Category: Tech

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.

Further reading:

2) Citizen Centric Services

Citizens don’t care about the complexities of government, and yet we continue to do service delivery along departmental lines and spheres of government. The public service structure is continually changing to match the priorities of the government of the day, so not only is it confusing, but it is everchanging and we end up spending a lot of effort changing websites, stationery and frontline branding each portfolio shuffle. The service delivery itself (usually) continues seamlessly regardless of shifts in structure, but it is hard for citizens to keep up, and nor should they be expected to.

Citizen centric services is about having a thematic and personalised approach to service and information delivery. Done well, this enables a large number of our population to self service, in the manner and at the time that is convenient to them. It is no small task to achieve as it requires a way to integrate (or perhaps sit in between) systems and data sources throughout all of government, but we have some established case studies in Australia that we can learn from. Rather than trying to get consistent systems across government – which leads to always being only as strong as your weakest link – it is feasible to have integration tools to “front end” government.

By enabling many citizens to effectively self service, this approach also frees up government resources for supporting our most vulnerable and complex cases.

It is worth also noting that a truly citizen centric approach would be both cross departmental *and* cross jurisdictional. We need to start asking and addressing the challenges around how can we collaborate across the three spheres of government to give citizens a seamless experience?

A more eloquent description of this concept is from a speech from my former boss, Minister Kate Lundy, from a speech entitled Citizen-centric services: A necessary principle for achieving genuine open government/

3) Proactive data disclosure – open data and APIs

The public service holds and creates a lot of data in the process of doing our job. By making data appropriately publicly available there are better opportunies for public scrutiny and engagement in democracy and with government in a way that is focused on actual policy outcomes, rather than through the narrow aperture of politics or the media. This also builds trust, leads to a better informed public, and gives the public service an opportunity to leverage the skills, knowledge and efforts of the broader community like never before.

Whether it be a consultation on service planning or a GovHack, an open and contextualised approach to data and indeed the co-production of policy and planning ends up being a mechanism to achieve the most evidence based, “peer reviewed” and concensus driven outcomes for government and the community. It gets citizens directly engaged in actual policy and planning, and although the last word is always ultimately with the relevant Minister, it means that where political goals don’t align with the evidence based policy recommendations, an important discussion can be had and questions asked from an engaged and informed public.

This, to me, is a real and practical form democracy. I feel that party politics actually gets in the way to some degree, as it turns people off engaging in the most important institute in their lives. Like a high stakes team sport, the players are focused on scoring goals against their opponents and forget about what is happening off field.

As a person who is working in the public service, I truly believe that transparency is our best defence in fulfilling our duty to serve the public.

With major changes to legislation in recent years making FOI more seamless and accessible to citizens, departments are struggling to allocate necessary resources to comply in an extremely fiscally conservative environment.

In the meantime, although there is a general concensus on the value (with admittedly sometimes quite different interpretations of value) of opening up more public sector information publicly, the fact is that it is largely seen as a “good” thing to do, a nice to have, and as such has been challenging for departments to justify the not-insignificant resources required to move to a proactive data disclosure status quo.

There is a decent argument to say that proactively publishing data (and indeed, reports) would help mitigate the rising costs of FOI as departments could point requests to where the information is already online. But realistically, unless the department had in place the systems to automate proactive publishing, then it will remain something done after the fact, not integrated into business as usual, ad hoc and an ongoing expense that is too easily dropped when the budget belt tightens.

I have people say to me all the time “just publish the data, it’s easy”. The funny thing is the vast majority of people have little to no experience actually doing open data in government. It is quite a new area and though the expertise is growing, we are in infancy stages in jurisdictions around the world. Even some jurisdictions with very large numbers of data sets are doing much of that work manually, the data becoming out of date quickly, and quite often the pressure to be seen to do open data overrides the quality and usefulness of the implementation, as we see datasets being broken down into multiple uploads to meet quantitative KPIs.

The truth is, although putting up some datasets here or there is relatively easy – there is a lot of low hanging fruit – to move to a sustainable, effective, automated and systematic approach to open data is much harder, but is the necessary step if we are to see real value from open data, and if we are to see the goals of open data and mitigating FOI cost compliance merge.

Interestingly, another major benefit of the proactive public publishing of government data, is that the process of ensuring a dataset complies with privacy and other obligations is quite similar between making something public and sharing across departments at all. By making more government data openly available, particularly when combined with some analysis and visualisation tools, we will be able to share data across departments in an appropriate way that helps us all have better information to inform policy and planning.

