The original recommendations were derived from the Public Sphere process, and honed in the Public Sphere 2 wiki.

Please click through for a larger version of this image.

Recommendations arising from Public Sphere 2: Gov 2.0

We had some technical issues with this vodcast wchich resulted in us having to capture the video via a screencast, so our apologies for the low video quality. We are changes tools for the next vodcast.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Transcription and captions soon to follow.

Update: the event streaming and main online discussion will be at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/gov-2-taskforce-q-a

This event is for the handover of the finalised briefing paper and the recommendation voting results from the Government 2.0 Public Sphere held by Senator Kate Lundy July 22nd 2009.

http://www.katelundy.com.au/2009/07/29/briefing-paper-and-recommendation-endorsements-from-public-sphere-2-government-2-0/

The entire Australian Gov 2.0 Taskforce will be available for a Q&A on the results from the Public Sphere and to receive the final recommendations voting results. Senator Lundy will be interviewing the Taskforce, and accepting questions from either people in the room or remote participants.

The priorities are at http://au.nationbuilder.com/branches/9/priorities/top

If you wish to attend the physical event which will be in Canberra, please RSVP as there are limited numbers. Alternatively you can participate remotely by listening to the stream, posting questions on Twitter or emailing questions to pia.waugh at aph.gov.au

Date:       Friday the 21st August 2009
Time:      1:00pm till 2.30pm
Venue:

Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations
29 – 31 Brindabella Business Park
29 BBP Amenities Room
Please let the guard know you are there for the Gov 2.0 Taskforce event to be escorted to the meeting room.

RSVP:     http://publicsphere2-briefing.eventbrite.com/

We look forward to your participation in this final chapter of the Government 2.0 Public Sphere, and thank you again to everyone who has contributed!

The audio stream will be linked here on Friday the 21st. Please watch #publicsphere on Twitter for commentary on the day and to post your questions. If you don’t have a Twitter account, please email questions to pia.waugh at aph.gov.au by Thursday the 20th August COB. ]]> http://www.katelundy.com.au/2009/08/18/gov-2-0-briefing-paper-handover-and-qa-event/feed/ 1 http://www.katelundy.com.au/2009/07/29/briefing-paper-and-recommendation-endorsements-from-public-sphere-2-government-2-0/ http://www.katelundy.com.au/2009/07/29/briefing-paper-and-recommendation-endorsements-from-public-sphere-2-government-2-0/#comments Wed, 29 Jul 2009 05:19:57 +0000 Pia Waugh http://www.katelundy.com.au/?p=4152 The Government 2.0 Public Sphere briefing paper was finalised on the wiki a week ago, and now we have launched the prettified pdf version, complete with graphs, photos from the day, and a useful mind map!

The briefing paper has been sent to the Australian Gov 2.0 Taskforce, and in the coming weeks we’ll coordinate a Q&A event for the taskforce so people can discuss specifics of the report, as well as to hand over the findings from the report recommendations endorsements.

All recommendations from the report have been put into an online endorsement system, primarily to ensure one last public quality assurance of the reports findings, and also potentially to assist in the prioritisation of the recommendations.

The briefing paper references the talks from the Public Sphere Camp, comments from the original topic blog post, liveblogging (by Craig Thomler, Des Walsh and Nathanael Boehm), and the #publicsphere Twitter stream. The wiki draft of the paper was open for public contributions between 30th June and 22nd July 2009.

The endorsement system requires a login for transparency and accountability purposes, and is a beta system for Australian priority setting. We support the efforts of Australia 2 BETA, the Australian not-for-profit behind it, and thank the volunteers for setting us up a category for our event recommendations.

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.

All the speakers obviously put an enormous effort into their presentations. I am really grateful everyone was good-humoured about working within very tight time frames, and still able to convey such depth and substance! As a result, the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ was shared with hundreds of people both in the room and online.

In my closing remarks yesterday I outlined what happens next and I thought it would be good to blog those comments. I know Pia plans to post a follow-up too with respect to the details about what comes next.

In general, the Public Sphere continues online for a week. This is the opportunity for speakers to answer questions that were tweeted or blogged during or after the event. It is also a general invitation for members of the audience and/or people participating online to add their thoughts, comments, responses and more ideas in the blog.  I really encourage the conversation to continue so that we really get a feel for what you think are priorities and so forth.

Pia and I thought that because of the time constraints for presentations, we wanted to invite and encourage speakers who were not able to give their whole presentation to record it so we can publish it online. 

We hope to have the video up soon… maybe a few days, so please keep blogging.

After a week Pia we will post a draft report on a wiki for you all to contirbute to. This wiki will be open for 2 weeks.  This phase of public sphere is essential as the result of this collaration will be what we present to the Ministers and the newly formed Gov2.0 Taskforce , chaired by professor Nick Gruen.

