I’m sad because this is my last day working for Senator Kate Lundy as her IT Policy Advisor and inhouse geek. Kate headhunted me almost 3 years ago at BarCamp Canberra, though we had known each other for a few years beforehand from when she was the Shadow Minister for IT. I was quite wary of going to work in a political office, but my curiosity about how the machine works combined with a desire to help make good tech policy and an immense amount of respect for Kate brought me into one of the most interesting, fun and challenging jobs I’ve ever had.

I particularly wanted to better understand the legislative and executive arms of government. How ideas turn into policy and policy into implementation. As a result, along with doing my job I’ve spent time researching the history of democracy, of Australian politics, of the ideological and historical premise of all the major Australian parties and the interaction between party politics and democracy over the years.  I’ve also spent time coming to understand some of the layout, responsibilities and challenges of a multi-tiered system of government.

I have learnt a great deal in this job about government, but also about human nature. Working in an electoral office gives one some insight to the difficulties faced by many, but also some insight to the challenge in maintaining a constructive and respectful dialogue. I think it is human nature to try to boil issues down to black and white. But we are essentially grey creatures with enormous complexity, and I think democracy is about finding ways to have a transparent, informed, respectful and constructive dialogue with all the people on complex policies and implementation, so governments can best implement the best policies for the communities they serve.

I have been lucky to work for a politician who is passionate and knowledgeable about technology and good policy. She has been a valuable teacher and mentor. I shall always be thankful for the wisdom, patience, compassion, critical thinking, strategy and policy development I have learnt in this role and from Kate. I’m sure these skills will continue to serve me well.

My work on Kate’s website, the Public Spheres, Open Government, assisting Kate in linking together different tech policies across a variety of portfolios are all things I am proud of. I also feel very lucky to have met and worked with such inspirational people from many different walks of life through this role and in Kate’s office.

Meanwhile, having developed some understanding of the legislative and executive arms of government, I realised that I wanted to have more experience in the administrative arm of government. I had done some tech work in a previous life within departments but always as the outsourced person. I knew I wanted to really get in and contribute to the public service, as well as learn more about the implementation of policy and the delivery of government services to citizens.

As such, I’m excited to say I am hopefully moving into a role in the APS in the coming weeks and I hope my efforts there will be broadly useful to others in the APS. I can’t say more at this stage as it is being finalised at the moment, but I’ll update this post in the weeks ahead with more information.

By working within the APS, I hope to get a better personal understanding of the specific challenges facing the APS with regards to technology, and hopefully assist in developing strategies to be a more agile, responsive and citizen-centric public service. I will also continue helping to move the Open Government agenda ahead both in my own time and, where appropriate, within my new role. My commitment to Open Government (and Gov 2.0) lies in my understanding that it provides a path to a public service and democracy that is most relevant to, engaged with, responsive to, representative of and accountable to its citizens.

I’ll finish by saying that after three years in her office, my respect for Kate has only grown. She is a person who has engaged fully in her role with integrity, responsibility, grace and a firm grip on her own principles. She is a politician that makes me believe politics isn’t just a dirty word and I wish we had more like her. Even in spite of the fact the last time I socialised with her, I ended up with a fractured scaphoid! I have learnt a keen respect for the torque of a 2 stroke, especially on a motocross track.

My shiny black carbon fibre cast. Shiny!

So, I’m diving into the deep end and I look forward to seeing how well I swim. Wish me luck

Below are my notes from the talk I gave at OSDC (Open Source Developers Conference) 2011 on open government, where I tried to go into some of the practicalities of open government implementation and projects. I had a great response from the packed room, so thanks everyone for attending (and for encouraging me to blog <hide>)

The changing relationship between citizens and government

Most citizens have a very limited relationship to government. We tend to see government as an amorphous body that removes our garbage, provides our hospital and local school, and makes us pay taxes. Politicians tend to get a pretty bad rap, and are assumed to be simultaneously stupid and extremely strategic.

But “government” in Australia is a large and complex entity run by a democratic Parliament, this makes it a tool of the people, an entity accountable to its citizens.

The proliferation of and now mainstream usage of the Internet, brings citizens closer to governments than ever. It also makes governments more accountable and transparent (whether intentionally or not). So the government is now more a tool of the citizen, and as such we need, as citizens, to engage with governments.

As citizens we are more empowered than ever. We can research, make public comment, self-organise into clusters of interest and advocacy, cross check facts, hold people to their word, develop new ways to do things and much more. The line has blurred between governments and citizens. Indeed, we are starting to even properly accept the idea that people who work in government are, themselves, citizens.

Citizens have much to contribute to government policy, implementation and vision, and governments are just starting to understand and engage with that opportunity.

Gov 2.0 is about using the new technologies at our disposal, primarily the Internet, to co-design the next era of democracy in collaboration with citizens. It is about a more transparent, accountable, engaged, participatory and responsive government approach to serving the needs of citizens.

Open Government and Gov 2.0 are often used interchangeably, but “open government” has been used for many years, usually to relate to things like Freedom of Information laws and transparency in legislative processes, whereas Gov 2.0 is more specifically looking at how we can use modern technologies and communications to make government more open, engaged with, relevant to and ultimately co-created with citizens.

