Getting started in the Australian Public Service

I worked for Senator Kate Lundy from April 2009 till January 2012. It was a fascinating experience learning how the executive and legislative arms of government work and working closely with Kate, who is extremely knowlegable and passionate about good policy and tech. As someone who is very interested in the interrelation between governments, society, the private sector and technology, I could not have asked for a better place to learn.

But last October (2011) I decided I really wanted to take the next step and expand my experience to better understand the public service, how policy goes from (and to) the political sphere from the administrative arm of government, how policy is implemented in practise and the impact/engagement with the general public.

I sat back and considered where I would ideally like to work if I could choose. I wanted to get an insight to different departments and public sector cultures across the whole govenrment. I wanted to work in tech policy, and open government stuff if at all possible. I wanted to be in a position where I might be able to make a difference, and where I could look at government in a holistic way. I think a whole of government approach is vital to serving the public in a coherent and consistent way, as is serious public engagement and transparency.

So I came up with my top three places to work that would satisfy this criteria. My top option happened to have a job going which I applied for and by November I was informed I was their first choice. This was remarkable and I was very excited to get started, but also wanted to tie up a few things in Kate’s office. So we arranged a starting date of January 31st 2012.

What is the job you ask? You’ll have to wait till the end of the post 😉

Unfortunately for me, because I was already 6 months into a Top Secret Positive Vetting (TSPV) process (what you need for a Ministerial office in order to work with any classified information), and that process had to be completed, even though I needed a lower level for the new job. I was informed back in October that it should be done by Christmas.

So I blogged on my last day with Kate about what I had learned and indicated that I was entering the public service to get a better understanding of the administrative arm of government. There was some amusing speculation, and it has probably been the worst kept secret around Canberra for the last year 🙂

Of course, I thought I would be able to update my “Moving On” blog post within a few weeks or so. It ended up taking another 10 months for my clearance to finalise. TSPV does take a while, and I’m a little more complicated a case than the average bear given my travel and online profile 🙂

As it turns out, the 10 months presented some useful opportunities. During the last year I did a bunch of contracting work looking largely at tech policy, some website development, and I ended up working for the ACT Government for the last 5 months.

In the ACT Government I worked in a policy role under Mick Chisnall, the Executive Director of the ACT Government Information Office. That was a fantastic learning experience and I’d like to thank Mick for being such a great person to work with and learn from. I worked on open government policy, open data policy and projects (including the dataACT launch, and some initial work for the Canberra Digital Community Connect project), looked at tech policies around mobile, cloud, real time data, accessibility and much more. I also helped write some fascinating papers around the role of government in a digital city. Again, I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with excellent people with vision. A huge thanks to Mick Chisnall, Andrew Cappie-Wood, Pam Davoren, Christopher Norman, Kerry Webb, James Watson, Greg Tankard, Gavin Tapp and all the people I had the opportunity to work with. I learnt a lot, much of which will be useful in my new role.

It also showed me that the hype around “shared services” being supposedly terrible doesn’t quite map reality. For sure, some states have had significant challenges, but in some states it works reasonably well (nothing is perfect) and presents some pretty useful opportunities for whole of government service delivery.

Anyway, so my new job is at AGIMO as Divisional Coordinator for the Agency Services Division, working directly to John Sheridan who has long been quite an active and engaged voice in the Australian Gov 2.0 scene. I started a week and a half ago and am really enjoying it already. I think there are some great opportunities for me through this job to usefully serve the public and the broader public service. I look forward to making my mark and contributing to the pursuit of good tech in government. I’m also taking the role of Media Coordinator for AGIMO, and supporting John in his role.

I’ve met loads of brilliant people working in the public service across Australia, and I’m looking forward to learning a lot. I’m also keen to take a very collaborative approach (no surprises there), so I’m looking at ways to better enable people to work together across the APS and indeed, across all government jurisdictions in Australia. There is a lot to be gained by collaboration between the Federal, States/Territories and Local spheres of government, particularly when you can get the implementers and policy developers working together rather than just those up the stack.

So, if you are in government (any sphere) and want to talk open government, open data, tech policy, iterative policy development, public engagement, or all the things, please get in touch. I’m hoping to set up an open data working group to bring together the people in various governments doing great work across the country and I’ll be continuing to participate in the Gov 2.0 community, now from within the tent 🙂

Power and legitimacy in government

Below are some thoughts I had scribbled out as part of a discussion at university a few years ago. I was reminded of it through a discussion with a friend yesterday. I think it is a topic worth considering on an ongoing basis.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking recently around what constitutes legitimacy in government or the powers that be throughout time. It has been quite fascinating to consider what people expect, what they get, and what holds it all together.

Basically, I content that legitimacy isn’t binary but rather a spectrum. Legitimacy isn’t static, but rather something that has to be continually established, something that needs to be earnt. Gone are the days where the sword or gun ruled, because people’s fear of force has (at least in some countries) been outweighed by a sense of self-empowerment and people expecting to have a say. In democracies around the world, this say, this legitimacy, has for many years been established at the ballot box. But the Internet has changed things and legitimacy now requires so much more.

Governments today face enormous challenges to how they’ve always done things due to the democratisation (mass distribution) of communications, publishing, monitoring and indeed enforcement. We are seeing a) individuals can hold governments to account much easier and louder than in times past, b) governments finding it hard to transition to the conversational and collaborative approach expected online, and c) the role of the media, particularly in mainstream publishing has become more and more politicised making it harder for people to hear an apolitical mainstream voice from which to make up their own mind.

Legitimacy is a tricky thing in a time when anyone can say anything, when the media often reports all perspectives as if they were of equal relevance/truth, and the voice of government is just another voice in the cacophony of the Internet. In announcing a policy, a vacuum of information is created. If that vacuum isn’t filled with updates, the policy status, what it means and active engagement with “the people”, then the policy might succeed on paper, but completely fail from a public perspective if the vacuum is filled with an alternative narrative.

Legitimacy used to be enforced, now it has to be earned, every day. Nowadays, particularly in democratic countries, without legitimacy it is very hard to maintain power.

It’s also worth considering that we (in Australia) expect a *lot* more from our government now than anyone would have dreamed 300 years ago. Health, public transport, free education for our kids, etc. We also have much higher obligations but can (often) rationalise that with the benefits.

So where does legitimacy break down, and is it possible to predict when a social system will break down and transform?

I’ve come up with two simple tensions that perhaps play a part in the ongoing legitimacy of an entity in power that hopefully reflect how societies relate to and judge legitimacy. I think this formula works both for the times of Hobbes and for now. Regardless of the fact that expectations of many modern societies has changed fundamentally from those times as we are more globally aware, connected and empowered than ever before.

Both of these tensions can be analysed at an individual, community and nation/society level, and fundamentally, whilst ever the vast majority of people in the society are not getting a negative result from these criteria, the power and structures will not be seriously challenged or threatened.

The first tension is the benefits versus the obligations *and* inconveniences. Benefits include things such as health care, security, or education. Obligations are things such as taxes or abiding by the law. Inconveniences are things like being threatened if you don’t vote a particular way, or being sent to gaol. If the benefits you receive outweigh the obligations+inconveniences, there is a positive result, if they are roughly comparative, a neutral result, or if obligations+inconveniences outweigh benefits, a negative result.

Secondly is relationship between the the perceived reality of the ruling power and the expectations of the ruling power. For instance, some people may not see it as the role of the government to enforce a moral standard, so if the government does something they perceive as conflicting with this expectation, then that can be a problem. If perceived reality is not in line with the expectations its a negative result, is roughly equal then neutral. This depends heavily on the success criteria communicated by the ruling power and the related perceived success of that ruling power. For instance, if the ruling power sets a low bar (or a reasonable bar) and is seen to overachieve, that is a positive result, seeing to have achieved what was laid down is a neutral result, and underachieving, even if the bar was set too ambitiously high, is a negative result.

Put more simply:

Test 1: benefits minus obligations+inconveniences
Test 2: public expectations (success criteria) minus perceived reality (success)

Both tests demonstrate the importance of good clear communications and engagement with the public.

Interestingly, in my opinion there has been a growing discontent on both tests in Australia. Although we have high benefits and high obligations, the inconveniences haven’t really been seen as that onerous for most people. But we are seeing an interesting scope creep with policies relating to the Internet and intelligence agencies starting to create more inconvenience to the population. It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the coming years, as it appears more and more of the population are starting to feel a rise in our obligations and inconveniences.

Interesting times. In the Chinese sense 🙂 Would love to hear your thoughts.

My talk on Data Liberation at Ignite Sydney

Ignite Sydney is like an evening version of TEDx with 5 min talks, 20 slides automatically progressed every 15 seconds. A lot of pressure I can tell you, but I think I did ok 🙂 Talking at a millions miles an hour, as usual. Rough transcript (with a few edits) below.

Hello

I’m here to speak to you about the legend of data liberation. It’s an important story, it’s a story about society, about people, about geeks, and it’s a story about government. Of course I am not here representing any of the government people that I work for here tonight.

So I do think I believe I represent a new generation of public servant that will transform things, but by the by.

Most people when they think of government think of garbage. They think about what is it this entity does for us? They take out our garbage, they build our roads, they build our education. But what’s happening is that the Internet is leading us to a period of discontentment. People are more empowered than we’ve ever been before and we’re seeing government make mistakes, like the NSW Transport issue (2011 issue mentioned by earlier speaker) and we’re just going “come on! We can do this better”.

So what’s starting to happen is people want the data, we’re seeing a new thing called Gov 2.0 (I know, “2.0” is stupid) but it’s around transparency, participation and citizen-based approach to government. I’m going to run through these three things very quickly.

Transparency in the first instance is about raw data. You need access to the raw materials to make new and interesting things. It’s one thing to have someone say to you “the water is rising” but it’s another thing to actually have information over the last 200 years about how much it’s rising and be able to do your own analysis.

Having access to the raw data means we can better trust the outcomes. I mean how would it be if we got the outcome of elections, but didn’t have the capacity to have scrutineers and have people look at the raw information. We need raw data to be able to trust outcomes and to be able to provide our own analysis.

Analysis is a really important part when we get access to raw data. We need access to economic data, environmental data, biological data, demographic, government. The Human Genome project, who has heard of that? Come on, I met the guy who runs that project very recently, I also got to meet Hans Rosling, was very cool.

Another type of transparency is parliamentary transparency. So the Italian Government has this huge glass room to let the sun shine in. Cool idea. then they covered it up. Not so cool.

Really good metaphor for the fact though that people want access to the information so that they can participate in the democracy, they can participate in the policy, they can participate in the process. If people aren’t able to get information, then they aren’t able to get educated, then they aren’t able to get an informed view, then they aren’t able to participate effectively.

So basically where we’re going is a period of time where how government operates is it actually starts to co-develop the policy with the people. Because you know there are a lot of skills out there, there’s a lot of us that know stuff that can contribute to making government do things better. So why wouldn’t they talk to us?

Well, it’s not because they’re bad or evil or nefarious, generally speaking, it’s usually just because it’s not the way things are done. Things are starting to be done differently now.

Open data and raw data also gives us new opportunities to innovation. I actually ran a thing called GovHack which was really awesome. Raw data, competition, people making heaps of projects over 48 hours.

You also have the opportunity to crowdsource. So this was the spike when the floods hit Queensland of the number of people who liked the Queensland Police Facebook page. And what the police found, and this is fascinating, was that not only were they able to get information out, but people were able to get information to the police. Because of course they took over trying to coordinate emergency responses.

So when people were able to take “oh, 10 people have said this bridge has gone down”, well that gives you a fairly good indication how to deploy your resources so crowdsourcing gives a new type of raw data that can help government do things better and help people work with government better.

So: iterative, collaborate government. That’s what Gov 2.0 is about. Transparency, Participation and a Citizen Focus in how we do things.

The Government of the future is something we have to do collaboratively. If we can’t create the blueprint for the future as a whole society then we’re going to end up running into troubles and we do run into troubles. We can’t respond in a quick manner, we can’t respond in an effective manner. And then we end up just becoming – government itself – ends up becoming out of date, irrelevant, and not able to respond to the changing needs of society and of it’s citizens.

So basically, we need to change or we’re gonna die. Woo.

A couple of things in Australia. There’s a bunch of raw data things happening. There’s dataACT which I’m actually working on which is the first actual open data platform. It does transcoding, it does APIs, it does all the cool technical stuff. data.gov.au and dataVIC and some of the other ones are mostly just content management systems but they’re starting to change and this weekend I think is a hackfest on the NSW transport data as well.

A couple of considerations, people thing about privacy but people don’t think about fish privacy. If you release the data about all the flora and fauna above the ocean, and then someone goes in and fishes a particular fish to extinction, then what does that mean about privacy.

Geek culture and tech skills give us the capacity for privacy, for analysis, for doing all the cool stuff that leads to education and empowerment which leads to digital democracy.

And frankly, everyone here sees themselves as a geek right? Those who don’t should because geeks are the future.

So, thank you for coming with me on my little journey on data liberation. I will continue to fight the war and please, come with me, embrace your geek if you haven’t yet already, free the data and let’s get a better society together.

Thank you very much.

Privacy and Internet Policy at Internet Government Forum Australia

A couple of weeks ago I participated in the Australian Internet Governance Forum, both on a panel about Internet privacy (which also delved into the murky waters of data retention) and I also ran a 90 minute session on Government and Internet Policy. Both were fascinating. Below I’ve briefly wrapped each one up.