I was really pleased that we had so many people who will be on the taskforce at the public sphere! Three were on the speakers list. Professor Brian Fitzgerald, Alan Noble, Martin Stewart-Weekes. Other members present were of course the Chair Professor Gruen, who gave a brief outline of the taskforce and Lisa Harvey, and Sebastian Chan was tweeting! Adrian Cunningham from the National Archive would have been there but I know he was giving a presentation in China!  Also, I want to send my regards to Alan Noble who is recovering from injury. Raul gave a terrific presentation on your behalf!

I want to thank again the wonderful sponsors that allowed us to stream the event live to facilitate online participation as well us providing the catering. Transact was the main sponsor and I sincerely thank Ivan Slavich and his team for their support. Thanks too to Agileware, BizCubed and Cisco. Public sphere is not a government funded initiative so we couldn’t have approached in the way we did without this sponsorship.

I also want to acknowledge and thank the hard working staff in sound and vision in the parliamentary departments. It was a sitting day in parliament and that means a very busy day for everyone. Their cooperation and support was essential to the success of public sphere.

Finally special thanks to the team that helped Pia in the organisational detail, program and setup: Stephen Collins, Craig Thomler, Rae Buerckner, Andrew Boyd and Jeff Waugh.

And to my intrepid staff, who are alwasy fantastic. Especially Pia whose talents are immense!

Kate

Those wanting  to contribute to the online discussion can do so by:

• Twitter using the #publicsphere tag
• Adding comments to the live blog (no account required)
• Uploading photos to Flickr with the “public sphere” or “publicsphere” tags

We will use  this Live page in future for other events. We’ve love your feedback.

Many thanks to TransACT for providing the live video stream for all our remote participants (as well as the wireless Internet access and catering!). And to our other sponsors (Cisco, BizCubed and Agileware) for contributing to the professonal recording of the day.

As recently as 2002 I remember being challenged about what was perceived as my inappropriately high level of enthusiasm for the Internet.  The bursting of the dot.com bubble saw many a cyber-sceptic adopt the smug smile of “I told you so”.

However, time has proven the cyber-sceptics very wrong indeed. Despite unreasonably expensive broadband and many broadband black holes, Internet connectivity continues to climb in Australia.  True to form, Australians continue to be early adopters of technology and clever innovators.

I believe the enthusiasm for public issues within social networking communities illustrates the broad craving for genuine engagement in the political process by many citizens. They were alienated for many years and the new options for online communications combined with a more engaged government has reinvigorated a much needed public discussion. Online social networking is driving this conversation and governments would be wise to listen.

With the change of federal government to Labor, the true potential of ubiquitous high bandwidth will be realised as the National Broadband Network is rolled out over the next few years and the digital divide will be dramatically narrowed. When considered alongside the latest statistics around Internet usage and users in Australia, this increases the importance of government participating online as a serious platform for citizen engagement.

Another important shift occurred at the last federal election: The Prime Minister gave a commitment to openness, accountability and transparency in Government. This commitment is reflected in the new Freedom of Information and Information Commissioner Bills prepared by Senator Faulkner in his former role as Special Minister for State. Senator Joe Ludwig has confirmed his commitment to press ahead with these important reforms.

It’s also about policy.  Bringing the additional openness and engagement that online tools can provide to the process of policy development facilitates transparency in policy-making. From my perspective, these shifts in policy have inspired social activism.

In both the US and UK we have seen strategic work around Open Government.

In the UK the government has focused strongly on citizen-centric delivery of government services, and are engaging with citizens for feedback, collaboration and innovation. UK citizens have responded by innovating when the opportunity has been presented, however with similar restrictive copyright being the norm for government data, innovation has been in some cases difficult. The Power of Information Taskforce, which was established in 2008 released a report outlining strategies for the UK government to improve digital engagement with citizens (POIT) in early 2009.

In the US there has been a strong focus on citizen engagement for citizen empowerment, and more open and transparent governance. The most public example is how citizens were empowered and engaged was the Obama election campaign last year, and they are employing similar strategies now for a large community consultation process around open government. The US has for some time had a policy position that government data should be freely and openly available (eg – the data.gov project) and so citizens and businesses have been able to innovate with US government data creating enormous value to the economy and society, particularly now with online tools readily and often freely available.

For the Australian government, an opportunity to construct  what I see as the three pillars of Open Government is presented. Each of these pillars assumes the basic principle of citizen engagement at every possible  opportunity to both empower people, and to ensure the results are actually appropriate and useful.

The three pillars of open government.