“There’s a clear vision from the top, not only in the US and the UK, but in many other countries, that now is the time for government to reinvent itself, to take the old idea of government “for the people, by the people, and of the people” to a new level.” — Tim O’Reilly

In Australia we have a strong, highly skilled and completely awesome Gov 2.0 community. These are people who work in, for or with government to implement Gov 2.0. This community has people who are into software/web development, user experience, accessibility, open data, mobile development, public engagement and much more.

It is a community driven by the ideals of open government, and a really inspiring and exciting community to be involved in. I highly recommend to any of you interested in following or getting involved in Gov 2.0 to check out the following:

• The Gov 2.0 Google Group mailing list - https://groups.google.com/group/gov20canberra?hl=en
• GovCamp’s – a great opportunity for Gov 2.0 practitioners to get together, share knowledge and find ways to collaborate. They are starting to run all around Australia after I ran the first one in October. The next one is this weekend in Sydney (BarCampNSW)
• Follow the #gov2au hashtag on Twitter, and some notable Twitter users in this space are @CraigThomler, @trib, @chieftech, @davidjeade, @gov2qld, @sherro58 & @lisa_cornish from AGIMO, @FCTweedie & @OAICgov from OAIC, and many more including me @piawaugh . I’ve got a far more complete Gov 2.0 list on Twitter that I’m continually adding to that may be useful at http://twitter.com/#!/list/piawaugh/gov-2-0
• There is a Gov 2.0 Ning group and OzLoop Ning. Craig Thomler also runs a good blog worth subscribing to. Craig and Kate Carruthers put together a website on Gov 2.0 and the Centre for Policy Development did a great collection of essays by people in the community on Gov 2.0 in 2009 which is available online.

What is Gov 2.0

Most elements of what we call Gov 2.0 can be boiled down to three concepts:

1. Open Data
2. Citizen Centric Services
3. Public Engagement

Open Data

Open data is about taking the vast majority of government datasets and information which doesn’t have privacy or security issues, and putting it all online in the most useful way possible. In a practical sense, for data to be most useful (both to the public but equally important for other parts of governments to be able to leverage the data), it needs to have permissive copyright (such as Creative Commons BY), be machine readable, time stamped, subscribable, available in an openly documented format (open standard), have useful metadata and wherever possible have good geospatial information available.

This last point about geospatial information is vital for making data interactive and personalised to a citizen’s needs, as it helps aggregate and map information relevant to where a citizen is.

Achieving open data is a difficult process. There are three key steps to take, each with its own challenges:

1. Just get it online! This stage is where an organisation just tries to get online whatever they can. It often means the licensing is not entirely clear or permissive, the data format is whatever the organisation uses (which may or may not be useful to others), the data may be slightly out of date and it often isn’t clear who the contact for the data set is making followup hard. This stage is however, extremely important to encourage as it is where every organisation must begin and build upon. It is also important because to achieve quality open data, major changes often need to be made to systems, workflows, technologies and organisational culture. Access to imperfect data in the short term is far better than waiting for perfection.
2. High quality data! This is the stage where issues around quality publishing of data have been teased out, and an organisation can start to publish quality data. It is hopefully the point at which the systems, culture, workflows and technologies used within the organisation all facilitates open data publishing, whilst also facilitating appropriate settings for secure data (such as sensitive privacy or security information). This stage takes a lot of work to achieve, but also means a far lower cost of publishing data, which helps amongst other things, keep the cost of FoI compliance down.
3. Collaborative data! This final stage of open data is where an organisation can figure out ways to integrate and verify input from the public to data sets to improve them, to capture historical and cultural context and to keep information up to date. This is also a challenging step but where government departments and agencies can engage the public collaboratively, we will see better data sets and greater innovation.

There are examples of each of these stages, but it is important to remember that they are stages, not static. Some good examples of open data initiatives in Australia include:

• data.gov.au, the Office of Spatial Data Management, the BoM climate data, the Living Atlas of Australia, Mapping our ANZACs, the Powerhouse museum online collection database and the GovHack initiative.

It is also important to consider the broad ramifications of open data. One can think of many positive case studies for open data. Examples of transparency or innovation or a strong public record. But there can be unforeseen negative consequences. For example, I heard of a case where the mapping of the ocean above Australia was made public, and within a very short period of time a particular species of fish was driven almost to extinction by fishers who used the data to plan their fishing season.

This is not a reason to not pursue open data, but rather a reminder to always consider things critically and thoughtfully.

Data visualisation

Nowadays I can’t overemphasise the importance of data visualisation. As a technical person I was quite cynical in the value of data visualisation. It seemed a waste of time when you can just read the data. But using data visualisation tools effectively can create two core benefits:

• Informed public narrative – most people are really busy. Busy with their jobs, their personal lives, their hobbies. So expecting them to take time to really understand complex issues is not only unrealistic, it is unreasonable. Presenting information visually is a great way to lower the barrier to understanding and then engaging in an informed public debate. People will understand in seconds the information from a well constructed visualisation, but to glean the same information from papers and spreadsheets takes a lot longer.
• Policy development & load testing – interactive data visualisation tools such as SpatialKey, Tableau or one of the many great FOSS tools available create a new way to engage with and glean new knowledge from data. By being able to pull together many different data sets into a single space, one can then explore, test and experiment with policy ideas to determine the effectiveness of a policy to meet its goals.

Citizen Centric Services

Citizen centric services is about putting the user experience first to create a personalised and unique experience for citizens. It is better for citizens as it makes their experience better and more seamless, and it is better for government who can more effectively serve the needs of citizens. Citizen centric services requires good data and metadata, especially good geospatial data as location information is an extremely effective way to personalise government services, information and projects for citizens.

