The increasing importance of role models in the public sector

Role models are incredibly important for humans across both their personal and professional lives.

Role models can help show us and make us believe we can exceed our own boundaries. They can open doors and windows to new ideas, fostering innovation and positive change.

The more restricted and limiting the environment, the more important role models become. They show us where the gaps and opportunities exist and help shine a light on dark paths where many would otherwise fear to tread.

If you doubt humans need role models at every stage in their lives, watch this video showing how even a doll can become a powerful role model for a child - and the movement behind it is helping shift views across society.

The importance of role models is understood by governments, who seek to lift up those that support their agendas. Awards like Australian of the year and Young Australian of the year are examples of how exemplary citizens can be held up as national role models, presenting values and attitudes that we can aspire to share.

Similarly the importance and practical use of role models is understood by business, by the arts and by not-for-profits, which all hold up those exceptional individuals who model the behaviour that others seek to exemplify, to encourage productivity, ethical conduct, creativity and selflessness.

The concept of role models is even understood within the public service, where exceptional service and good behaviour can be recognised through awards and speaking opportunities. From the Public Service Medal to the new Public Sector Innovation Awards, role models are recognised to help illuminate the conduct and behaviours that the public sector seeks to encourage.

This is why role models are increasingly important in the public sector. With increasing digital transformation across society, new tools and new problems emerging as sunset industries fade and new ones rise, the public sector's role is changing increasingly quickly.

What does it mean to be a public servant in an era when the customer is kind and every citizen holds a supercomputer in their hand? How does government continue to reinvent itself - its policies, structures, performance criteria and behaviours - to remain relevant and effective in an age when people expect instant customized service?

While I worked in government I was alway conscious of being a role model for digital innovation. My blog made me more visible, but my conduct and work made me an example that others could learn from and follow.

I was also very conscious of the other role models within my sphere who similarly blazed trails, did great work and were held up as exemplars of what public servants could and should do. I continue to admire and be inspired by many of them to this day.

While many of these faces have now changed, in the public service, due to life changes and new opportunities, there's just as many, if not more digital and innovation role models in government today. Whether publicly recognised and held up, like Paul and the team at the Digital Transformation Office, or working within agencies, like the members of the PS Innovation Network, these individuals are modeling the behaviours and conduct the public service needs to adopt to move forward with Australian society.

But what happens if agencies or powerful public sector senior managers see these role models for innovation and change as threats - to their egos, job security or just don't fit their view of how the world they believe they control should operate?

I've seen few acts more cowardly or despicable than cutting down a positive role model for selfish personal reasons, or to preserve and protect a poisonous culture.

Indeed this too becomes a role model, of the worst kind - a negative influence that spreads fear and uncertainty. "If my role model can be cut down, then what could I do" can run the thinking, leading to the growth and spread of a negative 'prisoner' culture where no-one dares to raise their head, challenge poor decisions or demonstrate innovation or leadership.

Yes role models are powerful in the public service - both for the good and the bad.

For the public service to prosper in the digital age, to become agile, adaptable, citizen-centric and innovative, from the heights of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet to outlying agencies like CSIRO, from top agency executives to graduates, positive role models must be elevated and negative role models cut without remorse.

To everyone who is a positive role model in the public service (whether you know it or not), everyone who models leadership, innovation, digital expertise and amazing stakeholder and citizen engagement, those who are collaborative, giving and supportive and love helping their colleagues and Australia succeed and grow - I salute you.

Once you grow tired of the good fight and retire the field, do so with honour, knowing that no matter whether you leave by choice or necessity, your impact has been profound, recognised and valued.

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Australian governments need to stop treating citizens as free consultants

Across April I'm spending a week participating in government-run sessions to contribute to the democratic life of our nation.

I'll spend two days with CSIRO, supporting their startup commercialisation programs, a day with the NSW Department of Transport supporting their deliberations on future transport needs and policies and a day with the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet supporting the open government partnership process.

Plus there's associated travel and preparation time - including several return drives to Sydney from Canberra.

Every bureaucrat and politician involved in these sessions will be paid for their time and have their travel costs covered. 

Every consultant employed by the government to organise, manage, promote and report on these sessions will receive due compensation - paid at their going market rates.

However the participants who give up their time and intellectual property to provide input to government won't receive a cent in payment from the agencies for any of their time commitment. Not even to defray travel or accommodation costs.

Some of the participants might attend representing a university or corporate interests - so while the government won't pay for their time or travel, their employer will. In return their employers will expect some form of benefit in having them attend, whether it be through building or exhibiting expertise, influencing policy directions, senior connections or another form of  potential commercial benefit.

However for other participants, including myself, our involvement is a cost - a personal cost (spending time in another city, far from loved ones), and a professional cost (losing days of productive income time).

I've been prepared to sustain this kind of cost due to my passion for helping government take full advantage of digital ('digital transformation' as per this year's buzz phrase), improving citizen-government engagement to support and strengthen our democracy, and supporting Australian innovators to create the export industries and jobs that our country will need to remain successful throughout this century.

Indeed I've calculated that my personal investment in these goals has cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost income over the last ten years.

Now I've also had paid gigs helping government to improve in some of these areas - both as a bureaucrat and a consultant, which puts me in the position of seeing both sides of the equation.

However, make no mistake - for most Australian citizens participating in democracy can only be considered a hobby.

While the government 'professionals' (bureaucrats & consultants) get paid - the hobbyists (citizens) do not.

It's no wonder that most Australians do not respond to government consultations, attend government policy events or participate in significant democratic exercises.

It's no wonder that Australian governments find that the same organisations and individuals constantly respond to their requests for attendance at events and round-tables. Organisations with commercial interests and individuals with either commercial or close personal stakes in the outcomes.

Most people can't afford the time off work to provide their views and insights, even when they have expertise on a topic, leaving a deep well of Australian knowledge and ideas untapped.

Now some might claim that it would be inappropriate for government to pay citizens for taking an interest in democracy and contributing their time to inform or influence policy - after all, all that work is being done directly for the citizens' benefit.

However the majority of citizens now only contribute because of commercial benefit to their employer or themselves, or because they have the financial freedom (or willingness to sacrifice lifestyle) to get involved. Most Australians don't contribute at all beyond voting. So this view of citizens as 'free consultants' is quite outdated and doesn't reflect the realities of the real cost of participating in democracy.

When the Icelandic government ran a constitutional event, inviting 300 representatives from across the country to participate in the design of their new constitution, they paid the participants the equivalent of a parliamentarian's salary for the day - plus travel and accommodation costs.