Privacy Panel

I sat on the IGF privacy panel as an open government person, and it was a fascinating discussion. Other panelist

You can watch the Privacy Panel video on the auIGF website, but you (quite ironically) have to provide your name and email address. If you just want to get the gist of the panel, check out the IGF session captions. I’ve copied the caption service transcript at the end of this post for my archives. They did a really good job on the day, but we all spoke quite fast, so it’ll give you a good but rough idea of what was said.

Government and Internet Policy session

My personal goal in this space is to have a more nuanced public dialogue on Internet policy such that we make more informed, collaborative and inclusive debate on where we as a society, want from the Internet, and such that we can avoid government policies having unintended results that inhibit the social or economic opportunities we have enjoyed to date.

I thought it would be interesting to get some of our Internet policy and practise luminaries to discuss Internet policy. It was a robust and fascinating discussion resulting in some great insights and ideas. Core ideas that came out where a) the Internet cannot be defined because the moment you do so, the technology changes, but b) there are some core values/principles that underpin the Internet that could be used to assess policy. It was interesting to have some, at times, quite contrary thoughts in the room, but to see that by the end of the session, the different perspectives were largely two sides of the same coin.

What I rapidly realised during the session was that most people in this space are focused on a very narrowly defined patch, and each patch is being dealt with largely in isolation from the rest. For example, the idea that “we don’t need to worry about policies that deal with content (such as Internet filtering) because we are focused on the domain name space”. In my opinion this is somewhat problematic because it makes it too easy to play divide and conquer by policy.

As a result of this session I’m writing a short paper on some core values of the Internet that migh be a good basis for reviewing government policies around the world so we can start to reframe Internet policy in terms of what is good for society, rather than the relatively unhelpful and specialised “open vs closed Internet” debate we have seen completely fill the airwaves recently. I’m going to do some policy analysis on some of the big ones against this list of values to see how the model stacks up.

Check out the wiki page where we captured the ideas contributed to this session.

As part of setting up the wikipage for this session, I also invited other sessions to use the wiki. Two other sessions decided to use the wiki and you can check them out at http://auigf.wikispaces.com/

Below are the outcomes of the session, and below that all the content that led us to this outcome.

Values of the Internet

Potential list of values, perhaps “public good” aspects we take for granted, things “on the net”? Perhaps government should be able to confirm they agree with? Perhaps “please make a commitment”. Perhaps the values could be then compared and contrasted with policy positions:

Coordination not control– committing to protecting coordination efforts and commitment to participate in coordination:
- Social: more collaborative approach which might lead to more citizen centric policy.
- Economic: capacity to tap into other efforts, more effective policy outcomes that align with how the Internet is actually run/managed/governed.
Interoperability– open standards, no undisclosed/forced gated communities
- Social: avoids lock in or out, people can make informed decisions, increased usability, accessibility,
- Economic: fair market competition,
Peer to peer global connectivity– people/devices/all ports/all teh things/any to any – connecting directly to each other
- Social: free expression, non discriminatory
- Economic: freedom to provide and accept and service, facilitates innovation, we don’t know what the next killer protocol is going to be, so freedom for future opportnuities,
Route around damage– capacity to deal with issues
- Social: gete around censorship,
- Economic: resilience, high availability, availability during natural disasters,
Distributed control– no single point of failure or control, eg multi-source networks of trust
- Social: uncapturable, ability for civil disobedience and dissent,
- Economic: no single point of failure, avoiding damage of monopoly rents
Non-discriminatory approach– users, devices, content, jurisdiction, technology neutral/common access, free flowing data
- Social: affordability, accessibility, availability
- Economic: free market

Perhaps some point about public information, gov role in providing public infrastructure/information/emergency information/open data (bushfires)? Maybe this is more a policy recommendation than a core value?

Additional comments and points:

Internet must have the capacity to deliver:
All ports, protocols, content, origins and all destinations.

What is the different between the Internet and public roads?
NBN as a policy example where there is a a purposefully neutral policy approach.
Technology doesn’t limit the application. Public communications. Will a private market service the need and if not, then public investment. What are the parameters for determining a market factor. Is it accessible for everybody? Eg comparison with electricity grid.
Consistent addressing structure
Consistent naming structure
Availability, predictability, stability
Government needs to commit to an Internet that is coordinated and not controlled.

Below is the rest of the content of the wiki from my session (for my archive, from the date of this post):

Session Info

Facilitated by Pia Waugh, this workshop looked at the role of governments in Internet management, policy development and regulation. Participants were invited to exchange views on the pressures and issues that could drive governments to take an increased regulatory role, the areas in which meaningful government engagement would be of benefit, and the areas where the open and multi-stakeholder model should be retained. Topics included current parliamentary deliberations on reforming national security legislation and the potential impact on business and end-user rights.

Session Methodology

We kicked off the session by, as a group, trying to identify the high level categories of problem spaces that the plethora of Internet related policies, legislation, codes and trade agreements are trying to deal with. As part of this we had a first shot at identifying the various mechanisms these approaches adopt in trying to achieve their goals.

Then we dived into a discussion about the technical characteristics of the Internet and their social/economic implications. That discussion had some healthy debate that resulting in some consensus that the technical characteristics of the Internet are constantly changing and shouldn’t be pinned down. However, that there *are* some overriding principles/values that underpin the Internet as it was, is, and should continue to be.

We ran out of time to compare and contrast our key categories and the various mechanisms of enforcement, with the model of how we define the characteristics of the Internet. Hopefully this can be part of an ongoing discussion in this community.
The outcome of the session is captured in this wiki, which forms the basis of a paper that can be fine tuned over the coming month in the lead up to the International IGF meeting in Baku and is a part of the Australian contribution to the international discussions.

Where people identify specific tangible policy recommendations for the Australian Government, please add them below. Feel free to copy and paste from existing working this space so long as you give attribution. This will be presented to the Australian Government along with a copy of the paper above.

Policy & Legislation

Please contribute to the Internet related policy/legislation page as this list is far too long to be on this page. From this rather extensive list of policies, legislation, codes and even trade agreements, we can see a number of categories of problem spaces emerging:

Summary of Issue Categories

Policies tend to have one or a number of theme categories inherent (please add/modify this list as it’ll be basis of discussion):

Individual interests
- personal safety (eg cyberbullying)
- market meeting the needs of the community public vs private?
- privacy
- identity astroturfing
- free expression (and thought, limiting behaviour on the internet?)
  - illegal vs inappropriate behaviour
- rights? access, usability,
- consumer safeguards role of gov? market distortion questions?
- net neutrality
National interests
- skills
- economic growth
- national/economic security (eg cyberwarfare)
- sovereignty
- knowledge
- trust and confidence – transactional confidence as well as who
Culture & democracy
- shifting cultural norms can and often respond to shifting cultural norms
- social inclusion languages, accessibility, access, (need definition)
- use of the internet in democracy evoting, astroturfing
Market challenges
- intellectual property (copyright for copyright sake? international sake, software patents, trademarks domain name policy)
- creative/digital industries in Australia
- innovation (?)
- competition
Legal challenges
- prejudice and justice on trial proceedings
- local jurisdiction vs international scope of the Internet difficulty of local enforcement on an international thing, some people chosing selectively the jurisdictional that suits their purposes

It was suggested the above ideas might boil down to the two categories of Ownership and Accountability. Thoughts?

Summary of Implementation Mechanisms

The tools and mechanisms used in policies range from (please add/modify this list as it’ll be basis of discussion):

Government Mechanisms

Social
- Education/marketing of an idea of information
- Civil remedies
Legal
- Judicial oversight as requirement for legal enforcement mechanisms?
- Tweaking of criminal acts (personal and corporate)
- Media law
- Injunctive takedown orders, suppressions,
- Contract law
Regulation & industry
- Content regulation
- Industry regulation imposed, co-regulation (relegatory framework designed to be administered by industry framework) or self/community regulated
- Codes of conduct
- Private arrangements eg changes to services, filtering
- Standards
- International coordination needs more consideration
- Public/private partnerships collaborating to achieve an outcomes
Gov investment strategies
- Taxes to accelerate or retard particular behaviours
Technology mechanisms
- Copyright protection
Enforcement & Monitoring
- What role should gov play in both/either?
- The scope of intelligence agencies
- Monitoring/management:
- Monitoring is in all directions including sideways
- Monitoring of networks, publicising/disclosing network performances
- Forensics of online information get context on issues
- Evaluation and analysis of policy values and metrics chosen, evidence
- Enforcement and publicity of enforcement related to the capacity for an enforcement agency to do its job it directly related to its visibility

Citizen mechanisms
The tools and mechanisms used by citizens to protect themselves (please add/modify this list as it’ll be basis of discussion):

Countermeasures how easy it is to work around the enforcement, race to the bottom
FOI

Further Policy Recommendations for Australia

Any specific Australian Government policy recommendations you have for the Australian Government, please feel free to link to existing papers, but pragmatic and tangible policy suggestions would be much appreciated.

Have official Australian Government participation and active voice in international Internet policy, representing the best interests of Australians

7) Further Contributions Post Session

Canberra Manifesto (contributed by Bret Treasure after the event)

The Internet is our most powerful communication, business and innovation tool. Although it is disruptive and although it may challenge individual governments, institutions, industries and businesses, its overall benefit to the people of the world is clear. The Internet is a path to a more connected and improved society; we look to governments to plan for that future.

So we make these requests:

That prior to legislating, Governments take into account the self-expression, community, efficiency and innovation that a decentralized collaborative regulatory structure has delivered
That prior to legislating, governments look to existing laws
That governments support a globally focused, multi-stakeholder, open approach to Internet regulation
That governments foster competition in the delivery of Internet services and access
That governments enact principles-based law rather than technology-specific law
That governments facilitate inclusion and accessibility
That governments respect such fundamental human rights as privacy and freedom of expression
That governments address the challenging issues that arise without using them as political tools.

auIGF Privacy Panel Transcript

auIGF 11 October 2012 Session time 2:30pm-3:30pm

[Welcome to Red Bee Media Australia’s Live Remote Captioning Service.]

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: In order to watch it. I think it’s those kinds of copyright restrictions on access to content – it seems cruel to me in an age of digital abundance we have these types of issues for the visually impaired and me as a consumer, if I want to read a book on my iPad, I got a voucher, eBook, which is the only format it’s compatible is kindle fire. These are the digital restrictions, the types attached.
UNKNOWN SPEAKER: I think a lot of us would continue to continue the discussion, but we are eating into the AGM times, the next panel – thank you to all of our panellists and for your questions and contributions. Thank you.
(APPLAUSE)
CHAIR: Can I ask the next panel to come up and those that are staying to stay. If this panel could move t next could come up. We will get going straight away.
The most vehement about openness are the ones who want the strictest rules about privacy, which strikes me as being slightly odd.
For what it’s worth, I’m happy to pay for content. I think I should be allowed to choose the content I watch, rather than have Channel 9 or 10 or 7 decide what they want to import from the UK.
We will do a quick panel switch and move to privacy. Let me read you what we said about privacy. We wrote this three months ago: things have moved on a bit since then. As with the copyright debate, the massive social and commercial changes brought about by the growth of the Internet over the last decade are also forcing law-makers… (reading .).
So they said a lot’s happened in the last three months since I wrote that and we can probably start and finish this discussion with three words – mandatory, data retention. The changes to national security legislation currently delivered by the joint parliamentary committee on changes are a hot topic when it comes to privacy, evidenced by the in excess of 200 submissions. We will come back to it later on.

Firstly, I want to set the scene folks, more broadly. What is privacy today? Does it mean the same things as it means to an 18- year-old? I said I was talking with curt and I said earlier on, for me it’s privacy I want to be able to tell you you’re allowed to know nothing about me. For the Facebook generation, privacy is, I want to publish everything about myself where ever I want to but you’re not allowed to do anything with that information. Those are two fundamentally opposed views. Let’s talk about that with the panel. I will briefly run down the introductions. Curt Wimmer you met, he was here. And Cheryl Landon is the director of auDA, and is the former Chair of the ICAANN advisory committee thing.
This is Craig Ng, General Crown sil for APNIC. This is Roger Clarke, the Chair of the Australian Privacy foundation. This is Pia Waugh, Open Government advocate, former ICT policy adviser to Senator Kate Lundy.
And… Adam is not here. Your name is not on my list.
ADAM.. I am here.
CHAIR: Never mind. I was going to do a pirate thing, but I won’t. It wouldn’t be fair. Okay. What do we mean by privacy?
What do we mean by privacy, Cheryl?
CHERYL: everything I will say in no way reflects upon or is to be seen as the views of any of the organisations that I represent.
I’m a member of or have been a director prior or currently to.

Future I will reserve my judgement on. I think privacy is a dream. I think we lost it. I think privacy was something that may all want to and perhaps in a glazed-eyed moment dream that we could have again, but we walk around with these things, w are geo locating ourselves. We have huge amounts of data collected and we do so willingly. So to say that we have a level of privacy, I think, is a pipe dream. What I do have, however, and we can get back to that later, Chris, is very firm views on what happens with it.

CHRIS: good excellent. Craig, you’re a Facebook junkie, you put anything up on Facebook, given the chance. What do you think? CRAIG: That’s true. I think that the Privacy Act in Australia is a misnomer. For us to be comforted by the fact there is a Privacy Act, to think we are protected, our privacy is protected is totally wrong, because our Privacy Act is so limited in its scope that the traditional concept of privacy to people on the street, you know, privacy not to be photographed; you know privacy not to be put up on Facebook and for your picture to appear and tagged immediately, there is no protection against it. So, you know, and I’ll be interested to talk about privacy act in a moment, but our Privacy Act protects us from such a minute scope, that it’s virtually ineffective.