Constant feedback loops that engage the input and ideas from citizens are extremely important to establish effective citizen centric services, and to ensure the iterative improvements over time to keep services relevant and responsive to the changing needs of the population.

Some examples of citizen centric services include:

• Australia.gov.au, MyRegion, MyChild, MySchool and there are some good community examples including OpenAustralia, GotGasto and Know Where You Live.

Public engagement

Effective, constructive and collaborative public engagement greatly improves the capacity of government to build the knowledge and experience of citizens into policy and projects. Public engagement strategies work best when they are underpinned by strong community development, a clear and collaboratively developed goal, a genuine interest in the inputs of others, and a process that is as low a barrier to entry to engage in as possible.

Basically we are moving towards an era of democratic and governmental co-design.

There are some great examples of public engagement out there, including our Public Sphere consultations, the Queensland Police use of Facebook throughout the natural disasters a year ago (which showed how social media is great for timely updates, but also for managing misinformation quickly and crowdsourcing to help most effectively deploy resources in disaster management), the Census 2011 social media strategy, the growing number of public consultations on government policy and strategy such as from the Gov 2.0 Taskforce and much more. The need for public engagement has also been pushed in several recent policy agendas. The GovHack events last year were also great as they showed how effective engagement with the general public can result in highly innovative and rapidly developed new applications and knowledge when open data is made available and when usage of that data is encouraged.

FOSS and government

FOSS has provided a natural fit for a lot of Open Government initiatives, due to the widespread use of open standards, the ability to rapidly deploy, the large developer and support communities around mature FOSS projects such as Drupal and WordPress, the competitive and thus reliably sustainable nature of commercial support around mature FOSS projects, and, most relevantly, the cross over of values and practices between Open Government and FOSS.

In January 2011 AGIMO released the Australian Government Open Source Software Policy which has three principles:

1. Principle 1: Australian Government ICT procurement processes must actively and fairly consider all types of available software.
2. Principle 2: Suppliers must consider all types of available software when dealing with Australian Government agencies.
3. Principle 3: Australian Government agencies will actively participate in open source software communities and contribute back where appropriate.

The third principle in particular represents a fundamental shift in how government sees and engages with FOSS, technology and the community. It is very exciting! It clearly demonstrates the value of collaboration so prevalent in the Open Government agenda.

In July 2011, after six months consultation, AGIMO also released the Australian Government Open Source Software Guide V2, a really useful document for departments and agencies to help them comply to the policy directive where they must consider Open Source in their procurement processes.

Both the Open Source Policy and the Guide are available along with other information at http://www.finance.gov.au/e-government/infrastructure/open-source-software.html

Open Government policies

The Open Government or Gov 2.0 agenda is nicely encapsulated in the two major policy documents, Ahead of the Game and the Gov 2.0 Taskforce Report. These two reports form the blueprint of Gov 2.0 for the Australian public service.

It is also worth looking at the Office of the Information Commissioner paper Principles of Open Public Sector Information and other resources at http://www.oaic.gov.au/, the Attorney General’s Principles of IP (which explicitly encourages Creative Commons), and the various useful web policies provided by AGIMO including the Gov 2.0 Primer.

Conclusion

Open Government and Gov 2.0 both represent an ideal.

They represent a goal for us to be continually aiming for but they are not achieved with a single switch of policy. Achieving true open government is necessarily a constant and evolving challenge, and given I am here speaking at an Open Source Developer’s conference, we all understand the difference between an ideal, and striving for the ideal whilst operating within reality.

Government won’t get it exactly right all the time every time, but we are in an extremely exciting time for open culture, and with a government position in Australia that firmly supports openness through policy, in legislation and in implementation of projects, we need to continue to encourage and support progress.

When you are sitting on top of a hill, watching people walk up towards you it’s more constructive to lend them a hand than to kick them down when they are only half way up No matter how tempting it may seem

Thank you.

Anyway, seeing my passion and expertise is around technology, I do try to keep across what is happening as much as I can. Most of the big ICT companies are pushing the cloud computing pitch extremely hard, but I’ve found the moment you ask many of them questions about privacy, data portability, data export & archival, open standards, interoperability and issues of jurisdiction, just to name a few, they seem to baulk.

I think there are certainly a lot of opportunities in ‘the cloud’, but I think there is a lot of hype around this topic and I wanted to jot down a few thoughts that I think people should take into consideration when looking into cloud computing strategies. This is not a highly technical overview, but rather a bit of a mythbuster for those without a technical background to help in navigating the hype.

Sam Johnston pointed out to me earlier tonight a useful basic approach to ensuring you get an open cloud service which provides for the interoperability, portability and strategic control you want to maintain when moving to the cloud. If you have any good resources about cloud computing, please add it to the comments

I also strongly recommend you read the Open Cloud Manifesto which talks about this issue in greater depth, and touches upon other elements to consider when moving to the cloud.

Where is the cloud?