The good news is, in Australia we have the policies (OAIC, AG Principles of IP, Ahead of the Game, Gov 2.0 Taskforce Report, etc), legislative (FOI changes),and political cover (Declaration of Open Government, though more would be useful) to move on this.

I will be doing a follow up blog post about this topic specifically in the coming week after I attend a global open data conference where I intend on researching exactly how other jurisdictions are doing it, their processes, resourcing, automation and procurement requirements. I will also give some insights to what the dataACT team have learnt in implementing Australia’s first actual open data platform, which is an important next step for Australia building on the good work of AGIMO with the data.gov.au pilot.

Additional notes:

  • more effective and efficient government – shared across departments, capacity to have whole of gov business intelligence and strategic planning, capacity to identify trends, opportunities and challenges within public service
  • internal measuring, monitoring, reporting and analysis – government dashboards – both internal and public reporting on projects
  • innovation – public and private innovation through access to data, service APIs – gov can build on public innovation for better service delivery – eg GovHack
  • transparency – need to build trust, what is the value to gov? – eg of minister vs doctor example

4) Agile iterative policy

There is a whole discussion to have about next generation approaches to policy which would be iterative, agile, include actual governance to keep the policy live and responsive to changing circumstances, and the value of live measuring, monitoring and analysis tools around projects and policies to help with more effective implementation on an ongoing basis and to applying the learning from implementation back into the policy.

The basic problem we have in achieving this approach is that, structurally, there is generally no one looking at policy from an end to end perspective. The policy makers are motivated to complete and hand over a policy. The policy implementers are motivated to do what they are handed. We need to bridge this gap between policy makers and doers in government to have a more holistic approach that can apply the lessons learnt from doers into strategic planning and development on an ongoing basis.

I’ll further address this in a followup blog post next month as I’m pulling together some schools of thought on this at the moment.

Check out the APS Policy Visualisation Network which is meeting for the first time next week if this space interests you. It will be fascinating to have people across the APS discussing new and interesting approaches to policy, and hopefully we will see the build up of new skills and approaches in this area.

Notes:

  • iterative and adaptive policy – gone are the days of a static 10 year policy, we need to be feeding recommendations from testing, monitoring, measuring back into improving the policy on an ongoing basis.
  • datavis for policy “load testing”, gleaning new knowledge, better communication of ideas, visualisation networks for contextualisation, etc
  • co-production, co-design
  • evidence based, peer reviewed policy that draws on the diverse strengths throoughout our community and public service

5) Supporting Digital industries

There are many reasons why, as a society we need to have strong digital industries including IT, creative, cultural, games development, media, music, film and much more. Fundamentally these industries and skills underpin our success in all other industries to some extent, but also, we have seen many Australian digital companies have to go overseas to survive, and we need to look at the local market and environment and ask how we can support these companies to thrive in Australia.

I ran two major consultations about this over the past couple of years, and the outcomes and contributions are still very relevant:

  • The ICT and Creative Industries Public Sphere – included an excellent contribution paper from Silicon Beach, a group of Australian tech entrepreneurs who have exceptional insights to the sectors here and overseas.
  • The Digital Culture Public Sphere – included excellent contributions from the games development industry, digital arts, the digital culture (GLAM) sector and much more.

Notes:

  • Open government can contribute to our digital sector through:
    • open data – esp cultural content for which we are custodians and esp the large quantity of data which is out of copyright
    • being great users of and contributers to digital technologies and the Australian sector
    • focused industry development strategies and funding for digital sectors

6) Emerging Technologies

I finished my panel comments by reflecting on some emerging technologies that governments need to be aware of in our planning for the future.

These are just some new technologies that will present new opportunities for government and society:

  • 3D printing and nanotechnology – already we have seen the first 3D printed heart which was successfully transplanted.
  • Augmented Reality
  • Wearable computing and “body hacking”

On the topic of 3D printing, I would like to make a bold statement. You see, at the moment people are already trying to lobby against 3D printing on the basis that it would disrupt current business models. Many on the technology side of the argument try to soften the debate by saying it is early days, you don’t get perfect copies, and myriad other placations. So here it is.

3D printing will disrupt the copyright industry, but it will also disrupt poverty and hunger. As a society, we need to decide which we care about more.

There is no softly softly beating around the bush. There are some hard decisions and premises that need to be challenged, otherwise we will maintain the status quo without having even been aware of an alternative.