CHRIS: curt, from an American perspective?
KURT: We don’t even have a privacy act. We entirely react. To specific problems. I think privacy is an agreement. It depends upon, you know, what you can work out with whoever you are giving up voluntarily your privacy to and whatever pledges and promises that are made or basically that we enforce through the act, I think.
CHRIS: Okay, Pia?

PIA: all right. Basically, privacy is whatever an individual perceives it to be. The problem is that of course that depends on your technical literacy. With a relatively technical ill literate population, you have no privacy. People want to protect themselves as much as as little as they want but because the IT skills have gone so down, those people are not aware of what privacy they have. A lot of people don’t think about environmental policy. There was a case study where data was published that looked at floa and fauna in the northern seas of Australia and in a couple of weeks a particular species of fish was almost done to extinction. I think there’s a huge amount of optimism that I have, which is…

CHRIS: can you slow down a little bit… These guys are really good, but…
PIA: Sorry, weirdly enough, it’s ten timings as fast in my head. I will try.

CHRIS: I have to stop you – I have the concept on fish privacy, which I think we could spend hours discussing!

(LAUGHTER) PIA: Environmental privacy is what people don’t think about. And there is the panoptic of things going on about the state of being able to see into the lives of the people, one of the cool things is the people can see back into the lives of the state. That’s interesting, though I think there is a lot less privacy than there was simply because there is the capacity to get to data, it creates possibilities for better democracy as well. The final point I will make is that there is a disturbing trend towards looking at inappropriate behaviour as opposed to illegal behaviour. The enormous amount of data available from people who are not technically literate enough to turn it off means that there is a whole judgement call going on inappropriate behaviour, rather than illegal and I’m concerned about that.

CHRIS: Adam?

ADAM: The cyber punk manifesto says that privacy is the right to selectively reveal oneself to the world. It is about saying this is a piece of information about me and this is the audience in which I give authorisation to view that piece of information.

There are lots of talk of the young generation these days putting all this information on Facebook and how they are giving up their privacy and they don’t care and it’s fine. They do care. They care quite a lot. We know that, because when things like Facebook’s timeline update came to and people in France realised there was a discrepancy between the intended audience of some messages that were posted on people’s walls, or in their inboxes, it’s not 100% clear if that was a bug replicating that information. There was certainly people who said that message was private. Now it’s public. That’s not okay. There are heaps of examples of people actually saying there is no way that would have been intended for a public audience, like a young woman who called up Triple J and said: “I wrote a dirty poem to my boyfriend”. His parents were able to read it because it was on her wall. The assumption that we are giving up our rights and saying we don’t care about it is false and we do care.

CHRIS: I’m sure you do, I agree. Roger.

ROGER: where to start. A privacy is the interest individuals have in a private space. We have a fair bit of con sis ten – – consistency. That’s abstract. The only people who are interested in that kind of abstract rubbish are people like me who publish articles on it. Privacy is a specific gut feeling every individual has and each individual has it differently at different times. It is utterly situational and utterly personal. If we have a list running down the screen of a privacy breaches reported in Australia this week, there would be enormous diversity and we would react differently to the examples as they came across the screen. That is how it is. And yes, it would be nice if we could divide it up and tackle just some of the things, the Privacy Foundation is so stretched across that great list. That’s not the reality. Now, the critical thing that you’ve been raising, the assumption that’s built into the wording we were given, has to do with the “privacy is dead” proposition. It’s not dead because people demand it. They don’t walk in the streets saying: “We want a real Privacy Act instead of this rubbish semi-data protection act”. They don’t do that kind of thing. It’s the abstract. People are only interested in the spefpbg. — specific. They will walk against an Australia card and against an access card and they will walk against data protection and a range of specific things. People demand it. Privacy ain’t dead. Privacy pauses in between flurries. One thing I that will hammer, but I won’t give you the explanation because I will get more air time later, won’t I Chris? (LAUGHTER)

The igeneration, the digital natives, that lot, I call them the igeneration for obvious reasons because “i” stands for everything in this conference, the igeneration will be more privacy sensitive than previous generations. I will explain when I get the chance.

PIA: I want to make a comment. I always find it funny, a lot of my peers didn’t get computers until they were in late High School or university. I had a computer since I was four because my mum was a geek. Now when I was a kid there was an active campaign called “stranger danger”. It taught you all the basics and so when I was on, you know, when I was dialling into remote servers and having chats with people in the mid-90s and running up huge STD phone bills for my school, I, you know, you applied those principles t principles applied directly. One of the myths we face is that online privacy is somehow a completely different thing from meet space. I never call it in real life, because I believe online is real life as well, but meet space privacy is not that different. I think part of the problem we have is that we’re trying to treat it like something different, whereas the basics of stranger danger and tech literacy, chose things combined give us the tools to maintain our personal level of privacy to our satisfaction.

CRAIG: A small point. I think privacy is something that moves with time as well, just like copyright. I think it’s a balance. It’s a balance between society that wants to protect privacy verses safety. So you know, those of you in Australia would be familiar with the case of Jill Meagher who recently passed away. CCTV suddenly is acceptable and encouraged and well, I haven’t heard a lot of…

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: I will disagree.

CHRIS: on CCTV – in the UK, where I’m from, it is almost universally loved. Everyone thinks it is fantastic, not everybody, but general people, society, thinks it is great. And it is in fact supported and promoted by all of the great British detective modern detective programs who, which refer constantly to the fact that almost every crime is solved due to CCTV.

CHERYL: What are the statistics on the crime solution, it’s infinitesimally small.

CHRIS: I’m not suggesting being a fan of it, but it can be embraced. In Melbourne it is happening now because of an individual event. You said you violently disagree. Go ahead and violently disagree.

CRAIG: I didn’t say violently. The statistic that was out after the case was that in the UK one in 1,000 cases are solved with the aid of CCTV, and another report that was put out said that the amount of money that gets poured into CCTV could be better spent putting in street lights.

CHRIS: I agree. Still loved though.

PIA: Sorry, I saw a brilliant speech by, can I can’t remember his name, I will remember it, but about the difference between security theatre and security reality. This is part of the problem. There is a lot of theatre going on. The talk is on the Linux website from a couple of years ago. But the, but I think this is a big issue. And data logging is a really good example of theatre verses reality as well. So we will get to that one.

CHRIS: do we have CCTV in the states publicly?

CURT KLS: NOT TO THE EXTEND AS IN — NOT TO THE EXTEPBLT AS IN THE STATES.

CHRIS: do you want to say something, Josh? We will get on to data retention. I know you want to talk about it. Yes, Josh?

JOSH: With regards to the CCTV stats on solving crimes, one may have to ask: does the presence of CCTV prevent or prevent crimes happening in the first place?

I don’t know.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Initially there is a lull when people see that there is an increase in surveillance of them. But they get used to it. And that deterrent fades a away and then it gets used for tracking people.

CHRIS: I will get to you.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: More fine-grained than that. Crimes of passion are uninfluenced. Crimes are maybe briefly deterred, but there are still thieves who do it in front and get photographs taken of them. Mostly it is displaced, almost all of the effect of CCTV that’s been measured in the States is dace placement of behaviour.

CHRIS: you’re all talking about facts.

(LAUGHTER)

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: We’re not talking about data retention.

CHRIS: it makes people feel better.

Paul Evans, you had something in I have a remote comment from Tom.

PAUL: I want to smile for the camera. Hi.

(LAUGHTER)

20 years ago, Roger, you and I were implemented the Privacy Act. Do you agree with Craig that it is almost a piece of relic-try? Do we need to revive it?

CRAIG: The privacy act is distinct from the amendments and was worth having. It’s since been cut away by a myriad of slashes. Obviously every successive act overrides it in many respects. It’s never been adapted to take account of technological change. There’s been many end runs and every loophole has been used and many loopholes have been found that weren’t designed in the first place. It’s become poor. Fit was enforced, if it was enforceable it would help but the limited power that the Privacy Commissioner has got are not used either. I think the Privacy Foundation protects you better than the Comigtser. — Commissioner, I would say that.

CHRIS: Tom, do you have a remote thing?

TOM.. Yes, this is from ‘Dude D’. He says: “If privacy is a dream, why do you have curtains?”

(LAUGHTER)

CHERYL: I’m happy to respond to that. Chris knows I’m happy to respond to that because I’ve given up my right to privacy. There is not a single curtain in house. There are not doors in my house.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: She lives on top of a mountain.

CHERYL: there are also no neighbours. We’re all wearing curtains right now. I can change that.

CHRIS: all right. Now, back away… Thank you.

All right.

So there’s a wander through the joys of what privacy means or may mean or may not mean.

(Pause). There’s obviously a balance required, right? Between privacy and, let’s just call it security. We could argue about the term. Let’s call it security. We will get on in a minute to data retention. There’s a balance required between security and privacy, some of our information has to be available. How do we, what’s the perfect, is there a way of striking that balance? Who should decide? How should we decide? Yo go ahead. You waved at me.

Slowly.

PIA: I will articulate madly, will do that to slow myself down. You see, it’s funny. I see the balance as not necessarily between – there is a balance between security and privacy, but the balance between openness and privacy is challenging. I think the only way to strike that balance is firstly to not assume that any one group or any group in isolation can make that decision, there needs to be an ongoing dialogue and debate in the society and community and done in a transparent way and it needs to be done in an iterative way. One of the things I’ve thought about and I’ve started to look at ways, have started doing projects to implement is looking at policy from an iterative approach – how can we have, dare I say it, an agile approach to policy development, where rather than the policy developers in isolation with a smaller group of stakeholders, you have open policy development and then in the first instance, so you get more peer review, more transparency and then upon implementation, it’s constantly being monitored, to use the term, and reviewed and recommendations made and fed back to the policy. It’s only through having that ongoing approach to policy can government policy maintain flexibility and be able to respond quickly to new challengers and opportunities. So in a way our entire approach to policy needs to fundamentally shift to answer that specific question. In the question about managing the balance between openness and privacy, the part of that debate ends up being, well, you know, we need to have a certain amount of low, you know, you can’t goo too high res into a lot of data stats because it is very easy, with age location to identify 80 per cent of people from a data set, so you need to make sure it’s low grain enough to protect privacy, but high grain enough to still get policy outcomes, research outcomes, transparency, and to help the society and the different aspects of that society make well-informed decisions.

CHRIS: I have Cheryl and Roger. But I want to check in with Kurt. You said a little while ago you tended to be over reactive in the States. A lot of, it’s hard to go back, once you’ve taken a step forward with legislation.

P9/11 example is a good one.

KURT: There is a balance between privacy and security, but that is your right of privacy as against the state. There is another balance that’s sort of a balance between privacy and maybe free content, which might be your balance as against commercial operators. You know what, as to the first balance, I think you are right. I think once you sort of change that calculus, you never get it back. September 11 I think did that to us as a society, and it’s very hard to get it back. We have the Patriot Act passed in moments after September 11.

CHRIS: Sounds like a demine act that says you should be patriotic to America.

KURT.. We’re great at acronyms.

CHERYL: I read a — made a couple of notes. One thing I want to come back to were Pia’s words that there shouldn’t be this big difference between the digital world and the cloud, our second lives and thirds verses the hard copy one that we’re all used to and historically perhaps have our benchmarks from. But when we make a choice on privacy or what I’m going to expose or not expose to whatever audience in the, inverted commas “non-digital” and, therefore, some people believe “real world”. There are those of us who think that is the opposite. I’m making an informed choice. I decide as suggested whether I put up curtains or not; whether I walk down the street with my credit card number printed on my T-shirt or not. These are things that I would decide I should or should not do. So I know what I’m doing. And who has access to the material I’m exposing or allowing to be collected. So what I would like to also bring into the table for the panel is how we ensure that the individual or perhaps small community or group or state knows what information is connected – is assured of the accuracy of that information. You know what, typos happen; wrong bits get connected to the wrong name. Do we have ability to redress and repeal and write these errors when they occur? It’s basically what’s been used, how it’s being used, why it is being used and that you know about it. It’s informed consent and control.

CHRIS: can I will go to Roger and then I have a comment from over here and then there.

ROGER: Pia joined my board and may be following me as chair. Everything she said a few more things as well. Privacy protection is the process of achieving balance among multiple constituents. It is the APF works with. There is no privacy absolutism, that is nonsense. What is the balance among? Among interests of the individual themselves, you have to trade off multiples. Interests of the group, interests of community, of society, and unfortunately, terribly powerfully, interest of corporations. There is all sorts of balances that have to be done. A further factor is that the four dimensions of privacy I’ve always used are the weakness of the so- called Privacy Act. It’s only a data protection act. The other three are behavioural privacy, privacy of individual communications, and privacy of the physical person. When you go on television on the news straight after the announcement that $3 million of CCTV cameras are going to be strewn across Melbourne because Jill Meagher’s been murdered, you have to think through very carefully the balances. Physical privacy is sufficient that such that about the worst invasion of privacy you can suffer is to be killed, about the second worse is to suffer serious violence to yourself. They are all part of privacy. There’s many different balances. How do we do it? There’s a small set of principles which government agencies, legislators and corporations try hard to avoid. If they would work on these principles x we would get somewhere. The first is justification. Why are you doing this? How is this going to work, what is the problem you’re trying to solve and what is the mechanism whereby the change will occur? It is proportion natural, taking into account the side effects it will have? Is it transparent? Do we have the information to work with, or are you hiding things from us? Are there controls in place, which includes mitigating measures in order to overcome the necessary negative effects on privacy, and is there accountability? Can we clobber the people who play the game badly. If those things would be applied, if privacy impact assessments were forced on organisations, public and private sector, we would address these problems.