The term cloud computing came from the idea of services being delivered over the Internet, because the Internet has traditionally been represented  on network diagrams as, you guessed it, a cloud. Some people use the term as the new SOA (and for all those who had to deal with the onslaught of SOA hype, you may enjoy http://soafacts.com/) and cloud can mean pretty much anything, which is why it is important to clarify what your vendor is trying to sell you. After all, services running in the cloud are still running on servers somewhere, so moving stuff to the cloud is moving stuff to someone else’s infrastructure and hoping they do a better, cheaper job.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t use cloud computing, but you should be very careful to understand exactly what you are getting, and you should be strategic. Charles Stross fans will already be familiar with the idea of the separation of data and processing power, and the cloud can provide enormous processing power without you having to necessarily hand over the reins to your data or your technology strategy. Cloud computing is not an all or nothing option.

Personally I believe you should always choose the best of breed tool for the job, committing to open standards and interoperability, and then you can mash tech together for your exact best needs rather than shifting to and away from cumbersome large solutions that try to be everything, and end up doing nothing particularly well, but I’ll leave that for another blog post

Saving the environment?

Whilst there is certainly an argument to consolidating old and largely unused hardware to reduce your carbon footprint and electricity bills, moving things into the cloud does not magically reduce your carbon footprint to zero. As mentioned, there are still servers out there, so the environmental benefits can be calculated by how much better the vendor is at efficiently using their infrastructure, than you. Again, it is just worth investigating the detail to understand the actual environmental impact, if this is important to you. Remember, refrigeration is a big contributor to carbon emissions, so it isn’t just about the hardware

How much money can I save?

There are certainly some great opportunities to save money by using cloud computing for some of your systems. Often you can get online services that can be cheaper than the cost of maintaining and running your own systems. It might be worthwhile to consider the cost against that of shared services under your control though rather than looking straight to the “cloud”. For instance, in Australia there is a large amount of projects around government data centre consolidation, where some costs savings can be found but the data, software, infrastructure and strategy stays under their control.

It is also worth considering the exit cost of any new solutions. Can you get access to export your data at any time, is it safely archived somewhere you can access in the unlikely but possible case of your cloud provider folding, or a contract disagreement? Can you migrate your data/service from the cloud vendor to another vendor/solution relatively easily? These are all important considerations when faced with “the cloud will save you money”.

What about my data?

What format is your data stored in within the cloud? Physically where is the data and what are you legal obligations in relation to data? This is an important concern for government where you shouldn’t store particular data sets outside of your legal jurisdiction, and government departments and agencies often have quite stringent privacy and other obligations.

Can you get immediate access to the most recent data if the “cloud” dissipates (had to make a joke like this sometime, sorry)? Where is the data archived? If you can export your data, is it available in a format that other applications can use?

All these are important considerations, because if your data is being updated in the cloud, but is not truly retrievable, you have a real problem.

The silver lining

There are a lot of opportunities to be found in cloud computing and you will find many, many blogs and presentations espousing the benefits of cloud computing. I wanted to write a short blog post to help people consider some of the issues. If you choose to move some stuff into the cloud, you are choosing to hand over the keys to your most treasured possession, so you need to make sure you aren’t locking yourself out.

You aren’t powerless in this transaction. You need to know what you want, know your exit strategy, be sure that your cloud solution is open enough to be flexible and interoperable, be comfortable with how much control you are giving up, and be sure you retain enough control to meet your obligations.

If you are comfortable with all of this, you can engage confidently with cloud vendors and demand what you need rather than being content with what you are offered

Beware the hype

“Government 2.0” is a current buzz phrase, and when you hear it used, it could mean just about anything from having a Facebook account to a fully geospatial integrated citizen-centric solution for delivery of services. There is a lot of hype about, and you need to ensure when you are engaging with experts in this space that they really know what they are talking about. You also need to carefully consider new products and services in this space to ensure they meet your strategic needs. Simple and easy solutions, particularly the solutions your users can engage with and aggregate will be more used and more useful.

Cross reference advice you receive, build relationships with several people/groups/companies in this area, get your people involved in the community, and pool your resources with others in government to help you.

Finding and pooling useful resources and advice

AGIMO have a useful Web Publishing guide which is currently being updated to include useful Gov 2.0 technologies and methodologies, and they are trying to aggregate case studies in this space, so talk to them about what you are trying to achieve and to connect with other agencies in the same boat. Also find and engage directly with the community (see below).

Start a Govdex (or other collaborative) group to share experiences with other agencies, and to pool the wisdom available within agencies and externally. Start to list helpful resources, reading materials, people to talk to. It may be useful to create an advisory panel with reputable people in this space for government engagement and collaboration. This will help you have a more rounded and informed approach in creating your own Gov 2.0 strategy.

Also, keep an eye on the great work and very interesting blog of the newly announced Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce. They will also be creating a report within 6 months or so which will be very useful for government policy in this space.

Senator Lundy ran a recent “Public Sphere: Government 2.0” event which had several hundred contributors to the event, blog, Twitter-feed and live-blogging. The briefing paper is in the process of being finalising with public consultation on a wiki, and it has useful and well-considered ideas and recommendations for government from experts all around Australia and the world. All video footage of the event is publicly available.

There is a movie project called UsNow which covers this area quite well. The website says “New technologies and a closely related culture of collaboration present radical new models of social organisation. This project brings together leading practitioners and thinkers in this field and asks them to determine the opportunity for government.” It is worth watching and includes several interesting case studies.

Finally, allow your staff to engage with the Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 community.