In a country like Australian where people off the street are paid $80-100 to spend an hour or two looking at product concepts and give an opinion, it seems ludicrous that governments won't pay a cent to citizens who give up their time to provide insights and expertise on policy decisions that affect millions.

If we want the best policies for Australia, governments need to at minimum be prepared to pay for the best participants to attend - covering travel costs to bring in citizen experts and leaders from all over Australia, rather than limiting the pool to citizens within driving distance.

Preferable we need Australian governments to budget respectful day rates for Australians who are invited and choose to participate, or who apply and are selected to participate in consultation events of significance to policy and program development. 

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How should we restructure 'first responder' emergency services in a world where they're now the second responders?

It's fairly widely acknowledged throughout the emergency community that due to the rise in citizen use of technology, emergency services are now rarely the first on the scene of a disaster.

Most emergencies are first publicly highlighted on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or another social media platforms as people proximate to the situation take photos and share messages, often even before anyone bothers to call an emergency hotline.

Once information about an emergency is shared online it can attract individuals, to assist or gawk, and by the time a 'First Responder' reaches the scene, there may be teams working to rectify the situation, whether officially qualified or not.

For large emergency and disaster scenarios, online systems may also appear with surprising rapidity. Donation-taking sites, rehousing services, advice and support lines and even running video and text commentary can be in place within minutes of a significant disaster.

The effect of this is that emergency services are no longer the first responders to the majority of emergencies, and often arrive at a scene with less information about the situation than citizens have already collected and shared online.

Even where citizens are not the first onsite, they may still become a major channel for sharing information - correct or not - about the emergency, as was observed during the Boston Marathon bombing (refer to the trailer for a new documentary on this below).


So how should emergency services and governments respond to an environment when they are no longer the first responders?

While there's been some discussion of this across the emergency community, there's been precious few changes to the protocols or approaches of emergency services to take advantage of their new status in a positive way.

Other than discouraging citizens from getting involved (as they're not qualified and may take the wrong steps), and a few efforts to bring some citizen social media intelligence into emergency centres, there's been little done to provide new tools and systems for supporting voluntary emergency support activities by the general public.

Some of this, perhaps most of this, is related to slow change within these services. It's hard for lifelong emergency service specialists to acknowledge that their role is changing - some still struggle with some of the modern tools for managing emergencies, let along with groups of citizens pitching in to help.

Some is also undoubtably connected with the risks of having unskilled volunteers onsite at some of the worst disasters. Many people don't understand or appreciate the potential dangers they face, or the complications they can cause to emergency services should a well-intentioned effort to help become another person needing rescue and resources.

However this situation is not likely to go away. Citizens are now firmly established as the first people onscene in most emergencies, and it is impractical to expect that at least some of them won't try to help and illogical to expect that no-one will broadcast unfolding events via digital channels.

It is a good time for emergency services to consider how to direct all that volunteer energy in productive ways. What tasks can citizens do at the site of a situation that will help pave the way for the 'second responder' emergency services when they arrive?

These tasks are likely to change by emergency type, however it is possible to provide basic guidance via social channels and via apps as to what steps will help preserve lives and property rather than increase the danger and difficulty of given emergencies.

With the right approach and support tools, emergency services can enlist citizens as a support workforce, able to set a perimeter, collect location-specific data and even, where safe, help address and transport the injured to appropriate services, allowing emergency workers to concentrate on the more difficult wounds and tasks.

Tools such as a 'Tinder' app for medical professionals could help quickly locate appropriately qualified personnel nearby who can lend a hand, prior or after emergency services arrive. The same approach could be used for people with specific skills useful in emergencies - from former and off-duty firefighter to army reservists, specialists in communication or the use of specific tools.

There's likely a range of other approaches that can be used to help direct the energy of the general public into supporting emergency services in effective ways, and its time for emergency services to unbend, recognise that the environment has changed, and think outside the square as to how citizens can be more than dangerous nuisances at an emergency scene.

The real risk now is that emergency services cling to their past 'first responder' status and dismiss the skills and capabilities of the public. This will only increase the danger in future scenarios where well-meaning citizens, denied effective leadership and instruction by emergency professionals, take unnecessary risks when helping emergency victims and scale up the extent of these disasters.

Regardless of whether emergency services choose to recognise that they're no longer the first responders in most disasters, or keep their heads firmly in the sand, we're likely to continue to see citizens be the first responders, and once on-scene helping in the ways they think they can and should.

Whether these citizens are assets or liabilities in any specific emergency comes down to how the professional emergency services support and lead them, but they will come none-the-less.

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Now it gets interesting - Australia has its first digitally literate Prime Minister

Rudd & Gillard could work the Twitters.

Abbott understood the need to engage digitally, if not the tech, the value or the full impact (and mistakenly thought one of his Ministers had invented the Internet).

Even Howard got onboard the digital express with a few YouTube videos.

However Australia has never before in its history had a digitally literate Prime Minister of the likes of Malcolm Turnbull.

This could mean nothing, or it could mean enormous change if the Australian Government is told to lift its game on digital engagement and treat technology as an integral part of designing and implementing government business rather than as a service to be called on when needed.

Turnbull has already laid down a positioning statement in this area, stating in his inaugural media announcement as PM that "We need an open government, an open government that recognises that there is an enormous sum of wisdom both within our colleagues in this building and, of course, further afield."

We'll see quite quickly which is true by Turnbull's approach to several of the key planks of openness and digital transformation.

Key steps would include endorsing and progressing Australia's membership of the Open Government Partnership, something agreed to by the Gillard government but was placed on the perpetual back burner by Abbott as he focused on closing, rather than opening up, government.

I'd also expect to see a rethink of the government's position on the Office of the Information Commissioner - an agency the Abbott government failed to legislate to remove but has been killing by degrees by cutting funding and refusing to replace Commissioners.

Another sign of change would be an elevation of the role of the Digital Transformation Office, making more of its approaches mandatory and providing more teeth to the agency when dealing with big and slow moving Departments more interested in the status quo. 

This could include shifting  the DTO back to the Prime Minister's department, but with a direct reporting line to Turnbull that minimizes the obfuscation prevalent within that department at senior levels. 

Other areas that could use attention include the open data space, which is run on a shoestring by Finance and could greatly magnify its impact with additional resourcing and mandates, and, of course, the NBN - Turnbull's former responsibility as Communications Minister. 