With advancements in nanotechnology also looming, we could see perfect copies of pretty much anything, constructed atom by atom out of waste for instance.

But there are also many existing technologies that can be better utilised:

  • games development – we have some of the most highly skilled games developers in the world and we can apply these skills to serious issues for highly citizen centric and engaging outcomes.
  • cloud – current buzzword – presents some good opportunities but also a jurisdictional nightmare so tread very carefully. You need to assume anything in the “cloud” can disappear or be read by anyone in the world
  • social media – see point 1

7) Final comment on government, power and society

Finally, just a couple of words about the most important element in creating open governments that can service the needs of an increasingly digital society.

We need to dramatically shift out thinking about technology and what it means to government. An no I don’t mean just getting a social media strategy.

For anything we think, plan, strategise, hypothesise or talk about to become real, we inevitably use a number of technologies.

Most people treat technology like a magic wand that can materialise whatever we dream up, and the nicely workshopped visions of our grand leaders are generally just handballed to the bowels of the organisation, otherwise known as the IT department, to unquestionably implement as best they can.

Technology, and technologists, are seen to be extremely important in the rhetoric, but treated like a cost centre in practise with ever increasing pressure to do more with less, “but could you just support my new iPad please?” IT Managers are forced to make technology procurement decisions based on which side of the ledger the organisation can support today, and the fiscal pressures translate to time pressures which leaves no space for meaningful innovation or collaboration.

We need the leaders of government, especially throughout the public service to be comfortable with and indeed well informed about technology.

We need collaborative technologists in the strategic development process, as we are the best people positioned to identify new opportunities and to help make a strategic vision that has a chance of seeing daylight.

We need to stop using the excuse that innovation or open government “isn’t about technology”, and recognise that as a government, and as a society, need to engage a healthy balance of skills across our entire community to co-design the future of government together. And we need to recognise that if we don’t have technologists in that mix, then all our best intentions and visions will simply not translate into reality.

Monitor, measure, analyse, collaborate, co-design, and be transparent.

The future is here, it simply isn’t widely distributed yet – William Gibson

Notes from after my speech from the event

The NSW AG speech was excellent – he spoke about the primary difference between the NSW Government Information (Public Access) Act 2009 and the old approach is that the current approach pushes for proactive disclosure.

He mentioned three significant aspects of GIPA:

  • Accessibility
  • Manner in which is enables participation
  • Public right to know is paramount

There was an important comment from the day that we need to address sustainable power if we are to build a vision for the future.

There was comment on public interest – public consultation, get best inputs, peer review, chose most evidence based approach.

Questions about cloud:

  • Cloud attributes – jurisdiction, privacy, ownership, enforcability of contract, data transportability
  • Functional categorisation – private data? criticality of data/service delivery?
  • PATRIOT Act implications

AGIMO have some good policy advice in this area worth looking at on their Cloud computing page.

I wrote a hopefully useful post on this a while back called Cloud computing: finding the silver lining. I will be following that up with some work I’m doing in gov atm around this topic a little later, looking at the specific attributes of cloud services, how they map to different things gov want to do, and the fact that government jurisdictions around the world are pretty much universally using what I call “jurisdictional cloud” services, which means they are hosted by gov, or by gov owned entities within their legal jurisdiction. The broad calls for government to “just go cloud” suggest a binary approach of ‘to cloud or not to cloud’ which is simply not reality, not a reasonable thing to expect when government has obligations around privacy, security, sovereignty, ensuring SLAs for service delivery to citizens, and much more.

I also did an interview with Vivek Kundra (prior CTO for US Federal Gov) a while back which will be useful to a lot of people.

I loved the five verbs of Open Gov by Allison Hornery: Start, Share, Solve, Sync, Shout. Her speech was great!

Also, Martin Stewart-Weeks talked about three principles of open government:

  1. partly in cathedrals and partly in bazaars
  2. new relationships between institutions and communities, and
  3. knowledge has become the network. Great presentation and interesting how open source ideas are so prolific in this space.

Fake geeks prey on us poor lonely “true geeks” – 4 realz yo

Note: apparently it hasn’t been completely obvious to a few people so just saying up front, this is a mock blog 🙂

Don’t you hate it when you go to a geeky event, and you see a guy dressed up as Mal or Ironman or Wolverine (swoon) and it turns out they are just a booth babe, or worse, a sales guy. It’s like, the biggest let down! OMG! They are obviously purposefully poaching on us poor lonely and desperate geeks and frankly we’ve had enough! If you aren’t a true geek, then pretending to be one is worse than poaching, it is maliciously playing with the hearts and minds of the people who run your networks, and read your email, and could, with very little effort, utterly destroy your life and reputation online.