Engage with the community

There are some passionate individuals and communities in this space, and empowering one or a few internal champions to engage will be enormously beneficial through what is learned and then able to be integrated into your strategy. Below are a few communities I know of:

• Twitter - check out the #publicsphere, #gov2au and #gov20 hashtags (discussions), and connect with people who are participating in the discussion. This will rapidly get you in touch with many local experts, as well as in tune with what the Twitter community interested in this space are saying.
• Conferences - look for and attend Gov 2.0, Web 2.0 and Open Government events. There are many happening in Australia at the moment, and some significant ones also happening overseas. I won’t bother listing some here as the information will date very quickly. You’ll find they are usually announced on some of the Gov 2.0 communities below.
• Gov 2.0 groups/lists - there are several useful ones. A few I’ve joined include the Gov 2.0 Australia mailing list, GovLoop networking group, the Gov 2.0 Ning group, and of course it is worth subscribing to and participating in the Government 2.0 Taskforce blog.

Find small wins first

There will always be small wins, and the best thing to do would be to consult with your users on what they want and their prioritisation to help you identify small and quick wins in this space. A few potential examples are below, just to get you thinking about what sort of practical things you might want to do:

• Ensure your news and information is available by RSS or ATOM, both are formats that allow people to subscribe to and even aggregate your updates. News might include Local Council or agency updates, weather reports, press releases or speeches. Anything you want to communicate publicly.
• Ensure geospatial data (location) is stored with your data, for instance, infrastructure projects or events have clear location information. Then expose this location data along with the normal information so both you and the general public can create user-centric maps based on your your data.
• Iterative improvements - don’t look for a single, all-inclusive solutions, because a) great ones don’t exist, b) they rarely do any one thing particularly well and c) they will be out of date within the month and are hard to replace or append to. Look for specific functions you want, and iteratively add them as part of your backend suite, integrating them seamlessly into your front end. This way you can add and remove functions as you want them. To achieve this you need all your technology to be standards compliant both in terms of web standards, data formats, and protocols. It will give you a lot of flexibility in the long run.
• When considering public consultations, put the consultation online on a blog post for public comment and allow people to respond to  each other. Let people know the comments will be included in the public consultation. You could also run a Public Sphere event for further public consultation.

Constantly re-evaluate

Ensure you plan into your Gov 2.0 strategy regular reassessment (perhaps quarterly or half yearly), as this area will continue to change and shift. You need to be able to adapt and engage. Your participation in the Gov 2.0 community will assist you in assessing your own progress.

The 7 lessons from Obama

Below are the “7 lessons learned from the Obama campaign” presented recently at the Frocomm Gov 2.0 conference I attended by Brian Giesen, a Senior Digital Strategist from 360° Digital Influence. I think the 7 lessons/observations are quite useful.

I’ve added my thoughts to each of his points after a dash:

1. Own your search engine results (paid & unpaid) - you can do this by optimising your website(s) for good searchability, and if you can by spending some money for paid search results (eg - Google ads).
2. Find an internal social media champion (with genuine passion) - then empower them. Ensure they are collaborative and consultative in their approach, and ensure you pick the right person. The young graphic designer with a cool haircut may not be the right person, you need to ask around.
3. Create a presence off the .gov domain (eg facebook Youtube Twitter). Ensure it is well staffed and well researched - and ensure all your online presences are aggregated back on your main website, and that everything is integrated such that items published in one medium, can appear on other mediums. Eg - your blog posts can automatically be published in Twitter and on Facebook with some pretty basic tools, like Twittertools for WordPress.
4. Listen, plan and then engage with online communities - there are loads of Web 2.0, Gov 2.0, geospatial, political and many other communities with an active presence online with whom you can communicate. You can also look at who your end users are (constituents, general public, statisticians, etc) and try to engage them online.
5. Be fast, nimble & willing to try new things - Given the rapid pace of online communications, there is certainly some risk involved, however citizens will appreciate more transparency into your office or agency, and by being constantly open to new things, you’ll maximise the opportunities to engage and improve services-delivery.
6. Offer ladder of engagement, so people can engage as much or as little as they like, but have options - this basically means to ensure that individuals in the public can engage in a variety of ways to facilitate their specific interest level, from simply posting a comment, right through to running events and direct consultation in major projects. This empowers people to want to engage.
7. Find influencers and make them fans. eg, invite to the conversation, give them tools - engage with connectors, leaders and influential people in your area. If they love what you are doing, that will encourage people in their sphere of influence to check your work out.

Last word

This is a very exciting time for government and citizens. We have new opportunities to improve our democracy through the use of online technical and social methodologies. You need to ensure you approach Government 2.0 with your eyes open, and in partnership with the broader community. This will help you achieve the best outcomes for you and your users/constituents.

Good luck, have fun and thank you for helping make Australia an even better place to live, an even better democracy and a world leader in the information society!

Learn from others’ success

“That some achieve great success, is proof to all that others can achieve it as well.” Abraham Lincoln

Look at the existing successes around the world, and the broader impact of these case studies. This will help you understand some basic strategies that may suit you and some ideas of the impact that may result. Below I’ve put four sets of examples I think we can learn a lot from.

Success in the UK

In the United Kingdom there has been a lot of work done to look at “Gov 2.0” by the “Power of Information Taskforce”, which was established in 2008 based on a report completed in 2007 by Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg called the ‘Power of Information review‘. The core aspects of the Taskforce recommendations include: helping people online where they seek help; innovate and co-create with citizens online; open up the policy dialogue online; reform geospatial data; modernise data publishing and reuse; and a modern capability.