CHRIS: that solves the problem, we can all go home. Perfectly fine. Rob.

ROB: One of the balanced points I think is between privacy and free speech and freedom. There’s discussion about the right of the individual to choose how much of them about themselves will be revealed. But three comments made in private comments in recent weeks I think illustrate that there is more than just the choice involved. Mitt Romney and his 47% comment made at a private dinner, Alan Jones’ comments about the Prime Minister’s father, made at possibly, possibly not, a private function. And the former Speaker’s texts clearly intended by him to remain private. Each of those things are things that do have, there is a genuine public interest. People may disagree as to what extent the public interest probably for Romney’s cases, it is clearly relevant to probably the most important election that will happen in the next four years.

CHRIS: that is unfair!

ROG — ROB: in each case there is potential public interests. The balance about not always having the right of individual to choose how much privacy is revealed is important.

CHERYL: I need to respond briefly to Rob. I think what you made is an important point. I think there are times when one knowing what one is doing, and a public person is one of these categories, they should assume that they are giving up certain likelihoods of the right to privacy. I’m not a particularly public person, but I do believe and mostly it happens, that just about everything I say, do, or otherwise, is probably going to be recorded, photographed, taken down, in many cases transcribeed into three or four languages. And and it will be searched on the Internet. Because of that, I would be incredibly stupid and I’m not, to do anything, say anything, or transmit anything that I would not have published on the front page of the following morning’s newspapers. I’m not saying it may not make interesting reading from time to time, but you do it informed. So it’s just dumb to think that if you are public, you should do that.

CHRIS: Now I understand why you often speak in headlines. I will go to this gentleman here.
PAUL: I’m retired, so can say anything I like. This is the fourth session today, and three out of the four I think had the same message that we’re all missing. And that is the education of the young. I’m not talking about High School students. I’m talking about peer, stranger danger, walked past a daycare centre and a little kid said, “Hello stranger”. I thought, there you go, he’s got the message. I didn’t speak to him. I kept going.

(LAUGHTER)

There was a camera there, I didn’t tell you.

The reference to the igeneration and I call them exactly the same is probably right. When you start out in primary school, what are you, five? Six years old, thereabouts, and half the tackers have got telephones already. So why aren’t we teaching them that this telephone is communication device which can get you in a lot of hot water. They’ve all got mum and dad’s computer to play, learning games on, and/or I’m a small bugger I can do all sorts of thing t why are we not teaching them from that age onwards that these are devices that are tools that you can use that have inherent dangers and you need to learn about them? Then you have an informed choice to be an absolute idiot on Facebook, or Twitter or any of those other devices. I, like quite a lot of people in this room, came to computers in the middle of our working careers, so that we were already suspicious of the damn things. You know, we looked at these square boxes and went, “I don’t know about that”. Like most of us, I think we all do our electronic banking and all that sort of stuff and…

CHRIS: what’s your password again?

PPAUL.. I write it on a poet-it note! We’re all fairly bleary about things like that. So we inherently have that privacy attached to us because I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid, I was seen and not heard at the dinner table. Until a certain age. Whereas now the kids probably sit in the dinner table bloody texting somebody. So who knows.

CHERYL — PIA: you’re still carrying your phone around, that’s meta data.

PAUL: Mine is turned off unless the AFP has the triangles on the towers running. We need to educate the young ones, so they are the generation coming forward and they will carry the privacy, they will understand what digital rights are; they will know where to go with copyright, and all of those other ones linked together, that’s where it ought to be.

CHRIS: speaking at a young one, I’m looking forward to being educated. I’m sure that will happen.

Now, Craig wants to say something, hold on.

I’ve got this gentleman here, comments at the back. I had Narell and John, and Geoff and we are still, we still haven’t got to data retention. That is kind of my ultimate goal was that we wouldn’t get there. You want to bring data retention in? I promise we will get to data retention. Narell; you want to deal with this point before we go to data retention? Let me take that off you. Don’t worry guys, I will do it myself. You relax.

NARELL. What was it, 100 or so years ago and this funny electricity thing happened. People were terrified the kiddys would be burned and the adults, the parents, were terrified because they could see how dangerous it was. There were very real dangers. And over time we figured it out and we incorporate that into our parents practising and we rapidly teach children not to stick things in power points and occasionally we miss out the occasional kiddy. (LAUGHTER)

CHRIS: how occasion — how nicely put…

(LAUGHTER)

CRAIG: I agree with the education point, but the erosion of privacy is the function of technology. You know, once upon time when, you know, when I was a younger kid, when you receive a letter it’s private to you. You ep it, you lock it, no-one sees it. You know, today my email is hosted by Google. My, I use Chrome, and I synchronise my website together, and…

CHRIS: what’s your password again!

CRAIG: I trade convenience for having my information in the Cloud. I trust Google to some extent, but do I trust the Government not to access my data at some point? We will talk about data retention. My data is everywhere. Every time I step on a tram, my electronic Miki card tracks it. Every time I use my credit card it’s tracked. And my credit card company keeps it for more than seven years. We’re worried about two years of, you know, it’s a balance. We’re talking about what sort of data we’re talking about, but you know, I used to be a partner in a law firm and you know, record retention policies, everything is kept for seven years, so your interaction with your banks, other commercial entities, those records are kept for seven years. So it’s a bit of a balance.

CHRIS: Quickly, then we will go to data retention. Geoff you’re on.

GEOFF. I thought we lived in a society that believed in redemption. I did something wrong, I went to court and got tried by a jury of my peers, I served the time and then I was erased, I could start again. Even the jurists who tried me are not meant to have knowledge of my previous heinous misdemeanours before this particular one. Privacy is about time as much as it is about now. What we’re seeing now is the data logged is never, ever, erased. The person I was when I was 16 is not the person I am now. I’m a different person. There are things I did then that I really rather no- one would know about. Oddly enough, I it was pre-Google. You guys don’t know about it. But my children can’t do that. I think that’s really sad. I think that’s incredibly bad. I think it’s bad that we’re trying to impose standards on our children that we as children never had. I’m not sure they’re capable of doing that. I would like to understand your views. I’m not concerned about privacy. I have nothing I’m ashamed about. When you think about yourself, when you were 13, and does that still apply to you now?

CHERYL: I didn’t have nothing I’m ashamed about. Education has been pointed out and a number of our users. And when we put things out on Google, to be fair, that you know, it’s going to be there forever.
CHRIS: I’m going to go to certain people desperate to speak. I want you to please be crisp.

PIA.. We’ve had a period of tile. I will say00 years, of pretending to be something we’re not. We’ve all drunk the Machiavelli Cool Aid, we pretend we’re pristine and norm Mall. I think that is a big opportunity for us to become more mature as a society and realise that we aren’t, you know, pristine little Stepford lives and that’s a good thing. Though in the short term there will be pain and there will be pain, I think in the long- term it is good for us. That’s it.

ADAM.. One of the problems with that is that there are still regimes in the world who like to kill people. For dissenting views. And when you start saying that privacy in the West is something that we don’t really care about, that much, and we should be a little bit more open and we should be allowing a little bit more access to we can grow as a society, it’s dangerous, because we start allowing companies like Fin fisher and CISCO to build devices that get placed into Syria and end up being very damaging.

CHRIS: you end up being killed precisely because you’re not private. You say stuff you’re not…Should you be saying it? I wasn’t being literal, I was, but it doesn’t mean it’s my view. Roger?

ROGER.. I say that the identification would be more privacy sensitive. No-one — the indie case would be more privacy sensitive — the igeneration would be more privacy sensitive. Young kids are risk-takers. It’s a function of age. It becomes more risk-adverse as it gets older.

They accumulate more things to hide. They had some when they were young, but not many, they get a lot more as time goes by. The current generation habit ten much earlier and bit ten more often than our generations were bit ten. Their indiscretions, carrying on from Cheryl, we can see they’re record which yours and mine weren’t. And they’re seen by more people again later than ever was the case in the past. Guess what? Each generation each generation is becoming more savvy. We need them to teach that way around, not that way around. And each, the igeneration will, as a result, be much more sensitive…

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: This is why groups like the crypto party has been a success. After the cyber Crime Bill was passed recently, there was no party like a crypto-app install party. So someone started the hashtag and said let’s get people together, drink beer and teach each other how to increase your communications so that data logging is difficult.

PIA: There was a case study of people who had kids. We’re very security conscious. Maybe bad people could take them and you know take our children. Here is this story on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald with the parents, holding the children in swim suits and talking about how much they care about their privacy. Come on.

CHRIS.. What do we have from the ether? What will the wireless tell us? If you can get a microphone that works?

Technology is fantastic.

A question from Liam Comford from the Pirate Party Australia. He asked: are consumers making informed trade-offs. Do consumers have proper appreciation for how far-reaching the risks of their information of self- disclosure are. If not, what can be done about this?”

CHRIS: they’re not. I have basically no clue what the apps, what information the apps I use on my phone are giving to whoever it is, I don’t have a clue. I mean, I believe that if I use, if I get my apps through iTunes, there’s more of a chance I have protection than on android. I read that somewhere I and I don’t know if it’s true. That’s, and I consider myself to be reasonably okay about this stuff, I have no idea. I am going to move on to data retention.

Data retention: what do we think, good or bad?
Can we start with, can we start with you, Kurt. So, you know the prose – Data retention, two years, mega data, pretty much everything.

KURT: When this came up, I was practising in London and we wrote a paper for the House of Lords saying what the human rights and data protection records are with data protection. It’s the same as you see today. You have to look at it from two lenses. One is human rights law is a proportion natural, is it necessary in a democratic society, all the usual tests. And it’s questionable, it seems to me, to sort of gather information on everyone in the society, in case you lailter need to — later need to use it. But even from a data protection/ privacy act perspective, it is clearly an incursion of existing data protection/ privacy rights. I think it is a serious problem. I think it’s one that, you know t Europeans have already gone down that road and then there is, we’re starting to get pushback from the constitutional courts, but it’s tough. I have trouble seeing the notion that 23 million people need to be surveyed and — surveiled and capture whatever small percentage of criminals it is have to be captured.

CHRIS: it’s Australia, there’s a higher percentage here.

(LAUGHTER)

CHRIS: I will go to to this pirate gentleman here and then come back to the panel. While the microphone is coming, you’ve heard the argument: if you have nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to worry about. We will talk about that in a minute.

GLENN: Glenn from Pirate Party.

CHRIS: speak up, slow down.

GLENN: if data protection is implemented currently to the report if in the process, we can’t verify the proposal because the Attorney General refuses to release the information on the draft legislation, what chilling effect do you think this will have on the way people use the Internet?

PIA: You guys are awesome as loaded questions.

CHRIS: as a lawyer, that’s referred to as a leading question! We will go to Cheryl and then Craig next.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: (Inaudible) in not providing the information needed on proper public debate and it’s to the Parliament they should fling the thing back in their face. Leaving process aside. What’s different about the proposition? An organisation could come and say that they need data retention and here’s that justification and we would need to argue it through. What is different? Why does this matter so much? It matters because hitherto our ephemeral conversations were that and didn’t end up tracked into files, we used to read things in libraries, we used to read things in our homes. It’s now trapped into protocols, trapped into logs. Every book your download is trapped into logs, it is behavioural privacy, not just our privacy. It is a’s — that is the chilling effect. Narell was trying to get it through to the committee. It’s hard to get basics through let alone the more subtle points. This audience is different, of course.

GLENN: You’re saying that mega data in a grey gate is content?

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: It is massive content. In the past suspicion had to exist about a person before the big guns could be rolled out and interception achieved. We all support that. A PF policy supports appropriate powers for law enforcement agencies. Ipso facto suspicions based on anything that turns out in the future to be a bad thing.

GLENN: that’s with the assumption that people who have access are good people.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: We don’t have — we don’t believe that in the APF. We say there will always be another bigotry. If you’re in Cambodia for a long time, a degree from a university is one you didn’t realise you will run into. There will always be new nasty things that turn up with ipso facto suspicion generation. They can mine for it because of the richness of what’s available and the power of the things we have. If we don’t teach our technology to forget, going back to Geoff’s point, we’re in deep trouble. Then I would worry about us having lost privacy. I haven’t, by the way, I don’t believe we have lost it, we will lose it, unless we act and beat off stupid things like the proposal.

CHRIS: who wants the next crack? Cheryl?

CHERYL: You said me. Hear, hear to the speakers. I agree if there is a like or dislike, it gets a big dislike from me. The thing that really worries me about this potential huge net dragging through the waters of everything we do digitally, and keeping it for the length of time that it is, is proposed to, is exactly the same rational as we think there might be a disease, and so we’re going to treat you with absolutely everything. We don’t know what the consequences of this is going to be. The unpredictabilities are not worth the risk of taking it. There is more than adequate, as has been discussed on this panel and earlier ones, ways of tracking the real bad guys when you have due process, and proper suspicion. But there is no transparency, there is no accountability, there is no ability for the individual to have what we’ve been talking about, informed consent, or knowledge of its use, how can you give away for a whole community, the right that they should have to know where their data is or isn’t being collected and stored? What worries me most is that it’s the purpose behind it. Because I’m already admitting to huge digital footprints being left in my wake, we’re all leaving them. They are so disorganised and so disparate, that it’s a huge effort.

Every one of the Twitter people or feeds I follow is analysed. You will learn a lot about me. It may not be a bad thing, but what, as Roger said, is huge change in the future?