Do you feel me?

Even worse, I hate when you meet a cute guy who does turn out to own a computer, but also turns out to be a total Windows fanboi. Raving on and on about his 1337 VB skills, or how everyone that picks on Windows 8 totally sucks because no one has even seen it yet but it is totally “awesum”. He despises “freetards” because they are all so unrealistic about the industry and “it’s not like Linux has even made it on the desktop anyway, so who cares?”. Yeah, Windows fanbois are totally fake and should stop pretending.

Then you get the Apple banbois. The ones who wear berets because they think it is fashionable, maintain a pretentious sense of (secretly self) loathing about geeks and pretend to be passionate about design and typefaces because it helps them get laid given the demographic of the vast majority of Mac users. An Apple fanboi will lament about how Steve Jobs was Gandhi, Einstein and Jesus in one man, and wear turtlenecks because they think it makes them just like Steve. Apple fanbois are fakers who should stop pretending and learn how to be a true geek!

Then you get the device geeks. You know the ones, who always have the latest gadget regardless of the brand, who like to show off their immensely huge collection of apps, and who think installing an upgrade to Angry Birds somehow makes them technically competent. I got news for you chum, you are a fake geek! Stop it!

You know when you meet guys who talk about being a sysadmin ninja, or a gun at games development? FAKE! I have studied martial arts for 21 years and you sir, are no ninja. You couldn’t hit a wet towel and you couldn’t fire a gun to save yourself. Your limp wrist and shoulder muscles would buckle from the kick back so just stop. We won’t be tormented like this!

Finally you might get lucky enough to meet a guy who can program in a real language, can run his own infrastructure, is into gaming and loves to throw around Star Wars and Evil Dead III quotes. But then he expects you to stay in the kitchen, or give up work entirely to look after the kids by yourself, or he wants you to not beat him in Tekken or Call of Duty ‘cos his friends might laugh at him being “beaten by a girl” and frankly he doesn’t want the competition at home. Geek guys who turn out to be misogynists are the most annoying kind of fake geeks, because they have forgotten that true geekiness has nothing to do with gender, and they encourage geek girls to reject either their geekiness or their girliness. You guys need to be put down, you are the worst kind of fake geeks. No rly.

So, I guess it’s too much for a geek girl to find a real geek guy, one who looks like Wolverine or Mal, who can talk my language, use the same tech, play the same games, treat me like a human being and not disagree with my particular flavour of geekiness in any way shape or form.

Or perhaps we should all just chill out and let Bartlet be Bartlet.

No one has a monopoly on geekiness, and there are many flavours of geeks out there. It is actually really awesome that being geeky is becoming popular because we need more people to get on the path of tech literacy, whatever their incentive. Otherwise when the machines come our army will be very small 😉

For another fantastic and better written blog post about this is John Scalzi’s “Who Gets To Be a Geek? Anyone Who Wants to Be“. Read it, now! 🙂

Note: This mockblog post is inspired by a good article by Daniel Griffiths (‘Fake Geek Girls’: How Geek Gatekeeping Is Bad For Business) which responds to the growing number of articles berating “fake geek girls”.

It’s incredible to me how idiotic some people can be, how short sighted they are in their own quest for self importance. Personally I love the fact that being geeky has become trendy, has become something people aspire to. As a geek I want to encourage our society to embrace and be empowered by technology, not shut down a person because they “aren’t a true geek”. What does that even mean anyway? So I hope you enjoyed my trollish response to the quite pretentious “Booth babes need not apply” article by Joe Peacock. Hey Joe, the article didn’t start too bad, but by the end it just got stupid. But well done for bringing an important discussion to the fore.

Online Culture – Part 1: Unicorns and Doom

There is a lot of commentating, hypothesising and general navel-gazing around the topic of “online culture” and how the Internet is changing society. Some believe we are ascending into a euphoric utopia where we will all be free and ride unicorns over double rainbows! Some bemoan our descent into ego driven fickleness that is undermining the very foundations of a civil society!

The reality is far simpler.

It is also, though it seems odd for many to hear, rooted in the actual technology of the Internet and history of geek culture.