The UK has a Minister for Digital Engagement, which has provided political leadership in this area. There are a series of Government 2.0 initiatives being undertaken under this portfolio. At this point the main initiatives appear to be around copyright reform and data accessibility, and their challenges in these areas are similar to Australia. They have gone through consultation and are now in the actual project phase of implementing digital engagement. Will Perrin (Secretary of the Power of Information Taskforce) wrote a very useful blog post about more collaborative policy development including a link to a draft white paper he is writing on the subject.

Success in the US

It is worth looking at how President Obama has used online tools. His first Memorandum in office was on this topic stating “The Memorandum calls for instilling three principles in the workings of government: Transparency – to enable greater accountability, efficiency, and economic opportunity by making government data and operations more open; Participation – to create early and effective opportunities to drive greater and more diverse expertise into government decision making; Collaboration – to generate new ideas for solving problems by fostering cooperation across government departments, across levels of government, and with the public“.

President Obama has also started a new initiative called “Open Government” to assess how to generally improve the transparency and openness of the United States Government. Also for many years in the US all non-private government data there has been released into the public domain which encourages massive public and private innovation with the data to the benefit of the economy and society. There is still a lot of work to do in the US in the rest of government and in government agencies. There is a good Gov 2.0 showcase available of US government agency case studies.

Success in Australia

There are some amazing individuals who have been pushing this barrow for years - with varying degrees of success - and have created some cutting edge Gov 2.0 initiatives.

At an agency level, there are many successes driven by passionate Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 individuals which has been extremely beneficial to many projects and citizens. I’ll post some of these case studies soon. Unfortunately, often enough, champions of citizen-centric services and online engagement in the public service are unable to talk publicly about their successes, but that is another story. There are some useful examples of Gov 2.0 in the public sector in the recent Government 2.0 Public Sphere briefing paper which is still in draft. Hopefully the resulting list of Gov 2.0 case studies in the public sector can be published as a showcase of Australian successes.

We’ve also had a number of interesting cases in the Australian political sphere. Senator Lundy has been leading the way in online engagement with her constituents and the broader community through her website (she’s run her own website for over 13 years) and more recently her engagement on Twitter. The take-up of online tools by politicians has been slow, however this is beginning to change. Senator Lundy references some new approaches by politicians in the speech she delivered at CeBIT this year. Minister Tanner wrote an interesting book that relates nicely to this space called “Open Australia” in 1999.

You should try to connect with other people in government to share successes and learn from each other.

The long term success in the Open Source community

Finally, there are many lessons that can be learned from the Open Source community. The strategies of online engagement, public collaboration on projects, encouraging positive and constructive input, consultative decision-making and open and transparent processes have been very effectively used by the Open Source community for over 20 years. Here are a few examples:

• Encouraging constructive public contributions - ensure there is a well-communicated tangible goal of the project to ensure everyone is heading in the right direction. Thus you can draw your community back from unconstructive behaviours. You also need to set the tone of the project. Whether it be some instructions on how you’d like them to participate or something as simple as a code of conduct, setting the tone will help keep the community constructive. Users will often self-regulate if there is clear direction on the goals and tone of the project.
• Ensure people can easily find and then access whatever they need to contribute - the more barriers to entry (which may be anything from a non-disclosure agreement to buried information) the fewer participants you’ll get. You need great documentation for how to participate and to explain the philosophy of the project. Where possible, include people in the planning phases and decision making of your project so the process benefits from broader community input and also from people wanting to see it succeed due to the sense of personal contribution in the process.
• Release early, release often - this idea is based on software code being released early in the development cycle, and as often as possible, as this makes it easier for other software developers to test and contribute to the project. From a Gov 2.0 perspective, this could be applied to any sort of online engagement from policy development to general communications. People would prefer to have access to the information in a way they can both access and hopefully contribute to than to wait for a potentially more perfect but slower response. The perceived perfect is the enemy of the good, particularly when it comes to establishing an open process.
• Many eyes make all bugs shallow - basically the power of “crowdsourcing” as it is becoming known. Creating a discussion or a thing in the public eye and garnering the wisdom of the crowd by encouraging and empowering many participants.

Define your Government 2.0 success criteria

It’s important to consider early on what Government 2.0 means to you, both strategically and practically? What do you see as success criteria for a successful Gov 2.0 implementation? My big picture success criteria are around the three pillars described in the previous post, but you need to be clear on what it means to you while also being open to new ideas and potential opportunities.

Carefully evaluate your options

Ensure you know at all times what you want to achieve, the basic requirements you would like to meet, and the mandatory requirements you have to meet. You don’t want to jump into new shiny tools just to catch up. Rather you should have a well-considered Gov 2.0 strategy that includes how any new approaches fit into your workflow, how they are resourced and maintained, how they fit into your broader communication strategy, and how they best serve your users.

For instance, you need to consider how you best use existing social networking tools as part of your Gov 2.0 strategy. Twitter is great for three specific tasks: updates; for specific conversations; and for rapidly generating interest and ideas for a project or conference. It shouldn’t be used trivially however people do like to see the real person behind the Twitter account, so some personal insight is also of value. You do need to ensure you have transparency in who is actually posting.