• Citizen-centric services
• Open and transparent government
• Innovation facilitation

The first pillar of open government is citizen-centric services. The principle is one of recognition that governments have a responsibility to serve the needs of the citizens they represent as best they can, and in a way that is individually meaningful to each person. A fundamental tenet of democracy, to be sure, but a more literal interpretation suggests a much higher priority on the quality of the interaction between citizen and government as services are delivered. 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. Service innovation is already happening and citizens ought be engaged directly by the Government to try new things.

The second pillar is open and transparent government. This pillar builds on the principles that citizens have a right to the information they need to inform themselves about public and political affairs, and to participate in the democratic processes in an informed way.  This second pillar is to ensure genuine means of engagement between citizens and the government in policy and decision-making. This is always harder than it sounds but it is essential to garner the wisdom of the crowd. It is vital that government engage with the broader community not just for a conversation, but in genuine partnership between political leaders and the people so we can as a society respond most effectively to the specific social and economic challenges communities confront. This localisation of policy solutions is essential to ensure relevance of government solutions to real situations, and essential to ensure a reasonable response time to new issues and emergencies. Open and transparent government will grow citizen trust and ultimately participation in policy development and government directions.

The third pillar is innovation facilitation, which 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. Public sector information ought to be in the public domain not just to facilitate innovation in the public and private spheres, but to enable individual citizens to make informed choices. Just to be clear, I am not talking about personal information that we expect to be private and secure. I am talking about general information about the places we live, the environment we live in, the things we do as a society. This principle should also extend to cultural collections for which the Commonwealth is custodian on behalf of the people of Australia. Transparency in this area would ensure that there is a culture of scrutiny and collaboration rather than a culture of secrecy. Finally, the need for sustainable access to all this information in the future is essential. Open standards and formats become the public insurance policy to ensure perpetual access to government data.

Together, these principles inform what I describe as the three pillars of Open Government. I am committed to pursuing all three and will build on the public policy advocacy I have been doing for many years both when I had the shadow ICT portfolio and since. This approach forms the heart of the motivation behind the Public Sphere events I have been hosting, a number of consultative forums and the local 2020 summit I hosted before that. All the way through I have been inspired by a number of active and inspirational people that have been instrumental. As a politician it is impossible to be across everything and I am the first to acknowledge that my path is one of continual learning. Only then can I be an effective advocate and participate in the sort of changes I have outlined.

I look forward to your thoughts and input as this post is part of an ongoing and very important conversation. The Internet combined with the many people who continue to innovate, collaborate and share continues to change everything for the better.

I know these issues will be more fully explored at Monday’s Public Sphere event: Gov2.0 and I can’t wait to hear the contributions.

Kate

The launch will take place at 11.40 am at Parliament House at the all day Government 2.0 Public Sphere event, which is hosted by Senator Kate Lundy and designed to improve government engagement with citizens through Web 2.0 tools.

The event leads with a specially recorded address from Andrew Stott, the Director of Digital Engagement in the UK, and the day consists of a variety of discussions and presentations from over 30 leaders in Government 2.0 policies and practices from Australia and overseas.

Speakers come from a range of backgrounds, with representation from notable organisations such as Google, Open Australia, ANU, University of Canberra, QUT, Bang the Table, the ABC and all three levels of government. The full schedule is now available on the event page below.

Logistics

The event is now booked to capacity, however, it will be streamed live over the Internet, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion online. All information for how to get involved in this digital engagement experiment is available from the Public Sphere website: http://www.katelundy.com.au/2009/05/29/public-sphere-2-open-government-policy-and-practice/

The Government 2.0 Public Sphere is coordinated by the Office of Senator Kate Lundy, and is generously sponsored by TransACT, BizCubed, Cisco and Agileware.

Information for journalists

A reserved area is available at the event for members of the media.  We invite you to review the schedule and attend as many sessions as you wish. Please contact us to reserve a place.

Further information

For additional information regarding the event, please contact Pia Waugh, Senator Lundy’s Office: 0400 966 453 or pia.waugh at aph.gov.au

For Minister Tanner’s office, please contact:
Nardia Dazkiw, 0418 144 690

For Minister Ludwig’s office, please contact:
Sarah Cosson, 0423 823 843

Click here to view the embedded video.

The potential to use technology to transform how government informs, consults and engages with citizens will be openly discussed on 22 June at Parliament House at the second Public Sphere event entitled Government 2.0: Policy and Practice for Australia.

This event – hosted by ACT Senator Kate Lundy and open for free to the public – will explore the how ‘government 2.0′ tools and practices can improve the effectiveness of government and deliver better outcomes for the community. Examples will include opening up access to government data and using web 2.0 tools to consult and collaborate with citizens on government policy and directions.

The event is an opportunity for experts and citizens alike to help map out a strategy for how government can make better use of the information, perspectives, insights and resources of citizens in responding to complex policy challenges through online technologies.

The event will hear from leading thinkers on government 2.0, and include an update from Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner MP on the Rudd Government’s approach to online engagement.