A shift back to a FTTH approach, delivered more cost-effectively than the previous Labor model, would provide Australia with the infrastructure it needs for the 21st century and cement Turnbull as a visionary with Australia's long-term future at heart.

There's also many things that could be done at a micro-level within agencies to shift the reliance on corporate IT suppliers, 1990s systems and large, virtually undeliverable technology projects - many of which could be led by a revitalised AGIMO in association with the DTO.

Of course Turnbull may have other fish to fry, he has quite a lot to do to get the Liberals back to an electoral-ready position within 12 months, and if not re-elected much of the program above could find itself on the scrap heap of a new government that wants to do things differently.

However I am hopeful that we'll see some true digital leadership from Turnbull whilst he is Prime Minister and potentially some real shifts in how government is delivered in Australia, to the benefit of all Australians now and in the future.

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GovHack 2015 International and National winners

Below is a list of all of the GovHack 2015 International and National winners...

The GovHack 2015 International categories had competitors across Australia and New Zealand: 

The International Best Disaster Mitigation Hack,

• iHelp by team Tremorz in New Zealand
  https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/tremorz

The International Digital Humanities Hack

• patentstori.es by team Patent Trolls in Canberra
  https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/patentstories 

International Bounty for Best WWI Hacks

• ANZhACks by team Hackasaurus Wrecks in Canberra;
  https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/anzhacks
  and
• Citizen Culture and Heritage: Lest we Forget by team Technogesic in Ballarat https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/citizen-culture-heritage-lest-we-forget

The GovHack 2015 Australian National Major Categories were open to all Australian participants:

The Best Digital Transformation Hack

• Health Buddy by team Chamonix in Adelaide
  https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/health-buddy

The Best Open Government Data Hack

• Question Time: A game of policy by Team Executive Swivel in Tasmania
  https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/question-time-game-policy 

The Best Science Hack

• Lungs by team Saint Simon in Adelaide
  https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/lungs 

The Best Policy Insights Hack 

• Synergising Synergies for Sitizens by team Synergising Synergies for Sitizens in Perth https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/synergising-synergies-sitizens 

The Best Data Journalism Hack

• Mapping Pedestrian Activities & Safety in Melbourne by team Monash City Science in Melbourne
  https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/mapping-pedestrian-activities-safety-melbourne

The Best Entrepreneurial Hack

• Neuron - Connecting Like Minds by team Neuron in Sydney
  https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/neuron-connecting-minds

The GovHack 2015 Australian National Team Awards were open to all Australian participants: 

The Best Youth Team (18 years and under) The winning hack is:

• AusEd by team Nexus_Is_Back in Mount Gambier South Australia
  https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/aused 

Best Higher Education Team

• patentstori.es by team Patent Trolls in Canberra
  https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/patentstories 

Best Public Servant Team

• Safeway-2-go by team Hippo Creative in Adelaide
  https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/safe-way-2-go

Best Professional Team

• Our Local Stories by team Our Local Stories in Melbourne
  https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/our-local-stories

The Australian National Bounty prizes were open to all Australian participants:

The most useful Product or Service for the Public Bounty

• Industry Check: Is it time to move on by team Elephant in Canberra https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/industry-check-it-time-move 

ABC regional bounty

• Secret Suburb by team BigDataBigDream in Sydney https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/secret-suburb 

The Statistics data bounty

• AboutOz by team Caffeinate me in Perth
  https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/aboutoz

The Charity data bounty

• Charitable Mapping by team Sleepless in Sydney in Sydney https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/charitable-mapping

The Taxation data bounty

• The Glass Ceiling Index by team Blackwattle in Sydney
  https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/glass-ceiling-index

The Scientific data bounty

• Twitter Field Guide by team FieldGuidesInc in Canberra
  https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/twitter-field-guide 

The National Map bounty

• Use Your Words by team 66& Teague in Canberra
  https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/use-your-words

The Structure of government bounty 

• Struct by team GD in Toowoomba
  https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/struct

The Air conditioner and energy bounty

• Air Compare by team Patch in Canberra
  https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/air-compare

The Geoscience Australia data bounty

• Minecraft your city by team Mind the App in Canberra
  https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/minecraft-your-city

The Intellectual Property data bounty

• Neuron - Connecting Like Minds by team Neuron in Sydney
  https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/neuron-connecting-minds

The Health and welfare bounty

• Death and Taxes by team Hackasaurus Wrecks in Canberra https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/death-and-taxes

The Open Source bounty

• SynergyCity by team SynergyCity in Perth
  https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/synergycity 

The Indigenous issues bounty

• #oncounty by team #oncountry in Perth
  https://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/oncountry

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Why not include ordinary citizens on the MP remuneration review panel?

Australia's Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, has now announced the review panel for MP remuneration expenses, and in my view it's close to becoming another missed opportunity to improve government engagement, accountability and transparency with the community.

The panel will consist of five 'eminent' individuals. Two will be former politicians (one Labor and one Liberal), one a business person and two will be former senior public servants (David Tune, former Secretary of the Department of Finance, and John Conde, Head of the Remuneration Tribunal).

In other words, the usual suspects - members of the major political parties (who are most under the shadow of the expenses issues), a friendly CEO or senior business advisor (who knows what side his - and it will be a him - bread is buttered on) and two public sector insiders who have worked closely with current and former politicians.

On the five person panel, there's apparently no room for ordinary citizens, the involvement of a citizen's panel or anyone unconnected to politicians who is actually concerned or enraged by the way MPs are using their entitlements or is concerned about the falling legitimacy and credibility of our political system.

Of course such participants would likely be more 'unruly'. They'd not be members of the cozy Canberra club which decides what is good for citizens (often based on mistaken, shallow or lobbyist influenced impressions of public sentiment). They'd not understand the rules of the game, the way in which things MUST be done in order to satisfy the egos and perceptions of those on the top of the political pile.

Participants from outside the Canberra insider club may not even share the group think of what is appropriate for politicians to spend, and could even disagree with the 'eminent' appointees on what is appropriate expenditure by politicians.

Of course the Prime Minister's hand-picked 'eminent' panel will be thorough and comprehensive in its review. It will consult citizens - allowing people to provide their views. And then it will weigh those views and provide its recommendations, based on their own filters, future career ambitions, relationships and experiences of being within the 'club'.

The upside of this insider approach is that the review will be less harsh on politicians, that the 'eminent' insiders understand the needs of politics and provide limited restrictions on politician entitlements, allowing politicians more freedom to rely on the public purse rather than personal or party finances.