PIA: I didn’t make it explicit, but I’m not speaking on behalf of any employers. I need to be clear about that. I have three problems with the data retention issue: the first one is it’s based on a faulty legal precedent. Apparently the European legal precedent has been overturned in European Courts and there is information today or tomorrow about that from the NSW Cyber Laws space centre thing, so that’s the first one. And that keeps getting references, you know, part of the precedents and you know, that’s a good thing it’s been overturned. The second thing is it’s not based on a good logical precedent. The quote, and I did a blog post about this issue and I quoted and there was a good story about it quite recently that was well researched and there was a quote there from the AFP saying that if we, I guarantee you if we don’t have access to this data, we can’t possibly catch anonymous. Now, there’s so many things wrong with that sentence, not least at all any geek worth their salt misbehaving knows how to encrypt, how to use proxies, how to do touring. The data retention won’t help catch these people. The premise is illogical. There is no evidence about how this will help people catch the bad guys. The third thing; the biggest one, whenever I explain this in normal words to normal people, they get enraged, but what happens is that the entire issue is part of the whole suite of issues which is geeks verses spooks playing out in gladiator war games in tiny dark corners and it is not a society-wide conversation about the Internet and society and what we are and are not happy to compromise on. We need to reframe this entire debate to be about what do we want, what do we not want and I’m running a workshop tomorrow, where I will do exactly that.

CHRIS: thank you. We are coming to the close. I think Pia had a —
UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Pia had a car analogy.

PIA: I won’t advertise any more. If we went to the Australian society and said: we will put a tracker in your car. Everywhere that you, where you begin the trip, end the trip, everyone that gets in the car, but we won’t record what they say, we could, but we won’t. And people would go nuts. We all know we have the technology with phones, but if we actually proposed that, people would go crazy, yet that is meta data effectively.

CHRIS: I will take a couple of comments from the floor and close up with the panel. So, yes? Brief. And crisp. To the point.

JOHN: Current hat would be electronic function in Australia. The Attorney-General’s apartment will be appearing before the joint committee on intelligence and security at 3.45 tomorrow at Parliament House. Please come, unless there is something on here, of course.

I just wanted to follow up on Pia’s point about the European experience and just give a little bit of detail about those countries that have actually declared data retention to be unconstitutional. They are Germany, everyone’s heard of Nastazi and Bulgaria, which had an oppressive regime, they are Romania which had one of the most oppressive mass surveillance schemes; they are Czech Republic, which had similar experiences as well. If you look at these countries, these communities, these are societies that have genuine experience of what mass surveillance does to its society. They have said this stuff is not acceptable.

I think that is the way we need to look at this. We’re lucky in this country. We don’t experience this. We have no experience of what mass surveillance can do in terms of the corrosive effect on society and we’ve all talked about the issues. I could go on at length and I won’t.

You know, we need to learn from the experience of these societies and say this is not acceptable in this liberal democracy that we apparently live in.
CHRIS: good point. Thank you. (APPLAUSE)
JOHN: hopefully we don’t have to learn that through a world war or revolution.
PIA: We are in a revolution, man.

CHRIS: You’ll be first off – oh, never mind! (LAUGHTER).

Very quickly, please.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: I think there are two sides today ta retention. There’s the public domain and then there’s the governmental one. I don’t know how many of you are aware unless you’ve just download your Medicare statement for your tax, but the Australia card has arrived, we haven’t looked in the mail. You cannot download a Medicare statement from Medicare unless you join Australia online, which links you to Centrelink and human services and the ATO. The four main services that the Federal fraudulent policing societies gather data from when they will prosecute you. So there you go. It’s already happening.

CHRIS: encouraging news. Very quickly, Geoff? Quick one from Geoff. I want 30 seconds to a minute of closing comments from panel.

GEOFF. I want to remind people when they consider data retention in the coming years. Two facts: we’ve run out of V4 addresses, right. And two, what that means for data retention. Because we’ve run out of the four addresses, carriers now have to put in carrier-grade nats. When you talk about the data gathered by ISPs, it is no longer the fact that you were online on this day and used that address. No, no, no. Many folk are using the same address. The data that will be created is which TPC sessions you opened to which address. Let me translate that. Every site you visit, every ad that gets delivered, every email is then logged. Everything. That’s the way carrier grade logs. It’s an enormous amount of data. But this is data that Google would kill for. This is you, in all of its gory detail. This is part of data retention. That’s a very spooky concept.

CHRIS: minute at the moment going down the line. Kurt.

KURT: I think what this shows is that this group which cares about Internet governance, the future of the Internet, has a huge stake in privacy. This isn’t just an issue we happen to care about because we care about a lot of issues that surround online activity. It goes to the trust that people put in the Internet, your ability, a medium for the future and core Internet governance issue, not just data retention, but privacy generally.

CHERYL: When I started off saying that privacy is a dream and a myth from the past, it’s also hugely important and something has to be on the current agenda. It’s all about informed and personal choice and control over data and its use.

CRAIG: While we should be concerned about data retention, we not be distracted by the data retention debate, and lose sight of the fact that data access is a more important issue. There’s data everywhere already. The question is who has access to that data and when. And I’m worried that this debate about data retention takes the focus away from access which I think is the bigger issue.

ROGER.. That merger of the larger control agencies in the VHS cluster has been brought to you by the perpetrators of the access card who were promoted to be the team that developed that process. Does that tell you something about the persistence of senior executives in government? Second point is that the John Lawrence down here, who produced himself from being from the FA is also a director of the Internet…

(LAUGHTER)

PIA.. I didn’t want to go into it. Briefly, I want to make one point to final Liz, but on that particular thing, the goal I think of privacy in terms of how government relates to citizens and I believe part of the goal of australia. gov.au, is to give people more permission about, not permission, but the ability to say, yes, I do, or don’t want to share particular types of data. I think that is a laudable thing that needs to be encouraged. I don’t think the goals of that website are about the goal. And the big thing is, the Internet, we’re limited by the fact that governments themselves are jurisdictional and geo-spatially jurisdictionally defined entities all trying to, from their tiny area, you know, putting limitation from how the Internet works, but the Internet is a global thing. And ultimately it’s not legislation that is going to protect people, people can protect people. We need to be better skilling our people and stopping the getting in the way of the Internet being the awesome thing it can be, has been and certainly will be.

Chris: FINALLY?
UNKNOWN SPEAKER: We can’t educate our children saying that privacy matters when the Government says it doesn’t.

CHRIS: Please join me in thanking the panel. (APPLAUSE)
Now, it’s afternoon tea time. It’s also ISOC AGM time. It doesn’t get much more exciting than this. We will reconvene here at 3.50. Ten to four for our final panel of the afternoon.
Please be on time. Thank you.

Thank you for using Red Bee Media Australia’s Live Remote Captioning Service.

OKFestival 2012: Open Data, Open Gov & Open Science in Helsinki

A couple of weeks ago I went to Helsinki, Finland to attend OKFestival 2012. It was a suggestion from someone two months ago that planted the seed to go, and I felt it would be really useful. So I saved my pennies and booked the tickets. It was an incredible trip with some incredible learnings.

Check out my “storify” stories which collate my experiences from the two days from my live Tweeting.

Hanging out with Hans Rosling, Rufus Pollock and Dr Tim Hubbard 🙂

Basically I’ve been working on open government and open data policy and projects for a while now and I realised I had a good opportunity to connect with practitioners and policy makers around the world. I really wanted to pick the brains of these people and also share what is happening locally to share, and to get some context on how we are going in a global context.

I found many surprising things, not least of all that we are actually comparatively quite well in Australia when you look around the world. Obviously we have a lot to learn and do but we are lucky in many respects, such as we have a relatively open democracy already. For instance, Hansard for Federal and State parliamentary reporting is far from perfect but many countries have abysmal parliamentary openness and transparency. It was quite a shock to realise how little the accountability some jurisdictions operate under. More on that later.

It was also very interesting to hear from over 20 countries on their open data initiatives, to attend technical sessions on publishing data, to hear about the European Commission investment in open data (substantial!), and to talk to people from over 15 countries involved in “apps contests” and other hackfests. There was a lot of interest in our GovHack model so there might be some grounds for collaboration there too.

I should also note that upon careful consideration, I thought it might be useful to bootstrap an OKFN Au local chapter in order to pull together all the open knowledge communities across Australia. Some network mechanism is needed as we have growing communities that are completely disconnected from one another. We could all benefit from some cross-disciplinary community development that includes cross promotion, discussions, aggregated events and news, tools for collaboration, support mechanisms (financial, insurance, legal, etc) and perhaps some events that bring us all together for mutual benefit.

So, this is my mother-of-all-posts report from the week. I will be blogging on some of the thoughts that have coalesced as a result later, but check out some of my highlights from the week below along with some really useful links. I’m also going to be working with the open government community people at OKFN to do an expanded open data census that looks at specific details of open data initiatives around the world to identify some good practice, policy commonalities and general information for people trying to do open data in government.

Open Government

The Open Government Partnership

Hanging out with Richard Akerman from Canada (@scilib)

The Open Government Partnership was a key theme for the conference, with over 55 countries now signed up in its first year. Signing up is not only a statement of commitment to this area, but countries have a series of targets on openness and transparency to meet. Apparently OGP has been slower to take off in Asia and Oceania, with only a few countries in this region getting involved to date.

Australia is unfortunately not yet signed up, and I hope that is rectified soon so Australia can more legitimately take our place in this space as something of an emerging leader. I had a lot of people interested in what Australia is doing at the conference from jurisdictions all around the world, and yet whenever we got to OGP discussions, there was not official Australian voice or commitment, which was disappointing. I hope this can be rectified soon, especially as the OGP commitments are already in line with so many existing policies in Australia.

Check out the infographic on the first year of progress of the OGP, and the draft strategic plan which is currently open for public comment.

There were several sessions on the OGP talking about standards, implementation challenges, and many representatives from supporting organisations like the World Bank who are investing in open government initiatives around the world.

Declaration of Parliamentary Openness

Afternoon tea with @anked & @kate_Braybrooke — Afternoon tea with @anked & @kat_Braybrooke

The Declaration of Parliamentary Openness was launched quite recently as an outcome of a global meeting of parliamentary monitoring organisations (PMOs). It is quite an interesting document and again, possibly something Australia should consider signing up to.

NSW Member of Parliament the Hon. Penny Sharpe did a great speech on the Declaration of Parliamentary Openness for International Day of Democracy (September 15th) which happened to be whilst I was in Helsinki. Several people there were very excited about the speech and I was quite honoured to be cited in it 🙂 Nice work Penny!

Check out some of the work from open parliaments around the world.

Open Data around the world

Gorgeous model in the basement of the uni

I managed to have a long sit down with the technical lead on data.gov.uk which was fantastic! It was great to get an idea of the model they use for publishing, the development work they have done, what resources they have an more.

My notes on the data.gov.uk discussion, with permission from their technical lead:

Human resources for data.gov.uk – 3 full time resources only
Uses CKAN – very happy with it, especially as they can easily develop additional functionality they need
Every department and local authority has at least one data champion that does data publishing as part of their normal job, ~765 publishers
Total cost of data.gov.uk only about 460k pound per year. 40k pound hosting and staff = most of the rest
Primarily focused on publishing data in the best way possible. Not focused on datavis, but considering looking at drupal front end with ckan backend
Departments are entirely responsibility for publishing their data. The full time staff look after the platform, do development where necessary (have created several plugins specific to their needs and open sourced them), provide technical support to publishers, but onus is on publishers
data.gov.uk folk have built functionality to handle the structure of government, creating lists of “Publishers” which are individual agencies (etc), users have a list of what Publishers they have access to publish to. You can have hierarchies of Publishers to reflect interrelationships between Publishers
An account API which could be the corporate API. Only publishers get API keys
No token required for apps
Antonio gave us a demonstration of uploading datasets, uploading had an option to choose whether a dataset is part of a time set
All datasets are appended, content is not changed at all, “if you get into data changing you are dead”
5 star rating is helping improve quality of data publishing
With a multiple data file time series, the API interrogates the entire set
Contact details are available by dataset
data.gov.uk do thematic theming, they have over 8000 tags in the system atm, and they created 6 themes: health, environment, education, finance (other things apart from spending), society, defence, transportation, spending data (where they spend money), government
Automatic updates for some files via JSON but largely manual. Publishers felt more comfortable with manual publishing than aautomation for perceived control
Tend to point to WMS servers for spatial data rather than host directly
UK folk suggest a geoserver to host geospatial data and use open data platform to point to data rather than host it directly. A metadata harvester gets data from spatial sets and points to data. Needed to comply with the INSPIRE directive
They don’t apply 5 star to mapped data (or other purely linked information) as it doesn’t exactly map to downloadable data star rating
You can search on geospatial datasets by postcode or by drawing an area
Found that within a minute and 15 seconds (the record) a user could go from not having used the site before to publishing data, very low transition from newbie to publisher which was important
All statistics are automated which is due to being within the one dept and they are motivated to automated
INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community) Directive was a major driver, as was “digital by default”
They generate monthly reports that counts the openness (stars) of data, the amount per Publisher, publishers with broken links, datasets with broken links. Helps publishers keep their data up to date
data.gov.uk is building a dashboard to report by the hierarchy of government
Public Roles and Salaries linked data tool – http://data.gov.uk/organogram/cabinet-office
Blog post about plugins data.gov.uk have built, all freely available on github – http://data.gov.uk/blog/the-code-behind-datagovuk
Indemnification from the Crown so public servants not at personal legal risk
Started with the knowledge management people, then expanded. Basically all parts of the public service were told that this is what they must do, so they did it
data.gov.uk is hosted by the government, Ubuntu servers
data.gov.uk – metadata, almost a petabyte of data now
US is running three open data platforms, including Socrata, CKAN and another bespoke one
No inferred metadata – up to data publishers to provide metadata
Real time data – can deal with real time, new functionality being also built
The value of cloud service to scale with API requirements

For some technical details and the code behind data.gov.uk, check out http://data.gov.uk/blog/the-code-behind-datagovuk

Thanks Toni for your time!