I was originally going to do four blog posts looking at:

  1. Unicorns and doom: online culture and the impact on mainstream society
  2. Live free or dial: public vs private, some new challenges for our society online
  3. The geek will inherit the earth: the history and lessons of online culture
  4. Who is responsible: some thoughts on the relationship between citizens, corporates and governments

I will continue this series mid 2013 as my contribution to an important discussion we are starting to have as a society, as well as useful in providing some context for those unaware of geek culture (and their own inevitable geeky metamorphasis).

Unicorns and doom: online culture and the impact on mainstream society

It is certainly true that we are seeing a shift in society that is profound, but it is a shift that really boils down to two key aspects:

  1. a change in mainstream society expectations, &
  2. a transfer in power (and increased capacity for greatness) to the individual and thus the community.

Great Expectations

When you use the Internet, it changes you. I don’t mean sending emails and the occasional Google search. I mean when you spend many hours every week or day going online, engaging in discussions, cross-checking official statements with on the ground bloggers, actively seeking out people you like (or dislike) online to see what they are up to, and clicking through interesting links until you inevitably find yourself rickrolled.

Using the Internet changes your expectations of the world around you, and importantly your expectations of how you can interact with the world.

There are four expectations that we develop, consciously or not, by engaging online:

1) Route around damage

At a technical level the Internet was designed so that there was always a way around a problem in the communications. Any damage or blockage becomes just something to work around. Internet users naturally adopt this idea of assumed access and expect to be able to find and do whatever they want online.

This becomes an extraordinary and profound expectation when “damage” is interpreted at a social level, and individuals assume they can “route around” any form of artificial interference such as censorship or manipulation. The expectation develops in individuals that they can work around obstacles in their life, and they are less likely to put up with ideas thrust upon them or agendas they do not subscribe to.

2) Healthy skepticism

Anyone can publish their thoughts online and there are many cases where the official media reporting of an issue does not gel with the online accounts of people on the ground. Projects like Wikipedia demonstrate clearly that for many issues there is more than one “truth”.

Wikipedia, to its credit, manages to present the most generally accepted version of issues whilst also archiving edits and discussion pages to present to the inquisitive reader some of the conflicting ideas around the topic.

Contrast both of these situations to the past where the local newspaper was the only news and Encyclopedia Brittanica or an equivalent was the authoritative source for students and casual research. The variety and ease of access to different opinions and knowledge is an easy trap in the first instance, but rapidly teaches us the importance of cross referencing, of looking for why someone might think or say something, of being skeptical of official information.

3) Transparency and accountability

When we want to know about something, we automatically look it up online. We expect to be able to get information on any subject we choose and when information is not forthcoming we ask why. Anyone is accessible online and we can follow (and in some cases get responses) from our leaders, music stars, favourite authors, peers, pretty much anybody.

This experience fuels an expectation of access and engagement which is a challenge for many, particularly in older established institutions. It is the accountability with which we can hold people, organisations and institutions to account that is making it easier for us to make informed choices.

Of course the flip side of this is that individual privacy has become far more public and people are sharing more and more of their lives online and then dealing with the consequences. Such as sharing that you are going away for the weekend along with your address through geocoded tweets and then finding your house broken into.

We are currently going through a transition period where the old and the new are caught in a frenetic push and pull of negotiating expectations, and we have not yet really defined our expectations of online privacy. See part two of this blog where I go into the ramifications of public vs private online.

4) Do-ocracy

When we meet people in the physical world, we engage in a complex dance of communication. There are protocols (in every culture), we use a number of mechanisms such as voice and body language to establish rapport, there is a negotiation of expectations and limitations and often an interesting conversation will result.

By comparison, when we meet someone online, we can immediately compare what they are saying to us to what they are saying to others, or what they’ve said before and importantly, what they’ve done. We can google their name/nick and get an indication of what they are like and their contributions to the world. We have an immediate capacity to establish for ourselves at least a small amount of context around this person, far more so than we could hope to establish in person over a significant period of time.

Even without a person’s real name you can establish a trusted, constructive dialogue and collaborate online. Establishing networks of trust is obviously not new, but the ease with which we can do so online with people from all across the world, even with pseudonyms or anonymously, creates an expectation that we can achieve great things in great numbers, very rapidly, without necessarily having to know exactly who they are.

It also creates an expectation that fits very well with Australian culture. That is, we start to treat people according to their actions, their efforts, their contributions, as opposed to their status, relatives or finances. Even famous people become judged by their actions as opposed to their past.

