set can be used on a later release of the same data? There are many considerations here, but the more automatable your data is, the more useful it becomes.
• Interoperability – Government applications and websites should be based on open APIs and use open protocol standards to ensure interoperability with other systems is possible, especially in the long term.
• Trust – Government systems need to instil trust in the general public particularly as data sets are opened up and more government services move online. Using software that can be verified and scrutinised such as Open Source tools, can greatly improve technical trust in government systems, especially in situations where system integrity is especially important, such as voting software.
• Updateability – If you have a data set where you would like to receive updates from the public, how easy is this? Can you update the data easily yourself? Try to plan out your online information strategy such that data can be easily updated, and such that – if desired – accepting public contributions to data is not an onerous task. For instance, consider putting a document online in an editable format (like a wiki) rather than just publishing a PDF.
• Sharing – government should be better about leveraging existing efforts and technologies, whether it be within another department or publicly available. Where possible, technical resources should be shared between government departments and jurisdictions. This should include the sharing of knowledge, of software, of bespoke developments, or documentation and certainly of best practices. Currently technical people within departments and agencies either can’t collaborate outside their area, or do so subversively. In either case, we are not making best use of our people or resources and our productivity, innovation and cost-effectiveness unfortunately all suffers as a result.

This last point is especially important. Government as a whole is in the unfortunate habit of defaulting to external expertise for direction or reinforcement, but every department, agency and indeed many offices have within them skills and expertise that can be better leveraged for better results. You may be surprised by what people can achieve if given the chance.

Some open data challenges

Some potential risks are being discussed in our Public Sector about Government 2.0 that are relevant to the records sector:

1. Compliance – it is difficult for government to ensure compliance across the board, particularly when there is often room for interpretation in the implementation. Achieving and maintaining full compliance is a huge challenge and one where often resources and direction simply aren’t available.
2. Getting on the front foot – it is often difficult for government to be proactive, because people are usually so busy keeping up with the normal workload of service delivery.
3. Human resources – Engaging with people online and creating truly citizen-centric services all takes time and resources. Re-organisation and re-prioritising to ensure the online engagement is not the poor cousin initially, and when the load shifts, there is a useful plethora of tools to help. Sharing knowledge or experience will be critical to sustain up to date capacity.
   Also, on this note – if data is stored in open standards in systems that are interoperable, then it becomes easier at a practical to share appropriate data across agencies to better deliver services and create a more seamless experience for citizens. For instance, the City of Toronto in Canada established a “311” phone service, where citizens can call a single number to find out anything from the nearest pool facility, or garbage delivery days to information about the health services (http://www.toronto.ca/311/about.htm). A knowledge base is continually updated with results from people’s queries, also created a useful online knowledge repository for people to find answers to questions. Achieving this kind of seamless service delivery requires agencies and departments to be able to share information easily and quickly.
4. Privacy – as identity theft becomes an increasing problem, concerns about privacy will rise, so as we start to engage with citizens online, citizens need to be confident their privacy is protected. Equally, when it matters identity will need to be authenticated. Of course not all interactions with citizens requires authentication as often citizens are simply after information such as the nearest childcare availability, hospital, or how their tax treatment may change if they get married or divorced.
5. Security – there are concerns that Government 2.0, and indeed eGovernment open up a can of worms for security, however I maintain that the use of open principles, and including standard opened source transparent methodology creates a more secure environment, if the technology can be completely scrutinised, it means it can be trusted technology. Proprietary software unfortunately does not allow the same amount of scrutiny and trust must be placed in a company.
6. Active threats – there will also be active threats to government. Be they against critical infrastructure or mission critical information systems. Our security authenticity requires the level of investment to protect against such threats and attacks. There is a case to be made that by empowering citizens to collaborate with government, perhaps, as software developers like to say “many eyes makes all bugs shallow”, and we can create a more secure environment through greater transparency.
7. Loss of control – when talking about opening up data sets in particular, one concern is about the misuse, or even just mistaken use of data that may present incorrectly and inadvertently create some issue. The answer to this is reasonably simple: when opening up datasets, government hosts the original dataset which becomes an authorative reference which reduces that risk.
8. Digital Divide – finally we have the concern about the potential increase in the digital divide once we move more online. However, with ubiquitous and high speed internet access across Australia, combined with the plummeting costs of hardware, the proliferation of online mobile devices and of course the enormous investment into computers for schools, I’m excited to say we are getting closer to a genuine digital democracy.
   With this in mind, I would still strongly encourage you to ensure you don’t create new Digital Divides through inaccessible online information or services. Accessibility is one of the most important elements in your digital strategy, and this includes access for people with a disability, people with low bandwidth access (such as mobile phones), people with different language needs, people with low technical skills and access to information in the most convenient way for them – eg, a combination of email, RSS & Twitter for people to subscribe to news.

Tagged: egovernment, gov20, open data, open government, open source, open standards, privacy