The risk for politicians is that the public don't feel the review recommendations go far enough, that traditional media and social media continue to pursue senior politicians for their expenditure, that citizens don't feel they have been appropriately included in the process. The outcome of this would be further erosion of trust in both Australia's political system and in our public sector.

This risk could be partially or wholly mitigated through including ordinary citizens as part of the eminent panel, or creating a citizen's panel to oversee and support or reject the eminent panel's review.

Citizens could be selected through nomination or random selection from the electoral role - our court jury model is one approach that could be used. This group should, of course, be paid for their time and not expected to donate it for free - Iceland's Constitutional process, where they paid citizens their travel expenses and the salary of an MP for the days they worked is a good model to emulate to reflect the value of citizen involvement and the cost of their lost time.

In this approach, citizens would decide whether the review went far enough, not political insiders who may stand to gain from lighter recommendations.

There's a risk for politicians in taking this approach. They may end up with tighter restrictions on entitlements. It could be uncomfortable for parties struggling to raise the funds they need to operate, or costly for politicians' own finances.

However it would be far more likely to meet public expectations, to help rebuild credibility in political parties and allow politicians more certainty that something they spend won't haunt them in years to come. It could even provide a huge boost to the Coalition's re-election chances by demonstrating how the current government was genuine about listening to citizens and governing for all Australians.

There's still time for the Prime Minister to shape the form of the remuneration review, to take a bold step to respect citizens and embed greater accountability and transparency in the review process.

It's not a missed opportunity yet, but if it becomes one, the consequences could further damage Australia's democratic credibility and institutions.

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If you want to see the impact of poor user interface design, look no further than Canberra's parking meters

User interface design (or UX design) has been a buzz term for several years in government, with agencies spending significant money on ensuring their services and processes are easy for the broadest range of citizens to access and complete.

This is a good thing too - It makes good economic, reputational and even health sense to make it easy and fast for citizens to interact with government, reducing mistakes, stress and negative impressions.

Complex and difficult to user interfaces have higher error rates, resulting in frustrated and sometimes out-of-pocket citizens, extra costs for government and often a loss of trust and respect in the service outcomes and agencies responsible.

Anyone who still doesn't understand the value to both government and citizens need go no further to witness the issues poor interfaces and processes cause than Canberra's parking lots, where the current crop of parking meters are creating all kinds of problems for citizens.

For example the current parking meters in the Wilson-run car park on London Circuit follow a process that is both complex and invasive for customers, greatly increasing the time required to conduct one of the simplest tasks a citizen has to perform, renting a parking spot.

Firstly the machines have an unnecessarily complex interface, with six buttons, several unmarked, one each red and green and the other four all yellow. Little stickers have been manually attached to several of the buttons to explain their functions, although several of the yellow buttons are used for multiple purposes at different stages of purchasing a ticket and different times of day. Most have two name tags, one at top, one at bottom. Some of these tags were faded and hard to read, so would presumably need to be replaced regularly, adding unnecessary effort to the process of maintaining the machines and increasing the risk of errors by parkers.

The many buttons on Wilson parking machines in Canberra

Secondly the process to pay for a parking spot isn't as well explained or as easy as it could be. The machine first asks for a person's payment method (coins or card) and then requires entry of the car's license plate via a touch screen (so why buttons you may also ask).

Now, I don't know about everyone, but many people I know, including myself, haven't memorised our car license plates. It's never used as a form of personal identification and only rarely are people required to use it, usually when organising to service their car (and after the first service, normally a mobile number or name is sufficient for a mechanic). 

There's no benefit to the user to providing this license plate information - only to Wilsons, who I presume use it to prevent people ticket sharing if they leave a spot early, so they can profiteer by re-renting an already paid-up parking spot (which could be considered unethical profiteering, but is one of the techniques used to maximise profits in car parks).

Enter License Plate to begin (the second screen, so not the beginning!)

There's also no signage in the car park, at the entrance or at the machine, to indicate to someone entering the car park, or waiting in line to buy a ticket, that they need to have this information at their fingertips. A parker new to the car park only finds out they need to have memorised their license plate when they reach this specific screen in the process - and they can't proceed any further without entering it.

The number and placement of machines in the car park can mean up to about a 50m walk back to your car to check, meaning a 100m round trip to retrieve this information. If there's a queue for tickets, common at peak times, this can make the ticket purchase process a 15 minute or longer process - intensely frustrating for busy professionals on their way to a meeting (speaking from personal experience).

Once past this screen the process was a little simpler, if followed precisely. The screen told me which yellow buttons to press (although I had to recognise that 'Select Earlybird' meant press the button which was marked as both 'Card' and 'E/Bird'), it took my coins quickly and efficiently dispensed my ticket.

Unfortunately the process wasn't as seamless for people ahead of me in the line who were using credit cards. Often the machine took three or more goes to recognise the card as valid and, once it had, it took on average 135 seconds to approve each transaction (I timed this). 

For credit card users, if you knew your license plate number (as regulars would learn to do), the entire process took approximately 3.5 to 4 minutes to complete, most of it spent choosing the right yellow buttons and waiting for credit card approval. At this rate each machine could service 15-20 people per hour. Cutting a minute off the credit card approval process would allow the machine to service 25-30 people per hour, This is up to a 100% increase in speed, resulting in less stressed customers, better patronage and more revenue for the car park.

Most of Canberra's public car parks have ACT government parking machines. These are different to Wilson's and have a slightly better interface - although they don't allow coin payments. 

Having used them frequently I'm not as able to look at them with unfamiliar eyes, however they provide better onscreen instructions to step people through the necessary steps, although I've witnessed people struggling to understand the '+' and '-' buttons for increasing or decreasing the parking time, with many people just paying the full amount rather than selecting a time period.

These machines don't require a license number, and don't have unnecessary buttons, so the overall impression is of a simpler process.

However these machines suffer from a similar issue to the Wilson machines for the credit card approval process, which takes a relatively long time for card approvals. While I appreciate this might be due to dialing into the bank each time, it does mean that at peak times there can be a long line of people standing and waiting for their turn, resulting in more stressed customers and potentially reductions in revenue.

I've also witnessed situations where there's insufficient room to queue safely for these machines, with people required to wait in a queue that snakes into the roads within the car park, where they and cars must dodge each other. This presents an increased risk of an accident, where a pedestrian is harmed by a car attempting to find a car spot, potentially increasing the legal risks to the ACT government.

