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.

OSDC 2011 Talk – Open Government, what is it really?

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

The changing relationship between citizens and government

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is Gov 2.0

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

Open Data
Citizen Centric Services
Public Engagement

Open Data

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data visualisation

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

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

Citizen Centric Services

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

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

Some examples of citizen centric services include:

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

Public engagement

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

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

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

FOSS and government

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open Government policies

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

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

Conclusion

Open Government and Gov 2.0 both represent an ideal.

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

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

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

Thank you.

US Air Force Web Posting Response Assessment

This is pretty interesting. The US Air Force have a methodology to deal with online responses like comments. I like it how trolls and “ragers” require HQ be notified 🙂

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

Click on the image for the larger more readable version.