In Senator Lundy’s office we use WordPress for the main website, which integrates with Twitter and has great social media plugins. We also use Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Vimeo and FlickR (soon to be added to the website). We are looking at some additional tools, but importantly, we are making sure everything is integrated to create a cohesive online presence. There is a lot of work in signing up and maintaining a number of online services, and dealing with them all independently of each other defeats some of the benefits.

You want to ensure that staff are able to communicate externally and have access to useful social networking sites (it helps them, helps you, and helps your users) but are also aware of what they should not discuss publicly.

Some vendors will be trying to entice you to put all your data into the “cloud”, but all of government has an obligation to ensure their data is stored within the Australian legal jurisdiction, which means offshore storage of government data is neither appropriate nor responsible. All of government is supposed to adhere to open standards for their data, and this is extremely important to ensure you can access your own data down the track, and to share data between different systems. Consider when evaluating your normal ICT systems how easy it would be to open up various processes or information which will hopefully help you avoid locking to systems that don’t facilitate your Gov 2.0 strategy.

Some ideas that are not current obligations include the consideration of how new systems will integrate with other systems, and what the exit cost of any new strategy is as part of the TCO analysis. Ensure you find expertise in this area to assist you.

Tomorrow will be the final post in this short three-part Gov 2.0 blog post including how to avoid the hype, finding useful resources and engaging with the community.

If there is one thing I have learned, it is that Government 2.0 is an overused and often misunderstood term, one that many people are rushing to understand and implement. There are some great ideas out there, however you should cross-reference to ensure you get an informed view.

I thought I would write this three part blog post about Government 2.0, Web 2.0 and “Open Government” along with some suggestions for people (particularly in government) to get up to speed in this area and hopefully assist them in their first steps.

2 point what?

When I first heard the term “Government 2.0” I thought it sounded pretty silly. It was obviously riffing on “Web 2.0” (another overused term that can mean a lot of things), and a lot of the successes talked about looked like fairly straightforward uses of the Internet by politicians and government agencies. A lot of people wade into the Government 2.0 debate with talk about access to data and transparent decision making, and this starts to delve into Open Government rather than Web 2.0. So let’s start with trying to first better define Web 2.0, Open Government and then finally Government 2.0.

Web 2.0

Wikipedia defines Web 2.0 as being second generation web development and design. I think there are four main identifying features of ”Web 2.0”. I say this not as a “Web 2.0” expert, but as a long time geek observing this space and working with the technologies:

• Online and always connected - being online at all times means people can use at their convenience, data can be constantly used, collected and aggregated
• Massive integration and aggregation - facilitates data mashups, cross-platform communications and the ability to publish once and to many places
• Broadcast conversation - enables global “social networking”, online public community development, a shift from one2many (eg - public statements) to many2many (eg - online forums and chat), and the range of public and private conversations therein
• Beautiful and dynamic user experience - the shift to a user-centric, dynamic, interactive and beautiful user experience is an important factor, especially as there is much more understanding now about how people use the Internet, and how this differs from other media

Open Government

In Australia we are very lucky to already have an open government. There is a lot of public engagement, consultation and information made available. Online tools and methodologies offer some new ways to improve our system, and to help get the average busy Aussie engaged. I think “Open Government” is the natural result when you have both:

• government policy and practice that informs, empowers, involves and collaborates with citizens, and
• a well informed and engaged public (which is essential for democracy)

We have identified three main focus areas for Open Government:

• Open and transparent decision making - engaging citizens directly in the processes of decision making, whether that be political (eg - policy or legislative development) or bureaucratic (eg - planning a new piece of public infrastructure). This improves public trust in government as it becomes open for scrutiny and oversight.
• Citizen-centric services - government agencies (and services) engaging with citizens based on their individual needs, which can mean leveraging information such as their location, type of help they need, perhaps even personal information. This means citizens are given the right information, from the right person, in a single place.
• Access to government information - ensuring all government information that can be made available (excluding data with privacy, security or commercialisation implications) is available to the general public. This will encourage public and private innovation on top of government data, to the benefit of the society and economy.

Senator Lundy communicates these ideas well on her blog post “The Three Pillars of Open Government”, so I won’t go on to describe them in further detail, however the idea of Open Government has been around for a long time.

Senator Lundy is demonstrating that Government 2.0 is also about elected representatives using these new tools to directly engage with their constituents for even more informed and agile decision making.

Government 2.0

Government 2.0 is about using the new opportunities presented by Web 2.0 technical and social methodologies to achieve even more openness in government. It encapsulates next generation models for government processes including online consultation processes, realtime citizen engagement, empowerment and followup, a shift in government services delivery to be more citizen-centric, facilitating public and private innovation through open and permissive access to useful government data (such as maps, rss feeds for council news, public facilities) and much more. There are no doubt many Government 2.0 initiatives that haven’t even been imagined yet.

Pretty scary stuff for many! After all, change can imply risk. It has however become very clear that people are expecting more engagement and empowerment from government agencies and their political representatives. The changing expectations combined with the increasing need for governments to be capable of reacting rapidly and collaboratively to new issues is driving forward the need for Government 2.0.

First steps for Government 2.0

I have tried to put together some very practical first steps for government representatives and agencies who are struggling to understand this space. The first step is to gather information. Above is hopefully some useful working definitions that will help, but you should also read the draft briefing paper from Senator Lundy’s Public Sphere event on Government 2.0, which is the collation of several hundred perspectives and ideas in this space. All the videos, Twitter chatter and blog comments are linked there too.