Now these ACT government car parks do allow people to pay for their parking online, removing the queuing and waiting at the car park, when people may be rushed for time. This option is not well explained on the machines in the car parks, which is a shame as it could cut queues as people waiting could simply go online to pay. 

Incidentally I find this a very handy trick at Hoyts to avoid some of the really long queues for movies - despite their ridiculous surcharge on online purchases, when nudge theory suggests they should charge less for online purchases (including from the Candy Bar) to prompt greater take-up and reduce physical queues and staff time.

However I've heard and read many reports of people who have found online payment for car parking a frustrating process as, once parked, parking inspectors often give tickets to people who aren't displaying a parking ticket. This has even received media coverage. 

As a result I've not tried this process and likely won't try it until the ACT government makes it clear (on parking meters and via it's own media channels) that the online option is working correctly.

This issue seems to be purely a training and change management one, with parking inspectors needing some adjustment of their behaviour through training and support to ensure they check the online system before issuing tickets.

Tens of thousands of public servants use Canberra's parking machines regularly, and have likely noticed issues and possibly even expressed frustration with the user interface and process. Many would have adjusted their own behaviours to deal with the foibles of the systems - arriving a few minutes earlier to allow for credit card purchase approval time, memorised their license plate number and learnt the right sequence of button presses to achieve the outcome they need daily.

All of them should consider the user interface and process, reflecting on their own experience. How could it be made simpler and easier, particularly for parkers who don't use the parking every day?

Then take that thinking and reflect on the user interfaces and processes they create and administer within government. How could they be made simpler and easier for citizens and for public servants, while reducing the error rate and cost to government?

What is the impact of any poor design within their own systems - both to citizens and government? And what value could be delivered, and behaviours adjusted positively, by improving the user interface design?

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We could resolve the electoral donations dilemma with a little digital thinking

One of the significant news stories in Australia this week is the revelation that Bill Shorten failed to correctly disclose a $40,000 electoral donation in a timely manner - breaching parliamentary requirements.

This is far from the first time a politician has done this, with repeated errors in declaring donations an ongoing issue for both major parties in Australian politics, and even affecting several minor parties and independents.

This has been called a crisis of trust, and one result has been calls for full public funding of elections - an approach that has been tried to some degree in a few other jurisdictions around the world.

Where full or near-full public funding has been attempted it has faced both legal controversies and difficulties in finding a formula that effectively funds established parties without closing the door on new electoral entrants or unfairly benefiting incumbent governments.

Australia already has partial public funding for elections, paid on a per vote basis. At the last election in September 2013 a total of $58.1 million was paid out, on the basis of $2.49 per first preference vote for candidates receiving at least 4% of the primary vote.

This 'flat rate' isn't necessarily a perfect solution either - it doesn't take into account the size of some of Australia's electorates (from Wentworth at 30 square km to Durack at 1,587,758 square km), or the significant differences in the number of voters per electorate (from 62,917 in Lingiari to Fraser with 143,564 voters). It is also open to manipulation by governments or major parties, as the amount per vote, or the threshold for payment, can be altered through legislation passed by a majority in both houses of parliament.

There's also other flaws with Australia's electoral donations laws, with donations often declared publicly through the Australian Electoral Commission 12 months or more after they are donated - often well after the election that the donors may be seeking to influence - leaving voters unable to consider the donations in the context of how they choose to vote.

Electoral donations are also often an area of contention for Australian state, territory and local governments, with varying laws in each jurisdiction, often modified by governments to suit their electoral needs. In particular NSW recently had over 10 Liberal MPs resign the party and several resign parliament due to irregularities as to who they received donations from, or roughly 25% of sitting members in their previous Liberal government.

There's also been cases of parties moving money between states or to and from their federal parties in order to evade stricter electoral declaration rules, and other kinds of shenanigans with the system between funds donated to individual politicians and to their parties.

It seems to me that a little digital thinking could resolve a large proportion of the issues with Australia's donation system, both ensuring donations are recorded and allocated appropriately and declared rapidly to the public.

Why not build a central donations website for collecting and declaring electoral donations for all parties.

The site, potentially called the Australian Electoral Donations System  (or AEDS for those who love acronyms), could provide a single electronic gateway for individuals of any political belief to donate funds from their bank account, credit card, paypal or other account to the candidate(s) and party(ies) of their choice. Every donation could be electronically transferred to the correct recipient and declared in real time as the electronic transfer occurs.

The AEDS could support both personal and corporate donations, including cash donations at events and gold coin donations, through becoming the official way of issuing tax receipts for all donations, making it unacceptable to simply hand candidates 'brown bags' of undeclared cash (a form of donation that is already illegal but hard to trace).

For easy event management, attendee management and an auction component could be built into the AEDS and a mobile app or web service used for recording donations (and attendance) at electoral events - mitigating the current issues with tracking and identifying donations through vehicles like Joe Hockey's 'North Shore Forum'.

It would become far easier for the public to see who has donated what to which parties - on a near-real-time basis, and the Australian Electoral Commission would be able to detect issues much faster - particularly where declared party income and expenditures don't match up. The AEDS may also help the Tax office to track the movement of funds and following up to verify that individuals and organisations are reporting their earnings and expenditures correctly, and even support police in identifying criminal activities linked to donations.

Done right this central donations website could even turn a profit - by taking a percentage of every donation towards its operating costs. Given that $10 million or more is given each year in donations to the federal parties (and that's only counting donations over the current $12,500 donation level), a 10% processing charge for using the AEDS could more than cover the ongoing costs of the service. This could be potentially a much lower charge when considering all the smaller donations (from $2 to $12,499) made at federal level and all of the donations to state and local politicians and parties.

The AEDS could be set-up as a start-up and run as an independent body - or even become a listed entity on the stock market (possibly expanding into offering similar electoral donations systems for other nations).

At worst case, the AEDS could be run under the auspices (or with board oversight) of the Australian Electoral Commission - though given their struggles to update their own technology I doubt the organisation has appropriate management to operate such a significant system.

Of course it would be a crazy entrepreneur to set up such a system without agreement and legislation by government, so the first step must be taken by parliament to recognise that the current electoral donation system is destroying trust and damaging the legitimacy of government - creating a strong perception, if not a reality, that our politicians are, if not for sale, at least for rent by the largest donors - be they corporations or organised crime.

Would our parliament countenance such a move?

I hope so. Removing the difficulty of managing electoral donations from parties, and the embarrassment politicians face when someone in their office forgets or incorrectly declares a donation, or they accidentally take money from an illegal donor, this type of independently-run electoral donation system would both make the lives of politicians easier and reduce their stress levels, while potentially lengthening their careers.