All of these changes in societal expectations has a profound impact on how people engage with the world around them, with governments and organisations, and interestingly with power constructs.

People Power

Like every other significant shift in society, we will see most people adopt the new tools as a matter of convenience, but we will also see some people embrace the opportunity for their personal beliefs or freedoms.

The opportunities for personal and community empowerment are enormous online.

The Internet has democratised both access to and “publishing” of knowledge. The control of knowledge has always been a power mechanism, and we are now seeing a significant struggle as traditional knowledge and power brokers find themselves continually flanked by individuals and communities.

Technology gives us an immediate, global reach both for information dissemination, but also significantly for distributed grassroots coordination. And we can engage with other people under our own names, psuedonyms or indeed anonymously, all of which are important in different ways. Also, as most people are online in some capacity (and certainly every power broker), anyone is able to be engaged with or affected online.

So armed with information from many sources, a virtual megaphone, the ability to connect with like minded people anywhere and coordinate, and the ability to do so from the relative safety of a psuedonym or anonymity, we really can achieve anything. Sometimes this power is used constructive, sometimes just for the lulz, but the Internet has changed all of us fundamentally.

In Conclusion

There will always be people being fickle, thoughtful, noble, underhanded, overreaching, argumentative, complacent and all the rest. The Internet has not changed any of this but it has acted as an amplifier. People will always be people (and we don’t have a plan ;)).

To assume social media (for example) is changing society because people are putting random tidbits about their life and thoughts in the public domain is a shift is not only a mistake, but a gross underestimation of what is actually transpiring. People have always used the tools they have to hand to express themselves, it just so happens the current tool of choice is quite public.

However, the Internet has had a profound impact on mainstream society. It has changed our expectations, how we engage with the world around us, and has created new opportunities for power for all people (and organisations). It has become an extension of our everyday life and mind, a meritocratic demonstrator of community empowerment and hyperconnectivity, and yet we are only just getting started.

My next post will look at some of the new challenges we are facing online, such as our definition of freedom, rights, and the interesting dynamic between private and “public” spaces online.

Air traffic control and Somalia

I was moved to blog this evening by two inspiring conversations I had whilst travelling to Melbourne. Both fascinating for very different reasons!

Firstly, on the plane from Canberra to Melbourne I sat next to a guy who works in the air traffic control systems industry. It was fascinating because it is an industry with only a few major players (about 4 or 5) who over the years have absorbed most of the small players. As a result most people in the industry know each other and because as he put it “a lot of the crap tech was discarded”. There is a lot of standing on the shoulders of giants, of building upon existing awesomeness rather than reinventing the wheel. It was interesting to hear as a person who has been in the tech industry for years to observe the consequences of less, large, quality players in a niche industry.

He also talked about the tech. It was interesting to learn that pretty much all air traffic control systems have become Linux based over the last few years (usually a forked and heavily modified Red Hat distro apparently), and that they take the Battlestar Galactica approach to security whereby they don’t have the systems networked or easily accessible and hence massively reduce the risks of cracking. Simple, low tech and extremely effective 🙂 A nice reminder that security doesn’t have to be overly complex, just well considered and  thought through.

The second conversation was with a cab driver in Melbourne, a lovely guy from Somalia with whom I got into a conversation about what is happening in Egypt and throughout the Middle East and Africa. He was happy for Egypt, but he was concerned because he thought the people’s uprising in Somalia didn’t result in a system that represented the needs of Somalians but rather split the country and rendered the government less capable. It was an interesting personal insight and I’m going to go and do some more research of the political histories of African countries. We also chatted about aid vs investment, and the challenge of generating wealth in a country vs just bringing external wealth in.

Lots of food for thought. I’m going to try to start blogging more again, even if it is just short pieces every week or two. It’s been far too long and I know I owe a few blogs I promised to do months ago! 🙂 I’ll be doing a blog about data vis later this week, and a long overdue one about linux.conf.au 2011 next week.

Cloud computing: finding the silver lining

Working in a political office means I am privy to the sorts of sales pitches that lobbyists, industry and community groups are constantly pushing on politicians. It can be weird, informative, amusing and at times plain scary, and I’m really valuing the critical thinking subject I took at University to help me better assess everything that comes my way 🙂

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

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

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

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

Where is the cloud?

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

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

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

Saving the environment?

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

How much money can I save?

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

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

What about my data?

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

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

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

The silver lining

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

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

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

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.

Diagram of US Air Force diagram for dealing with trolls