Below are my live tweets on the open data country updates – each person had about 5 minutes to wrap up their country. I’ve put them in alphabetical order and the results were a fascinating snapshot. I wish I’d had more time to talk to each and every contributor:

Argentina – created Ministry of Modernisation inc Buenos Aires Data, 3 hackathons, datavis, app comp, digital city event coming
Australia – @piawaugh giving Australia report http://twitpic.com/avwd85
Australia – What’s going on in#opendata in #australia ? Psi needs to be cc by default. http://instagr.am/p/Ptj4FUodS9/ by Lucy Chambers
Australia – Not OGP members, national picture mixed, neat local efforts #okfest http://pic.twitter.com/l9u1JK1l by Tariq Khokar
Belgium – some progress, inconsistent across region. Estonia: need to transform data that is published to use as hard atm.
Brasil – have also done information asset catalogue to help facilitate future opendata.
Brasil – new law created to get important datasets published, also have proactive publishing of source code. Cost seen as blocker
Canada – over 12k datasets this year. Next gen platform deployed next year. Toronto building a city that thinks like the web 🙂
Canada – lots of municipal level work, national level is participant in OGP with three pillars of opendata openinfo & opendialogue
Chile – regulation around #opendata created but not implemented yet.
Czech – working on apps&services based on opendata, OKFN local chapter, data catalogue & opendata.cz, 1st gov data blog. No money
France – France presentation a reminder that open standards can actually be a blocker to first steps in opening data. #okfest
France – talk from NosDeputes.fr, lots of cities putting data up, national now commit to open licence, formats an issue/blocker
Germany case study of getting gov to open up some data, but really just getting stated.
Ireland – new real time passenger info API coming this year, need national portal, still low priority for many but relatively cheap
Ireland – 8-9 public bodies in Dublin regional opendata portal. Interested in biz models, datavis, 40% participants entrepreneurs
Israel – black whole of legislation, printing protocols were hid in boxes. Volunteers went in to scan and digitise. Now gov opened
Italy – National data portal, people need gov to open data, 3000 datasets liberati 🙂 increase in data quality. Mostly in north
Kenya – had one year birthday for Kenya opendata portal, focus on open standards, lots happening. No FOI leg yet, community devel
Netherlands – parliamentary data opened, 1st budget open data tmrw, issues: budget cuts hard, slow grow, gov benefit realisation
Netherlands – launched open data portal, gov stopped charging for geospatial data, $4m spent to free up satellite images…
Nigeria – update data hard to get, oil companies & gov corruption high, have digitised & visualised budget -> public engagement
Open Corporates – has info on 44,470,772 companies in the world. Open database of the corporate world. Interesting. Launched API
Slovakia – bad news is a lot of new laws but the working group works are slow and projects at risk.
Slovakia – launched open data portal, has preliminary support, worried about new gov not supporting but did, slow but building up
South Africa – not so much, Kenya is ahead of us Gov have removed new order mining rights info from website & water quality data
South Africa – info commissioner an important part to getting more transparency
South Africa – 1st hackathon in Aug 2012, secrecy bill attempting to shut down access to data, civil society active, OGP work too
Spain – lot of open data portals (~20), diverse, some good, some not. National portal is good but not much data. Big community tho
UK – 8661 datasets on new site, good stats, worked with openspending ppl to do reporting & better tools. Increase in public trust
Uruguay – Fascinating, gov working on data but dropping ball on other opengov #okfest
US – several initiatives out of date and not detailed enough
US – lots of stuff proposed, data laws, most of the work is overshadowed by Presidential election, OGP commitments being worked on.

Open Data Census – expand to capture information about individual initiatives?

OKFN have done a great job trying to get a useful comparative analysis of open data in countries around the world. I suggested it might be worthwhile to consider individual initiatives to get some understanding of exactly what is being done around the world, find commonalities and get some ideas around good practice in this space, especially as it is such a new area for so many people.

I put up some draft questions for the next Open Data Census and it’d be great to get feedback.

Outstanding talks I heard

There were many, many, outstanding talks at OKFestival. I’ll just briefly wrap up a few outstanding ones that I really enjoyed 🙂

Dr. Nagy-Rothengass from the European Commission

Dr Nagy-Rothengass gave a fascinating talk about the European Commission commitment to Open Data. They have committed substantial funding for this, around 100 million Euro and their core rationale for supporting open data are as follows:

Untapped business and economic opportunities: data is the new gold; possible direct and indirect gains of 140b Euro across the EU27
Better Governance and citizen empowerment: open data increases transparency, citizen participation and administrative efficiency and accountability.
Addressing societal challenges: data can enhance sustainability of health care systems, essential for tackling environmental challenges.
Accelerating scientific progress: e-science essential for meeting the challenges of the 21st century in scientific discovery and learning.

Hans Rosling

Hans Rosling was a brilliant keynote.

My favourite quotes from the talk:

If you want to communicate with people you need to learn from tabloids. They are good at connecting with people.
The problem is not that people don’t know anything about the world, the problem is they have a completely incorrect view. evidence & statistics show world population growing to about 10b after which it normalises.
The western world has a toxic combination of arrogance and ignorance. Also gender equality doesn’t just happen. It requires work.
D3 d3js.org as a great tool for #datavis
We can’t rely on the leaders to deal with the money. We need to get involved and see for ourselves.
Life has never been so good as today. That the world is bad today doesn’t mean it hasn’t become enormously better.
We need to seriously invest in renewable energies & isn’t about polar bears. We are up against something much bigger.
You have to demand access to the data. Countries should report & need to release big data so we can do better.
OECD *sell* their data! We need to have it liberated so we can understand and learn.
Don’t talk about what you should do, just mock up and prototype.

He went a little through his normal developing countries vs developed countries spiel which clearly demonstrates the world is a lot closer statistically than many people believe. He spoke about world population growth and showed that it is one of very few things that statisticians have been consistently correct about (with only a 6ish% deviation from projections over 50 years), and yet there is still a lot of fear and misinformation about population growth. He said based on projections and the massive slowdown of population growth, that the world population would peak at around 10 billion and then that number would largely be sustained, unless there was an enormous disaster.

He showed the importance of not dividing the world up into “developing” and “developed” and that people’s understanding of the world is typically quite out of date, based on figures and perspectives taught in school but not updated throughout adult life. This leads to a community making decisions based on outdated information which leads to bad decisions. It was humbling to see actual statistics and realise that we don’t really have embedded societal mechanisms to update what is taught at school, and how this creates a perception of other countries and cultures that may fall completely out of date within just a few years.

Personally I believe strongly that it is through global collaboration that we can leapfrog issues and many of the attendees from what are traditionally call “developing” nations had great stories to tell of citizen empowerment and leapfrogging “developed” countries.

Hans core messages so far as I understood them included the importance of open data to make good decisions, the importance of recognisiing that our understanding of the world is usually out of date, and the importance of the active engagement of civil society in international and national matters to balance out the imbalance of power.

This last point he demonstrated very effectively by showing a picture of world leaders at the Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy, with some information about which countries were loaning/giving money to others. It was fascinating. Aid money being given from one country to a “developing” country, which was in turn was loaning $30b to the US (when George Bush was in), who was in turn supporting them to get a seat on a UN council. It goes round and round.

Hans made a strong point that people should demand the data and transparency so they can make more informed decisions as a community and not just leave things up to world leaders.

Click through on the following thumbnails to see larger versions.

Rufus Pollock

Rufus is the Director and co-founder of OKFN, and quite an impressive figure. He is passionate about open data and is credited by Sir Tim Berners-Lee as being behind the “Raw Data Now” agenda. Rufus gave a great opening keynote where he spoke about the importance of open data combined with analysis and action. He said we have now started to see more and more data being opened up but if we don’t combine this with good analysis and then action in response to the analysis, then we will not see the benefits of open data.

His speech was largely a spoken version of his blog post called Managing Expectations II: Open Data, Technology and Government 2.0 – What Should We, And Should We Not Expect so I recommend you check it out 🙂

Diagram from Rufus Pollock on a theory of change

My contributions to OKFestival

Just a couple of notes for people I met there on my contributions.

I hosted a panel on open government, I contributed to several forums and I spoke on the closing panel with Philip Thigo (Program Associate at SODNET & Co-Founder of INFONET, Nairobi, Kenya) & Antti Poikola (OKF Finland Incubating Chapter, Helsinki) which gave me a good opportunity to further discuss the role of the public service in open government. This was received really well and I have a load of public service colleagues now from all around the world in this space.

On a panel about open data and culture at OKFest 2012 with Philip Thigo, Program Associate at SODNET & Co-Founder of INFONET, Nairobi, Kenya & Antti Poikola, OKF Finland Incubating Chapter, Helsinki. Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/tuija/8008433837/

I spoke a little bit about public engagement on public policy and mentioned the Public Sphere methodology that I developed with Senator Kate Lundy. The most recent consultation was one on Digital Culture which was a major contribution to the impending National Cultural Policy. A lot of people asked about analysis, so I spoke a little about the importance for both data analysis and “network” analysis of a consultation to ensure the outcomes have the appropriate context. See the Analysing the community of a public sphere blog post on Senator Lundy’s site.

I also mentioned my Distributed Democracy idea which a few people liked 🙂

GovHack and App4Country discussion

I was involved in a wonderful discussion with people from over 17 countries who do “apps” competitions and hackfests. It was great to hear about their initiatives and to share the lessons learnt from GovHack. Many of them expressed a lot of interest in our model which is a little broader than the “Apps4Country” model which has been quite popular in Europe. Most of them had the same problems with sustainability, longevity of outcomes from the hackfests, getting the government actively engaged. It was fascinating.

There are some good notes from the global hackfest/apps events collated here and there is a global mailing list (not very active atm) at http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/appsforx.

The notes I made for my presentation about GovHack:

Narrative, design *and* hacks
Not focused on apps, but rather hacks (apps, mashups & datavis) – often applications emerge but “apps development” creates confusion with mobile vs web vs devel vs datavis
GovHack was part of a trilogy of events – GovCamp to set the narrative and vision, GovUX/Jam to apply design thinking to service delivery challenges in the public service, GovHack for open hacking and to make some service delivey design outcomes real
Open Government, Science & Digital Humanities – to add Data Journalism
– Amazing how much of an impact it made, has really fired the imagination of the public and sector.
Enormous enthusiasm from the gov involved, 7 departments and agencies from federal and state governments were deeply engaged.
People flew from all over Australia to the two locations that we were simultaneously running the hackfest to participate.
Mentors from data owners and technologists to support teams along with sessions.
Made the documentation and presentation of the hack part of the judging criteria, which compelled teams to nicely capture content about their hacks which meant a good archive of the event.

Motivations:

Bring community together
Demonstrate value of open data
Raise the bar for the narrative in Aus, focus efforts on constructive efforts
Open the data, give depts buy in, connect their tech with community and leaders with success
Create new ways to do service delivery that can be integrated into gov, fundamentally disrupt gov expectations around “innovation”
Volunteer run which gave it extra credibility, buy in, and public engagement
A lot of bad expectations of “apps competitions” because of events that have done it badly, in Aus and internationally
Open Sourced hacks for people/companies/students/gov to build upon

Lessons learnt:

Hackers are motivated so long as you create some importance, and engage in conversation to manage tone and deal constructively with trolls
Prize money is helpful, but need to be careful to ensure good community, tone, “spirit of govhack” award
Scaling to go national – hackfest for two days, 3 days to vote, awards ceremony, followup 6 months later.
More funding would be useful
Ensure non tech elements encouraged, some great non “app” outcomes, eg the jewellery hack
Engage with the startup and VC sector, open sourcing outcomes means govhack can be yearly incubator for spin offs as well as input to gov. Startups love it as it is the best form of publicity
Non geeky hacks are the most reportable – History in ACTION
Technologists have a lot to contribute to policy, and there is a lot of work now to bring these groups together. Data visualisation and other uses of data can massively contribute to policy development and better policy outcomes.
Ongoing community engagement could be achieved through launching OKFN Au chapter to bring together communities across the gov, data journalists, hacker/geek communities and academia/research.

Interesting thoughts from “apps” conversation:

Need to strongly socialise – Finland
Apps for Europe, Spain, lessons from @aabella: 1) Civil society not politicians. Pollies have a role but it needs to be civil society driven. 2) Need to target general population not just tech community, get broader community involved.

Some additional links collected from the week of interest

Some random Open Science links sent:

Thanks

For the first time I tried couch surfing on this trip and stayed with a lovely Helsinki resident called Tarmo. A huge thanks to Tarmo for having me for the week, it was great to meet and I have to say, the couchsurfing culture is really friendly and lovely 🙂

Also, a huge thanks to Rufus for encouraging me to come, to Daniel Dietrich for his dedication to the open government space, and all the lovely people I met. I look forward to next year 🙂

Creating Open Government (for a Digital Society)

Recently I spoke on a panel at the NSW Information Commissioner’s “Creating Open Government” forum about my thoughts on blue sky ideas in this space. I decided to work on the assumption of the importance and need for creating open government for a digital society. In the 10 mins I had, I spoke on the pillars of public engagement, citizen centric services and open data, where we need to go in the open government movement, and a few other areas that I believe are vital in creating open government.