I've thought a great deal about how this system could work, and the problems it may face, so if anyone in government wants to discuss the idea further, drop me a line.

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No it's a not appropriate to load test on your citizens in production - particularly when it's a critical service

The last week has seen a range of major issues for the Australian Government's new MyTax service.

As reported across both traditional and social media, people using MyTax to file their tax returns have experienced shut-outs, had the process freeze when they were almost complete and had it fail to autofill their pre-saved details.

MyTax is an online version of the eTax software which had been the primary way for people to digitally complete their tax returns for the last fifteen years. eTax improved year on year and had enormous take-up. In all respects it was a major success for the ATO.

This is the first year the Australian Tax Office has deployed the MyTax system and integrated it with MyGov. While the intention was, and is, good - to give Australians a single way to validate themselves with multiple government agencies - the implementation in this case hasn't withstood the real world.

This isn't a unique experience and it isn't limited to government. We've seen it with certain banking services, with retailers (particularly on a certain contrived Australian online shopping day each year), with A-grade games (such as SimCity) and with a range of other online services such as Apple maps.

In fact this issue is relatively rare, in comparison to the private sector, in government, with the last major issue of this type internationally being with healthcare.gov in the US, and the last I recall in Australia being with the MySchools site launch.

This type of issue will happen from time to time. Unforeseen bugs or network issues, denial of service attacks or other environmental issues can bring down even the most robust service, particularly at launch.

In every one of these cases there's a backlash from customers - and in every one of these cases the organisation responsible is judged based on how they manage and recover from the disaster.

In the MyTax case, while the ATO were probably aware of the risks, and may even have learnt some lessons from several of the issues highlighted above, it appears they're still struggling to manage and recover from the situation.

When asked about the siituation the CIO of the ATO, Jane King, wrote, as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, that "Capacity planning and testing was completed as part of the rolling out of the new digital design, however due to the complexity of our environment, production is always the real test."

I read this as her saying that while they did conduct testing, they were actually relying on real citizens, at real tax time, to fully evaluate how the MyTax system would perform.

Just as the UTS professor John Leaney, quoted in the SMH article above, says - this type of statement just isn't good enough.

"We're not in the 1950s; we're not even in 1990s, we've learnt a lot and from what we've learnt we apply the techniques for proper capacity modelling," Leaney said. "There should have been much better testing; it's not something you should learn the hard way on a major government system."

The ATO needs to do better at risk planning around situations like this. It needs to test capability properly and not hide behind the 'too many users' defense.

Government agencies need to carefully watch and learn from this experience - and learn the right lessons.

The first lesson is to conduct appropriate capacity testing. Look at the ABS's implementation of eCensus and the level of testing and resilience it put in place the first time eCensus was used in 2006. The ABS gave a great presentation on the topic, which I attended, which highlighted the risk mitigation steps they'd taken - from capacity testing through to multiple redundant systems and real-time monitoring with developers on standby and fallback manual systems in place.

The second lesson is to not release major systems at a time when they are going to come under a huge load. Release a new tax system in February or March, or after tax time in October, giving time to shakeout the production system and address issues before it hits peak load.

The third lesson is to avoid releasing major systems. Instead release smaller, but useful, services and progressively integrate them into a major new service, testing each carefully as they go. This is how Facebook totally replaced its back-end without any disruption to people's use of the service - modularly upgrading aspects of the service until it was completely done.

The final lesson is to plan your recovery before your system fails. Design a failover plan for what happens if the system doesn't work for people, a manual solution if required. The ATO should direct anyone with issues to a hotline where they can complete their tax return over the phone, or via screen sharing, so no-one is left waiting for days or in a position of financial distress due to not receiving a tax return fast.

I feel for the ATO (particularly their ICT team) and don't blame them for the issues they're having with MyTax, however I do hold the agency responsible for how the ATO recovers from this disaster.

They need to stop defending their implementation of MyTax and focus on ways to meet citizen needs - even outside the MyTax system - to ensure that the 'tax returns get through'.

Otherwise this issue could turn into another Apple maps-style disaster, or even worse, as there's no 'competitor' to the ATO that citizens can turn to to complete their tax returns. At least, not yet...

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The future of intelligence is distributed - and so is the future of government

In 2011 an IBM computer, Watson, beat human competitors at Jeopardy! 

This was a new landmark in artificial intelligence - a computer capable of correctly responding to plain English questions, in real time, by figuring out their intent.

At the time Watson was a computer as big as a room, and it was the only one of its kind in the world.

The original Watson still exists, as discussed in this Wired article, The Three Breakthroughs That Have Finally Unleashed AI on the World, however it is no longer alone.

Hundreds of Watsons are now in operation - not as room-sized computers, but operating 'in the cloud', as distributed software across thousands of open-source servers.

People can access the intellect and computing power of these Watsons through any computing device connected to the internet.

Even more significantly, like many artificial intelligences, Watson is a learning machine that gets more knowledgeable and able to find insights the more it learns. Whenever a Watson learns something, making a new connection, that knowledge is shared with every Watson - making it a distributed intelligence, able to learn at rates far faster than even a single supercomputer, or human, is able to learn.

The power of Watson isn't in the revolutionary algorithms that power its learning, it's in the network itself - how separate Watsons can share knowledge and learn from each other.

This is how humans evolved civilisation - by capturing, codifying, storing and sharing knowledge in sounds, images and words to pass it on from one individual to another.

However Watson hints at a more robust future for human intelligence, and for how we govern ourselves.

Humans have proven over the centuries that having more learners with better knowledge sharing means faster progress and better decision-making. Books, universal schooling and the internet have shown how dramatically a society can progress when appropriate knowledge sharing systems are in place.

The key is to focus on the size and complexity of the networks, not the expertise of individual 'nodes' (you might call them humans).

For computers this means that the more Watsons we create, and the more complex the knowledge sharing between them, the faster they will learn.

For governments this means the greater the transparency, and the more informed citizens are participating in knowledge sharing, the better the decisions and outcomes will be.

Now this isn't how government is currently constituted. The notion of representative democracy is that governance is handed to experts and specialists who live and breathe government so the rest of the population doesn't have to.

We elect politicians who are supposed to representative the interests of their electorates, and appoint bureaucrats whose role is to provide specialist knowledge and operate the machinery of government - develop policy, design and deliver programs, enforce laws and support citizens in emergencies.