It would also be useful to follow the progress of the newly announced Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce, and to speak to AGIMO who have a Web Publishing Guide which is being updated to assist government agencies in this area.

Tomorrow I will publish the second post in this three-part Government 2.0 blog post, and includes learning from existing success, and evaluating your options.

I think it helps people not used to communicating online think about different sorts of negative feedback, and how it is important to engage with some, and possibly not with others. Also the “response considerations” were quite good too to encourage transparency and accountability in online communications.

Click on the image for the larger more readable version.

1. Went with Kate to the “Sharing Data, Sharing Ideas” metadata conference for a couple of hours, where the people opening it spoke about the importance of metadata, and openness. I’ve been told all talk slides will be on that website after the conference and Kate will post her speech on her website probably tomorrow.
2. Posted the draft briefing paper from the first Public Sphere topic on high speed bandwidth on the new wiki, and within 30 mins had the first contribution! I believe this is the first use of a wiki for public engagement by an Australian Parliamentarian, very exciting stuff!
3. Met with some interesting folk to talk about virtual environments, discussed importance of open APIs and standards, and am considering eventually doing a Public Sphere in a fully virtual environment (easily months down the track!).
4. Coordinated some material to go into the vodcasts we are doing, and helped another staffer at Kate’s office to look at how to use the website to garner online feedback on an important topic. She’ll likely be also engaging the Facebook community on the topic and it was very satisfying to have the staffer exclaim surprise and happiness that they could directly engage on the website with these newfangled tools
5. Dropped down to the “Copyright Commons; Copyright Freedom” conference which featured amazing international speakers such as Lawrence Lessig (US) and Prodromos Tsiavos (UK, wrote a great paper called Cultivating Creative Commons: From Creative Regulation to Regulatory Commons),  and awesome copyright guru Aussies such as David Vaile, Brian Fitzgerald, Prof Graham Greenleaf, Anne Fitzgerald and Jessica Coates. Recorded an amazing audio interview between Kate and Larry Lessig, which we’ll podcast tomorrow, but I was particularly pleased with their responses to “what is the link between copyright freedom and open government”. They mostly just chatted and shared ideas, which makes it pretty cool listening (I think anyway ). Kate gave a fantastic speech which she’ll also post tomorrow. Larry recognised me from a conference I met him at many years ago in Brazil, which was impressive (as  he was totally jet lagged that day).
6. As part of going to the copyright conference, had my first visit to Old Parliament House, a beautiful building and definitely worth visiting.
7. Was invited to speak at an eclectic event for geeks to share fringe geek interests and talks, and I’ll likely talk on “being a geek in Parliament House”. Will post more information once I have it.
8. Was chatting to Liam Wyatt from Wikimedia Australia about the upcoming GLAM-WIKI seminar (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums & Wikimedia). The idea is “a two-way dialogue to determine how to use the two communities’ strengths to a mutual advantage”, should be really interesting!

So although it has been a 15 hour day (who says public servants don’t do long hours!) it has been amazing. I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of this “policy advisor” thing, and one of my main initial goals of being a conduit to the community and industry is working out nicely with the public spheres and some other projects we are working on

As David Vaile so eloquently put today, I’m as happy as a pig in mud, and energised enough to be up and blogging at 4am, time to go sleep…

Anyway, the new site is up, there are still some tweaks we are doing, and there are still a few media releases we are importing (manually) from her old Frontpage website (argh!!!!) but it’d be great to get people’s perspectives and feedback.

One thing it would be good to know is what do people what to know about? How could we - through her online presence - help make Australian Government processes more transparent? What are some good examples from overseas? Links, stories and ideas welcome!

I felt and the Senator agreed that it was important I announced this new role in my blog considering the public profile I have, and that I have always tried to be as open and transparent in my actions as I could. Senator Lundy feels that online and transparent engagement with the democractic process is an important goal, and I am now a part of that process.

On a personal level, I am extremely excited about this role. I love Parliament House, and now I am working here. I have always wanted to understand how policy and legislation comes about, and how the political process works. But I have, as have many Australians, been fundamentally disinterested because of, well, the politics This role gives me an opportunity to really understand - and hopefully participate effectively in - the system.

This role is my new full time employment, and as such I will not be engaging in any new Waugh Partners’ or other business. Jeff will be continuing as a Waugh Partners’ consultant, focusing primarily on his new website development work.

From a community participation level, I intend on maintaining my participation in various industry and community groups, however I will not be in any leadership or advocacy roles. I have spoken to Donna Benjamin and James Purser, who are both specifically interested in creating a FOSS Government liaison  group, and if anyone else is interested in useful engagement with the Government, please speak to Donna or James.

Traditionally a person employed as a political staffer would not have any kind of “public” role. This is largely because of the challenges in ensuring a clear distinction between when a person is speaking on behalf of their employer, or themselves. Taking this into account, plus my existing online presence, we will be experimenting with me continuing to blog and twitter, and I hope to establish a good balance.

I see my new role as a way of contributing to a more robust and informed discussion within Government about ICT, skills development, online engagement in the democratic process, and the importance of openness (standards, technologies, transparency) in sustainable ICT procurement, in industry development and in global competitiveness. I hope that my peers in the FOSS community, in the ICT industry, in the media and in education are supportive of me in this role, and I look forward to an open dialogue to help shape future directions of ICT for and within the Australian Government.