Below are some of the thoughts presented (in extended form), some cursory notes, and some promises to write more in the coming months 🙂

I should say up front that I am a person who believes government has an important role to play in society, even in a highly connected, digitally engaged and empowered society. Government, done right, gives us the capacity to support a reasonable quality of life across the entire society, reduce suffering and provide infrastructure and tools to all people so we can, dare I say it, live long and prosper. All people are not equal, there is a lot of diversity in the perspectives, skills, education, motivation and general capability throughout society. But all people deserve the opportunities in their life to persue dignity, happiness and liberty. I believe government, done right, facilitates that.

In my mind government provides a way to scale infrastructure and services to support individuals to thrive, whatever the circumstancecs of their birth, and facilitate a reasonably egalitarian society – as much as can be realistically achieved anyway. I’m very glad to live in a country where we broadly accept the value of public infrastructure and services.

So below are some thoughts on next steps in creating open government, with additional references and reading available 🙂

1) Online Public Engagement

There is generally a lot of movement to engage online by the public sector across all spheres of government in Australia. However, this tends to be the domain of media and comms teams, which means the engagement is often more about messaging and trying to represent/push the official narrative. There are a lot of people working in this space who say they are not senior enough to have a public profile or to engage publicly without approval and yet, we have many people in government customer support roles who engage with the public every day as part of their job.

I contend that we need to start thinking about social media and “public engagement” also as a form of customer support, and not just media and communications. In this way, public servants can engage online within their professional capacities and not have to have every tweet or comment vetted, in the same way that every statement uttered by a customer service officer is not pre-approved. In this way interactions with citizens become of higher value to the citizen, and social media becomes another service delivery mechanism.

For example, consider how many ISPs are on social media, monitoring mentions of them, responding with actual customer support and service that often positively impacts that persons experience (and by extension community perception) of the organisation. Government needs to be out there, where people are, engaged in the public narrative and responsive to the needs of our community. We need our finger on the pulse so we can better respond to new challenges and opportunities facing government and the broader community.

One of the main challenges we face is the perception from many people that there is little be gained through public engagement. If a department or agency embarks upon a public consultation without genuinely being interested in the outcomes, this is blindingly obvious to participants, and is met with disdain. It is vital that government invest in online community development skills and empower individuals throughout the public service to engage online in the context of their professional roles.

This online engagement development skillset can be deployed for specific consultations or initiatives, but it also vital on an ongoing basis to maintain a constructive narrative, tone and community that contributes on an ongoing basis.

Internet, government and society: reframing #ozlog & #openinternet

Having followed the data logging issue peripherally, and the filtering issue quite closely for a number of years, I am seeing the same old tug of war between geeks and spooks, and am increasingly frustrated at how hard it is to make headway in these battles.

On one hand, the tech/geek community are the most motivated to fight these fights, because it is close to our hearts. We understand the tech, we can make strong technical arguments but the moment we mention “data” or “http”, people tune out and it becomes a niche argument, easily sidelined. It is almost ironic that is it on these issues the Federal government have been the most effective on (mainstream) messaging.

The fact is, these issues affect all Australians. When explained in non tech terms, I find all my non-geek friends get quite furious, and yet the debates simply haven’t made it into the mainstream, apart from a few glib catch phrases here or there which usually err on the side of “well if it helps keep children safe…”.

I think what is needed is a huge reframing of the issue. It isn’t just about the filter, or data logging, or any of the myriad technical policies and legislation proposals that are being fought out by the technical and security elite.

This is about the big picture. The role of the Internet in the lives of Australians, the role of government in a digital age, and what we – as people, as a society – want and what we will compromise on.

I would like to see this reframing through our media, our messaging, our advocacy, and our outreach to non-tech communities (ie – MOST of the community). I challenge you all to stop trying to tell your friends about “the perils of data logging on our freedoms”, and start engaging friends and colleagues on how they use the Internet, what they expect, whether they think privacy is important online in the same way as they expect privacy with their snail mail, and what they want to see in the Internet of the future.

I had a short chat to my flatmate about #ozlog, staying well away from the tech, and here is what she had to say:

What annoys me is how the powers that be are making decisions that can or will affect our lives considerably without any public consultation. The general public should be educated on the implications of these kinds of laws and have a say. To me, this is effectively tampering with the mail, which has all the same arguments. If we start just cutting corners to “catch the bad guys” then we start losing our rights and compromising without consideration, potentially to no effect on crime. It’s a slippery slope.

Pamela Martin – flatmate and non-geek, she still has a VCR

It’d be great to see a series on TV about the Internet and society, something that gets normal people to talk about how they use the Internet, what they expect from the Internet, from government, and to work through some of the considerations and implications of tampering with how the Internet works. Some experts on security, networking, online behaviours and sociology would also be interesting, and let’s take this debate to the mainstream. The tech, security and politically elite too often disregard the thought that “normal” people will get it or care, but this is in fact, possibly the most important public debate we need to have right now.

I’ve written a little more on these ideas at:

Online culture – Unicorns and Doom – http://pipka.org/2011/06/26/online-culture-part-1-unicorns-and-doom/
The Society 5 project – http://society5.net/

Would love to hear your thoughts.

It is worth noting that during the big filter discussions in 2009/10 I was working for Senator Kate Lundy. Most of our correspondence up till that date were, to be frank, pro filter letters that argued that people wanted less porn to protect the children. IE – the arguments were generally idealogically based and little to do with the actual proposed policy, but supporting letters just the same. The Senator blogged about her thoughts on the issue which caused (over a few posts) several thousand comments, largely considered and technical comments against the policy which were really helpful both in building a case and in demonstrating that this is a contentious issue. I was and remain very proud to have worked for a politician with such integrity.

At the same time I saw a lot of people fighting against the filter using nastiness, personal attacks, conspiracy theories and threats. I would like to implore to all those who want to fight the good fight: take a little time to consider what you do, the impact of your actions and words, and whether in fact, what you do contributes to the outcome you are seeking. It is too easy to say “well it’s gonna happen anyway” and get all fatalistic, but I assure you, constructive, diligent and overall well constructed advocacy and democratic engagement does win the day. At the end of the day, they work for us, we just sometimes need to remind them, and the broader “us” of the fact.

UPDATE: This post was initially inspired by a well written SMH article which reported that the data logging issue had been put deftly back on the table (after it being shelved for being too contentious) with questionable claims:

Her apparent change of mind may be a result of conversations with the Australian Federal Police, who have long pushed for mandatory online data retention. Neil Gaughan heads the AFP’s High Tech Crime Centre and is a vocal advocate for the policy.

”Without data retention laws I can guarantee you that the AFP won’t be able to investigate groups such as Anonymous over data breaches because we won’t be able to enforce the law,” he told a cyber security conference recently.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/roxon-edges-towards-keeping-online-data-for-two-years-20120903-25amz.html#ixzz25dXwbRcM

Now, I’m not involved in Anonymous but I’m going to make an educated guess that there is probably a reasonably high rate of tech literate people who understand and use encryption and other tools for privacy and anonymity. Data logging is ineffective with these in place so the argument is misleading at best.

I was pleased and heartened to see the SMH article get a lot of attention and good comments.

This is only the beginning.

Speech from Nethui on Open Government and Gov 2.0

Kia ora everyone, and thank you for having me over here from Australia.

I’d like to talk a little about Gov 2.0. For all the techs that groan, I agree it is a stupid term, but nonetheless is has come to represent something quite profound.

eGovernment of days past was a first step towards governments going online. They looked at how government could put the same forms and pamphlets online that were handed out in government shopfronts and how citizens could submit those forms back again. Agencies and departments – by and large – did their own projects and it certainly did take us a huge step towards enabling citizens to access and interact with government.

However the different between eGovernment and the Gov 2.0 movement is significant.

Basically, Gov 2.0 is about three things:

Genuine Public Engagement – Recognising that governments can’t work in isolation anymore if we are to be relevant to the communities we serve, and in order to be capable of responding to new opportunities and challenges in a timely and effective fashion. This also means more access to and transparency around the machinery of government and democracy. Of course, being apolitical, I would love to see this engagement primarily at the public service level where we have the most incentive to get evidence based policy outcomes. Public engagement isn’t about just getting your media team on social media. It is about recognising that the old premise that the media is the only platform to communicate with the public is now false. Traditional media comms are about controlling the message, engaging with journos in the most effective way for them, broadcasting the message as much as possible in as positive way as possible. Online community development skills are about recognising we have no real control over the message. Collaboration, understanding the topic area, understanding where and how the community discussions are taking place, empathy, respect and a genuine passion for community feedback and input are all part of online communty development.
Citizen-Centric Service and Information Design – a cross agency and even cross jurisdictional approach that doesn’t expect an individual to understand the complexities of government, but rather can get a personalised service based on how much or little personal information they want to give. In this way, however the bureacracy of government is carved up today should not affect a consistent and reliable experience of citizens.
Government as a Platform for Public and Private Innovation – by recognising that governments can’t and indeed shouldn’t try to do everything all the time and that our primary role is to serve the needs of our citizens, governments should recognise where we can facilitate others to innovate. Where we can facilitate others to create new social and economic value. A great example of this is the enormous amout of publicly funded data and software that is made by government through our business as usual functions, and how free and public access to government owned data and software can stimulate entire industries and research sectors. The economic value of a series of geospatial datasets released by the US Government some years ago was estimated to be 20 times the value of what the government themselves could commercialise.

The policy basis for Gov 2.0 and open government in Australia is found in the following documents:

Other relevant documents and initiatives include:

AGIMO (the Federal agency responsible for Gov 2.0) and their blogpost Progress on Government 2.0
The great work and papers by the Office of the Australian Information Commission and open data as a way to mitigate the rising costs of FoI
The Statement of Intellectual Property Principles for Australian Government by the Federal Attorney-General, Creative Commons as the default

NB – I’ll add more here next week 🙂 Just wanted to get this post up sooner rather than later.

Let me give you a brief examples of each pillar from Australia:

Genuine Public Engagement: The Public Sphere consultation methodology – enhancing traditional government consultations through online community development and consultation methods. Community development for better consultation design and to get thought leaders onside, peer review, content and commmunity analysis (link gives example).
Citizen-Centric Service and Information Design – australia.gov.au – currently very beta but is in the process of being developed into a single interface for citizens to self select the services and information they need from across all federal government, with a consistent login and single place to manage their information and interactions with government.
Government as a Platform for Public and Private Innovation:
- dataACT – An interface approach for all ACT government data, making it accessible, machine and human readable, mashable, downloadable, contextual, reused and able to be visualised on the site by non-experts. Interfacing directly with government data sets wherever they are so people are still seeing the most up to date information live. Privacy, commercial and security implications to consider and take into account but it means access is not held ransom to legacy systems or slow procurement refresh cycles.
- GovCamp and GovHack Australia is an example of how open data facilitates private innovation. Held a month ago in Australia we had seven government departments across Federal and State all contribute funding and data sets for developers to create new mashups, applications and data visualisations. Several of these are getting funded to further develop and be integrated into government service delivery and the competition focused on science, digital humanities and open government. The categorisation gave developers a focus and we ended up with over 40 full functional software prototypes.

Also a more in depth list of examples of Gov 2.0 from Australia was presented by Minister Lundy at the Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington DC a couple of years ago. Obviously there are more recent examples too, but this is a good list 🙂

Basically Gov 2.0 is to eGovernment what social media is to email. A whole new world of collaboration, consolidation and crowdsourcing.

What does it take to achieve open government?

Great people! – identify, upskill or hire
Political leadership – Declarations of open government in Aus, NZ, US, UK, Permission to make mistakes also vital.
Policy – directives and support for all of government to comply, to engage online, risk mitigation strategies
Technical – procurement policy, standards, copyright, interoperability, APIs, low barrier to entry, geospatial is KEY!
Cultural – shifting to collaborative, open, engaging, genuine interest in what the public can bring (THIS IS NEW)
Structural – a way to get compliance and open gov across all gov
Precedent – examples, to celebrate, to learn from, to encourage and to mitigate risk

Let’s look at what is happening around the world in this space:

Note: I have covered this in greater detail in part two of my blog post on Gov 2.0: Where to begin, so please check that out 🙂

UK – Power of Information Taskforce, open data, engaged with developer community, trying to shift frontline service delivery, COINs, the Guardian
US – traditionally have had open data, some great initiatives a few years ago, IT Dashboard example (open source!), the Open Government Partnership, Vivek Kundra and being prepared to hold industry to account. See the interview I did with Vivek.
Canada – Chris Moore, the CIO of Edmonton – a great example of an innovative approach to public service – flattening the hierarchy for a skills and time based approach to projects
NZ – Vikram will be discussing

See some interviews I did with Chris Moore and Andrew Stott on Minister Lundy’s blog below her also rather excellent talk.

Culture shift

Of course, Gov 2.0 is riding on the back of a signficant and incredible movement sweeping across the planet, and this is no more evident that the conversations at Nethui amongst visionaries and thought leaders like yourselves. Here in this room we have people from such diverse backgrounds, industries, the public sector, researchers and many more. And it is in coming together that we are able to leverage the power of a cross-discipline co-design approach to new opportunities and challenges.

It is the power of collaboration that we find true innovation.

Technology has shifted the way we think.