By its nature this approach to government relies on experts who are placed separately to the population - often even physically removed and concentrated in a city like Canberra, Washington, Ottawa, Brazilia, Naypyidaw or Putrajaya.

This group (elected and appointed public servants alike) tend to become inwards focused - focused on how to make government keep working, not on whether it actually works and delivers for citizens.

Particularly inwardly focused governments tend to become so removed from their citizens that they are overthrown - though they've usually replaced with a not-dissimilar system.

Now we can do much better.

Rather than focusing on electing and appointing individual experts - the 'nodes' in our governance system, governments need to focus on the network that interconnects citizens, government, business, not-for-profits and other entities.

Rather than limiting decision making to a small core of elected officials (supported by appointed and self-nominated 'experts'), we need to design decision-making systems which empower broad groups of citizens to self-inform and involve themselves at appropriate steps of decision-making processes.

This isn't quite direct democracy - where the population weighs in on every issue, but it certainly is a few steps removed from the alienating 'representative democracy' that many countries use today.

What this model of governance allows for is far more agile and iterative policy debates, rapid testing and improvement of programs and managed distributed community support - where anyone in a community can offer to help others within a framework which values, supports and rewards their involvement, rather than looks at it with suspicion and places many barriers in the way.

Of course we need the mechanisms designed to support this model of government, and the notion that they will simply evolve out of our existing system is quite naive.

Our current governance structures are evolutionary - based on the principle that better approaches will beat out ineffective and inefficient ones. Both history and animal evolution have shown that inefficient organisms can survive for extremely long times, and can require radical environmental change (such as mass extinction events) for new forms to be successful.

On top of this the evolution of government is particularly slow as there's far fewer connections between the 200-odd national governments in the world than between the 200+ Watson artificial intelligences in the world.

While every Watson learns what other Watsons learn rapidly, governments have stilted and formal mechanisms for connection that mean that it can take decades - or even longer - for them to recognise successes and failures in others. 

In other words, while we have a diverse group of governments all attempting to solve many of the same basic problems, the network effect isn't working as they are all too inward focused and have focused on developing expertise 'nodes' (individuals) rather than expert networks (connections).

This isn't something that can be fixed by one, or even a group of ten or more governments - thereby leaving humanity in the position of having to repeat the same errors time and time again, approving the same drugs, testing the same welfare systems, trialing the same legal regimes, even when we have examples of their failures and successes we could be learning from.

So therefore the best solution - perhaps the only workable solution for the likely duration of human civilisation on this planet - is to do what some of our forefather did and design new forms of government in a planned way.

Rather than letting governments slowly and haphazardly evolve through trial and error, we should take a leaf out of the book of engineers, and place a concerted effort into designing governance systems that meet human needs.

These systems should involve and nurture strong networks, focusing on the connections rather than the nodes - allowing us to both leverage the full capabilities of society in its own betterment and to rapidly adjust settings when environments and needs change.

We managed to design our way from the primitive and basic computers of the 1950s to distributed artificial intelligences in less than 70 years.

What could we do if we placed the same resources and attention on designing governance systems that suited modern society's needs?

And it all comes down to applying a distributed model to governance - both its design and its operation, rather than focusing on the elevation of individual experts and leaders to rule over us.

It's a big challenge, but for a species that went from horses to spaceships in two generations, it surely isn't an impossible one.

And given that societies thrive or die depending on how they are governed, are we willing to take the the risk and hope that our current governance and political systems simple evolve into more effective forms within a human lifespan?

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Don't help your official agency and Ministerial photos become parody memes through poor selection and timing

A challenge today for politicians and public servants is how easy it is for a photo or frame from a video to be reused out-of-context to parody, well, literally anything.

We've seen the increasing use of 'photoshopped' images on social media to support all kinds of political and social positions, ranging from the clever and amusing to the downright disturbing.

Two of the most notable examples - which have become memes in their own right - include the 'floating Chinese officials' from 2011, the result of the accidental upload of a poorly photoshopped image of three council officials (below).

The image appeared to show the officials (including the County mayor and vice-mayor) floating above the road and was immediately parodied by internet users, who placed the officials in a range of amusing and inappropriate locations, such as below.

The second example of a government photo-turned-meme was the phone call from David Cameron to President Obama in March this year, where the UK Prime Minister tweeted a serious photo of him listening to a landline phone, claiming he was on the phone to President Obama of the USA to discuss the Ukrainian situation (below).

I've been speaking to @BarackObama about the situation in Ukraine. We are united in condemnation of Russia's actions. pic.twitter.com/7Rk2k8iOIK
— David Cameron (@David_Cameron) March 5, 2014

This was parodied by a range of people, who started by posting tweets of them speaking on the phone, and then on a variety of other items. It even attracted celebrity attention from people like Sir Patrick Stewart (as below), and in the end David Cameron played along and tweeted a photo of him meeting an ex-US President in person.

.@robdelaney @David_Cameron @BarackObama I'm now patched in as well. Sorry for the delay. pic.twitter.com/elLQcKcV3w
— Patrick Stewart (@SirPatStew) March 5, 2014

This second 'on the phone' meme was replicated a month after the Cameron call in Australia when the Prime Minister tweeted a serious photo of himself on the phone addressing the MH17 crisis. This was predictably mocked by many people online in the same vein.

Now while it isn't possible to prevent the 'photoshopping' of images and their reuse in parody form, it is possible for agencies and politicians to consider what images they wish to 'put out there' to reduce the prospect of having their message overshadowed by a clever, funny or touching parody.

This means avoiding deliberately publishing images which are obvious fodder for parody - anything related to being 'on the phone', 'inspecting developments' or easily misinterpreted facial expressions.

It is also important to avoid 'follow the leader' shots - where an Australian official is photographed in a similar pose, or doing a similar thing, to an overseas official who was recently parodied for the same pose (such as the Cameron - Abbott situation).

I saw one of these images yesterday from an Australian politician and decided to see how easy it would be to modify it for use in parody.

Using my trusty copy of Seashore - a free graphics editing tool with many of the same features of Photoshop, I was able to cut out the relevant parts of the original image within about 15 minutes.

It then took a simple Google image search to locate some freely available images and a matter of second to import and place the politicians within the scenes.

Below I've included a copy of the original image (in its original tweet), as well as several of the 'photoshopped' parody images.

Consider this what is possible by a relatively inexperienced user of a free graphic design program in under an hour - then consider what someone with more experience and more intent could do with images that make parody easy.