Senator Lundy said ‘I hope events like this Public Sphere event will encourage Government and politicians to start to think about new ways to engage with the community’.

‘This kind of engagement in public policy is a great way to represent different views and harness a broad range of expertise, particularly on topical issues of the day.’

The Public Sphere series is designed to put government in touch with community sentiment on important issues. The event is free for the public to attend, and all Australians can participate online with a range of different technologies such as email, live blogging, Twitter and video streaming – demonstrating how online engagement can promote community engagement.

A public wiki has been established for participants to contribute to a briefing paper highlighting the major themes arising from each Public Sphere event. When finalised this briefing will be submitted to appropriate channels in government.

Registration for the event is still available through http://publicsphere2.eventbrite.com/

For more information and event updates please visit http://www.katelundy.com.au/category/campaigns/publicsphere/open-gov/

This is the second Public Sphere event following a successful event held last month on ‘high speed bandwidth’. The outcomes of this event were recently presented by Senator Lundy to the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. Details at http://www.katelundy.com.au/category/campaigns/publicsphere/high-speed-bandwidth/

“I hope this project will evolve the idea of ‘public consultation’ to facilitate policy development through community collaboration with the public and in the public eye,” Senator Lundy said.

For additional information, please contact Pia Waugh on 0400 966 453 or pia.waugh at aph.gov.au

The event has inspired some spin out events which will feed into the Public Sphere both on the day and with their own outcomes. Once such event is on June 30th in Sydney – Conversation Cafe: Is there a Knowledge Dimension to Government 2.0? Other events will be held around Australia and in New Zealand, and will be linked here.

Please also visit the Senator’s Facebook fan page, her Twitter account, and her Youtube channel.

Please click through to the video to post reply videos, or leave comments below.

Transcript

In Australia, we’ve got three spheres of government: the Commonwealth, State and Territory, and local government.

And one of the real challenges is: each of those spheres of government have got something to say and have some kind of interface between them and the citizens.

The real challenge I think for the future though is to make all those spheres of government citizen-centric.

Open government means a government that puts information out there and makes it accessible in the first instance rather than people feeling frustrated that they can’t get what they want to know from the government.

Labor’s put forward a whole raft of initiatives in this area, but perhaps no more so succinctly than put by Senator Faulkner recently in his launch of information awareness month, where he talks about agencies and departments making public information, information held by the commonwealth, putting it into the public domain in the first instance.

What this means is that people will be more easily able to access the answers to their questions, the history behind decision-making in government, and hopefully provide more and more channels for them to effectively engage.

Technology has the capability, the capacity to be able to respond to a citizen’s needs.

We need to get the policy settings right at the back end to be able to deliver that citizen-centric service in an online environment.

We’ve seen some great examples overseas:

I know through the transition period of the new US president Barack Obama he did something called the “citizen’s book”.

And you can find these on the White House website in the newly named Office of Public Engagement.

And I think it’s a great example of effort to consolidate ideas, rate them – they actually had people come in and vote on the merits of the ideas put forward – and then he’s collated them in a publication that you can download in a pdf from that OPE White House site.

The next step, however, is how we actually use this technology to become I think a more effective democracy.

And how we truly engage with people. Not talk at them – as I’m doing – but get some feedback as well and try to create a genuine conversation.

And one of the most exciting things about what we are trying to achieve now is using the social networking environment to host those conversations or to facilitate those conversations between you and I.

So, what you’ll see from this particular site is a range of initiatives, trying to use different channels, using our public sphere which is an experiment in itself, to try and capture the thoughts and ideas of our constituency and get feedback on them as they’re being presented and then process that in such a way that it is pre-packaged and delivered to government through the right channels as a strong policy idea in itself.

So, the idea is not to waste your time, because we know many people have got good ideas, but provide a channel into government, that’s efficient in the best sense, that is peer reviewed by virtue of the way we present those ideas in the public sphere, with running a twitter feed, and a live blog alongside the presentation of those ideas.

A couple of weeks ago, we started with our first public sphere.
Our public sphere event was designed for people to really self-identify with their ideas around a given topic.

And our first one was: what are we going to use the National Broadband Network for?

The next public sphere we’re planning is going to relate to government 2.0.

And what we’re hoping to gather then is some really practical and stimulating ideas about how government can effectively participate in social networking without it being another flat medium that government uses just to deliver messages to the public.

I think if government is going to be effective in using social networking, we need to make sure that citizens feel as empowered through that process as they used to in functioning in social networking in a private sense.

Government’s going to have to change a bit of it’s attitude in that regard. And I know a lot of my colleagues are really mulling over these challenges as we speak.

So, how we do open government and how we make the digital revolution meaningful for citizens, is something that interests me greatly.