Big statement I know but technology has empowered individuals in a way never seen before. Within a decade or two, we have seen widespread and rapidly growing access to all the traditional dimensions of power that the very foundations of society have been based upon. Think about it, we now have massive distribution of publishing, communications, monitoring (Foucault would love the Internet), force (the one keeping spooks up at night) and finally, the emerging possibility of massive distribution of property with 3D printing and nanotechnology.

Power used to be who had the biggest swords or guns. But technology gives us all the power to be disruptive. It is liberating!

So with these major shifts in society, it brings up the interesting question of what is the point of a government? For some it is about creating and enforcing laws, for some it is about market regulation. Perhaps government is about the common good?

For me, governments are a way to get an economy of scale for common good and common problems in a society. It goes a long way towards a good baseline quality of life for all people in a society, no matter what situation they are born into. I know this comes from an Australian perspective, but I think we largely share that cultural assumption of the role of government.

Regulation, trade, health, roads, education, all of this comes (or should come) from the basis of a good quality of life for citizens so the community can thrive socially, economically & democratically.

The point is that life is changing dramatically and being clear on what asusmptions from the past still hold for the future is an important part of creating resilience in the future.

Basically, the future of government and indeed society, is to be found in collaboration. In leveraging all the skills, passion and experience in our societies and transparently building the future together.

Thank you.

I’ll update this post with more stuff when I’ve slept 🙂 Otherwise, if you want any further links leave me a comment.

Public engagement: more customer service than comms

I’ve been involved in online communities for many years. I’ve seen and been in projects that span every possible traditional barrier to collaboration (location, culture, language, politics, religion, gender, etc, etc). This experience combined with my time in government has given me some useful insights about the key elements that make for a constructive online community.

What I came to learn was the art and craft of community development and management. This skill is common in the technology world, particularly in large successful open source projects where projects either evolve to have good social infrastructure or they fail. There are of course a few exceptions to the rule where bad behaviour is part of the culture of a project, but by and large, a project that is socially inclusive and that empowers individuals to contribute meaningfully will do better than one that is not.

It turns out these skills are not as widespread as I expected. This is problematic as we are now seeing a horde of “social media experts” who often give shallow and unsustainable advice to government and companies alike, advice that is not rooted in the principles of community engagement.

The fact is that social media tools are part of a broader story. A story that sees “traditional” communications turned upside down. The skills to best navigate this space and have a meaningful outcome are not based in the outdated premise that a media office is the single source of communications due to the media being the primary mechanism to get information out to the general public. There will continue to be, I believe, a part for the media to play (we could all use professional analysis and unbiased news coverage, please). However, as governments in particular, we will have a far more meaningful and mutually beneficial relationship with citizens where we genuinely and directly engage with them on matters of policy, service delivery, democratic participation and ways that government can facilitate public and private innovation.

You might be lucky and have some media people who have adapted well to the new world order, but any social media strategy limited to the media office will have limitations in delivery that starts to chafe after a while.

It is when you get your customer service and policy people engaged online that you will start to see genuine engagement, genuine community building and the possibility to leverage crowdsourcing. It is when you start to get people skilled in community engagement involved to work alongside your media people and in collaboration with the broader organisation that you will be able to best identify sustainable and constructive ways your organisation can apply social media, or indeed, whatever comes next.

Below are some vital skills I would recommend you identify, hire or upskill in your organisation. Outsourcing can be useful but ideally, to do this stuff well, you need the skills within your organisation. Your own people who know the domain space and can engage with imprimatur on behalf of your organisation.

I’ll continue to build this post up as I have time, and would love your feedback 🙂

Herding Cats

In my time in online communities I came to understand the subtleties in what we in the geek world refer to as “herding cats”. That is, working with a large number of individuals who have each their own itch to scratch, skills, interests and indeed, vices. Individuals who have a lot to contribute and are motivated for myriad reasons to get involved.

I learnt how to get the best out of people by creating a compelling narrative, having a meaningful goal, uniting people over what we have in common rather than squabbling over what is different.

Herding cats is about genuinely wanting people to get involved, recognising you can’t “control” the conversation or outcomes, but you can encourage a constructive dialogue. Herding cats ends up being about leadership, building respect, being an active part of a live conversation, setting and encouraging a constructive tone, managing community expectations and being a constant presence that people can turn to and rely upon. Cat herding is about building community.

Finally, herding cats is about managing trolls in a constructive way. Sometimes trolls are just passionate people who have been burnt and feel frustrated. They can sometimes become your greatest contributors because they often care about the topic. If you always engage with trolls in a helpful and constructive way, you won’t miss the opportunities to connect with those who genuinely have something meaningful to contribute.

Community and Topic Research

You need to know the communities of interest. The thought leaders, where they are having their discussions, what one-to-many points (technical, social, events) can you tap into to encourage participation and to get your finger on the pulse of what the community really thinks. Community research is about knowing a little about the history and context of the communities involved, about the right (and wrong) language, about if and how they have engaged before and getting the information you need to build a community of interest.

Topic research means your community engagement person needs to know enough about the domain area to be able to engage intelligently with communities of interest. Your organisation is effectively represented by these people so you need them to be smart, informed, genuine, socially and emotionally intelligent, “customer service” oriented and able to say when they don’t know, but be able to follow it up.

Collaboration & Co-design

This skillset is about intuitively trying to include others in a process. Trying to connect the dots on communities, perspectives, skills and interests to draw people from industry, academia and any other relevant groups into the co-design of your project. By getting knowledgable, clever and connected people in the tent, you achieve both a better plan and a community of (possible influential) people who will hopefully want to see your initiative succeed. Co-design isn’t just about creating something and asking people’s opinion, but engaging them in the process of developing the idea in the first place.

A little thanks goes a long way. By publicly recognising the efforts of contributors you also encourage them to continue to contribute but whatever you are engaging on needs to be meaningful, and have tangible outcomes people can see and get behind.

Real outcomes of your online engagement are key in managing public expectations.

Monitoring, Analysis & Feedback Mechanisms

It is vital that you have internally the skills to monitor what is happening online, analyse both the content generated and the context around the content created (the community, individuals, location, related news, basically all the metadata that helps you understand what the data means).

By constantly monitoring and analysing, you should be able to identify iterative improvements to your online engagement strategy, your project, policy or “product”. Most people focus on one of these three (usually the latest toy with pretty but meaningless graphs spruiked by some slick salesperson), but it is by turning the data into knowledge and finally into actions or iterative improvements that you will be able to respond in a timely and appropriate manner to new opportunities and challenges.

UPDATE – quick shout out to the rather useful Online Engagement Guidance and Web 2.0 Toolkit for Australian Government Agencies. This was a funded outcome from the Gov 2.0 Taskforce.

Vivek Kundra and some lessons learnt about tech in gov

Last night I heard Vivek Kundra speak about innovation, technology and Gov 2.0 at a dinner hosted by AIIA and Salesforce. It was a fascinating talk in that it exceeded my expectations significantly.

I had reasonable expectations that his experience as CIO of the US Federal Government and his insights to the US open government agenda would be interesting, but he also talked about the “epic war between the status quo and progress”, the inertia in government, the major shift in power from gov to the people, how tech in enabling a new form of democracy, the need to hire great people (and get rid of those not on board) and how issues like SOPA demonstrate that the people can overturn traditional power broker agendas through grassroots efforts.

He also spoke about the need to reform gov IT procurement practices to demand good services from the sector, to put them on notice and to engage smaller innovative players in the market. It was fascinating to see someone who was so senior in government take that strong a stance, but it makes sense. Government is the number one purchaser of tech, so how it engages the market has a profound impact. And as a huge customer, government should be able to demand the best possible service. At the same time, without great people internally who are empowered and incentivised, it’s hard to drive progress.

When asked how to actually drive tech innovation in government, policy, procurement and workforce reforms were very important, but fundamentally workforce. Vivek said that there needs to be rigour in hiring practices, a culture of getting the best people into the public service, a culture that rejects blockers and gets rid of those who don’t get on board with progress.

Some comments from Vivek that I thought useful and thought provoking (as captured by live tweeting on #gov2au from the evening):

The danger is to not move, to play safe. It’s vital to move and be thoughtful but bold to use the opportunity.
Often Gov collaboration is stalled by an us vs them attitude. This needs to be overcome.
It is now easier to innovate and compete due to new tech, and those that innovate dominate, as they fill the space.
Indian gov drove aggressive FOI changes, results of the transformation was short term pushback and issues, but longer term transparency and improvement of gov.
NBN is an enormous and exciting opportunity for Australia and for open government and Australia can play a leadership role.

I have to say, it was very interesting and stimulating. It kicked off some great discussions in the group too.

I have seen a few people respond to the Vivek coverage quite negatively. There is, of course, a lot of hype and fluff out there around Gov 2.0 and “cloud”, but it doesn’t mean you don’t listen critically, research what people say and come to your own conclusions. I am constantly surprised by people who insist on loudly voicing blatant cynicism, pessimism and general negativity, seemingly oblivious to the fact that this establishes a narrative that undermines the (often) valid and good points they are trying to make, whilst making it harder for other people to get actually get things done.

I would like to put out there that the more leadership shown by everyone in the tech community, especially the Gov 2.0 community and the media, the better a chance we all have of achieving great things.

Be the change you want to see, and all that 🙂

I highly recommend people check out Vivek’s talk from the AIIA Summit on Cloud. It was a good example of thought leadership by a person who has actually got things done, a change agent who has made a difference. I’ve been told you should be able to watch it and all the summit talks online here tonight.

Thank you to Loretta form AIIA and Phil from Salesforce for agreeing to have Vivek speak to the Gov 2.0 community. A big thanks to Vivek too, it was great to meet you 🙂 People can follow Vivek on @vivekkundra on Twitter.

It is worth mentioning that neither the AIIA nor Salesforce asked for anything in return for doing a Gov 2.0 discussion with Vivek, Salesforce paid for the dinner after the talk, and in the interview below I spoke with Vivek off the cuff without any direction from AIIA or Salesforce.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNMj4jd3q88[/youtube]

TRANSCRIPT

Pia: So I’m here with Vivek Kundra, he’s here in Australia touring around and talking to a lot of people and I just thought I’d take the opportunity to ask him a couple of questions for the Gov 2.0 community peeps out there, around Australia.

So, hi, welcome to Australia.

Vivek: Thanks for chatting with me, I appreciate it.

Pia: Yeah, that’s cool. Can you just give us a bit of an overview about your ideas on driving tech innovation in government. What you see to be the core things you need to do?

Vivek: Well obviously it always starts with the people and one of the most important things that needs to happen in government, around the world, is they need to be able to hire the right kind of people to drive innovation and be change agents. You can’t legislate and you can’t essentially mandate innovation itself so it starts with that.

Secondly I think you need need bold leadership. If you look at what President Obama did, he made technology a central part of how his administration was going to achieve some of the policy objectives that he had set out.

And the third, you need to be able to distrupt the status quo by making sure that you have a culture that celebrates failure. That doesn’t actually go out there and punish those that are at the bleeding edge.

Pia: And, I mean, if you’ve got that leadership at the top level and you’ve got your, you’ll always have your enthusiastic geeks at the grassroots level, how do you drive that change in that rather large middle level?

Vivek: I should think it’s easier if you have a number of people on the front lines. The geeks kinda banding together trying to find a new way. But you’ve got to be able to make sure is that the middle management, unfortunately a lot of times you have people who are incentivised by the number of dollars that they manage and the number of years they’ve been in the job and that’s where from a political leadership perspective it’s very very important to make sure that you’re reaching out and embracing those that are on the front lines that understand the issues and understand the innovation that must be driven, and frankly reward those managers that are going to support, encourage and embrace that notion and that culture and those people.

At the same time the reality is, and we don’t talk about this often, we also have to be able to make the hard choices. If there are managers or people that are getting in the way, the Dr No’s, they are basically in deleriction of their duty. And what I mean by that is that’s not what the people of a country expect of their government. They’re basically putting their personal interests over the interests of the people.

Pia: OK, and finally ‘cos we don’t have a lot of time, what are your observations and thoughts about what is happening in Australia and some of the opportunities and challenges for Australia? Seeing you’re here and seeing what’s going on.

Vivek: Well I’m actually very excited. I think it’s amazing country with an entrepreneurial culture, to the number of meetings I’ve had and meeting people like you who are doing some amazing work in the public sector, whether it’s been public participation, fundamentally rethinking what a modern democracy looks like.

I’ve also seen some of the really really bold steps that are being taken to invest in strategic infrastructure. So the National Broadband Network is one example. You look at what’s happening as far as the government’s concerned. You’re seeing some of these technologies come into the goveernment.

But the fear I have is that you want to make sure you continue on that trajectory. It’s very easy for those people in the government who want to preserve the status quo to win out. And I think there is an epic battle going on between the past and the future. And it’s really really important that, from a policy perspective, that there are appropriate incentives for those who are architecting the future, to be the ones that are driving the country.

Pia: And do you think that epic battle presents a bit of a power shift from small groups of people to the broader community to engage…

Vivek: Well absolutely, it’s clear. We see it every day, whether it’s in Australia or anywhere else in the world. Therre is this shift in power from a few government officials behind closed doors to the masses, it’s real. And technologies that didn’t exist before exist today that have made this possible in terms of the very structures that are needed.

So the ability for anyone with a front row seat to their government with a mobile device. That’s amazing! We don’t think about it, we take it for granted, but now every citizen can be a co-creator. Every citizen can be a watchdog and hold their government accountable. Every citizen can actually go out there and be part of the digital public square and that is what I think is super exciting about the time we are living in.

Pia: Yep, sure. Well thank you very much.

Vivek: Thank you.

Pia: And I look forward to next time you come to Australia.