The original Tweet (with a 'watching infrastructure' image - a type very likely to be parodied):

Watching the NBN rollout with @peterdutton_mp at Murrumba Downs in Peter's electorate of Dickson. pic.twitter.com/IEbDp1TcZ1
— Malcolm Turnbull (@TurnbullMalcolm) August 11, 2014

My (very quickly) 'photoshopped' images - starting with my favourite:

Now think about how you want your Minister and staff portrayed, and how you can minimise the likelihood of your official images being reused for parody purposes.

While you can't prevent this from happening, prudent image selection and advice can, at least, minimise the potential and help you retain control of your message.

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Government stakeholders and citizens see different priorities for open data release

Socrata has released an interesting benchmark study on open government data, which looks at the state of open data from the perspectives of citizens, developers and government.

It is interesting to compare which data government stakeholders consider important to publish, compared to what citizens feel is important.

Looking at Very Important from the tables (below) it is pretty clear that government puts a higher priority on data about themselves - for example the location of government services. This tends to be easier data to release as governments know where their shopfronts are and want citizens to find them.

However from a citizen perspective there's a priority on data that supports communities and increases transparency - public safety, financial data and accountability ranking 1st to 3rd for 'Very Important' (compared to government stakeholders who rated them 3rd, 8th and 7th). Government service locations is still relatively important but only 5th on the list for 'Very Important' and even lower at 8th when 'Moderately Important' is considered as well).

Census data is perceived as far more valuable by government stakeholders (6th) than the community (13th), possibly because governments consider the business value and individual citizens only rarely directly need access to broad demographics (such as when buying a house).

Education data is also in an interesting position. It is 4th for citizens but only 10th for government stakeholders on 'Very Important' - however when 'Moderately Important' is added, it shoots up to 2nd for citizens and for government to 8th place.

This could be reflected in how there's been quite a bit of political opposition to myschool.gov.au, but plenty of community buy-in. Someone's getting the sentiment wrong here, and I don't think it is parents.


It would be very interesting to see governments hold this type of study in Australia - looking at government stakeholders, citizens, businesses and civic hackers (maybe media as well), to understand the differences in expectations and how different data is valued.

Unfortunately we may be a little immature culturally to ask this as yet, open data has not had a significant impact on most people's lives and hasn't consistently been championed at a political level or put 'on the agenda' in more than a niche way.

It is clearly important for people inside and outside government to appreciate that government stakeholders may have very different views to others in the community on what open data is a priority to release and governments take appropriate steps to engage and consult with other groups in the community on an ongoing basis to understand the differences.

And a tip for politicians seeking to get elected or a Ministerial slot - there's clear support in this survey from citizens for politicians who advocate for open government and walk the walk. In fact three out of four citizens said they'd be more likely to vote for a politician who was an open government champion.

Citizens also see open data as worth investing public money in. I'm sure our Treasurer will consider this in his upcoming budget statement - which will be released under Creative Commons and as reusable data of course!

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My presentation from RightClick - the latest in global digital government

Earlier this week I presented at RightClick in WA about the latest in global digital government.

My main points were that government in Australia has largely been doing OK in the digital stakes, although talent is thinly spread and there is not a consistent level of expertise across agencies.

For example, the fourth computer in the world was built by CSIR, an agency in the Australian government, and the WA government was using the internet seven years before Facebook was created.

Yes things have changed enormously in the last ten years, however the use of digital is now well-embedded within the public sector, not only in Australia but also across a large proportion of the world.

The challenge is to keep improving, to focus on designing services for digital which are relevance, simple and easy to use for citizens and to become better at connecting - reusing what others have done and at sharing what agencies are doing.

At the end of the day, however, it is not about the technology - that's simply an enabler - it's about meeting agency goals.

So even when you feel your agency, or you, are a dinosaur, remember that dinosaurs can survive massive change - provided they are prepared to change themselves.

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Can an 'open' government site be open if it is poorly designed?

I was chatting with Paul Davis on Twitter recently about the The State Decoded, an open source US-developed platform for accessibly and openly exposing state legislation online (see the platform in use at Marylandcode.org).

He suggested that the tool was effectively a US version of Austlii, which is a repository for Australian federal and state law.

My view was that there were significant differences between the two approaches.

The State Decoded is an open source platform being crowd developed, which anyone can replicate for any jurisdiction. It contains APIs, presents all content as accessible web pages and is nicely designed to be easy for casual users to access.

Austlii, on the other hand, is a closed platform developed by two universities. There's no APIs, much of the content is available only as PDFs and documents, and the design - well, minimalist is possibly the right term, with the site difficult to navigate for all but university professors (who developed it) and lawyers.

When I made this comparison (in brief given Twitter's character limits), Paul said to me...

@craigthomler interesting, so design is a determinant of whether an initiative is considered open government.
— Paul Davis (@davispg) May 11, 2013

This made me think a little - do I consider visual design a criteria for openness in government?

And my answer was:

@davispg IMHO yes. A technically open site unusable for casual users due to inconsistent, inaccessible & generally poor design isn't open.
— CraigThomler (@craigthomler) May 11, 2013

I thought in this post I would expand a little on my view.

For some technically orientated people design can be an afterthought. Their focus is on making a system or machine work as it should, able to take in data and spit out information correctly and quickly.

For these people, design is a 'nice to have' added towards the end of the process, with sites and systems made 'pretty' to appease the communications and marketing people, but is otherwise non-functional.

I've participated in many IT-led 'design' processes, where the focus was on how entities within the system should interact with each other, and the testing focused on 'user-acceptance' - which basically is designed to answer the question 'do the system's features work as intended?'.

In these processes there was little or no consideration regarding the visual appeal of the solution, whether the terminology was understandable to the audience, the search results expected or the navigation logical for non-experts and non-programmers. At best there was some commitment to making the site accessible - however this often meant 'bare bones' lists of text on a white background, rather than using alternative methods  to provide a pleasurable experience for all users.

Of course it is essential that websites and system respond quickly and as intended. However if users don't find them appealing, intelligible or intuitive, they will use them unwillingly, if at all.

I like to compare this to the car market. Originally cars were designed to be functional only - with little in the way of 'frills' to appeal to the public. The hard part was in getting the mechanics to work right and to last and car developers (blacksmiths, bicycle and train makers) weren't concerned about appeal.

Today, however, you'd be hard pressed to find any car maker who doesn't strive for visual perfection as much as for mechanical perfection.

Yes we expect cars to perform flawlessly, but we also expect them to look good. All things being equal (mechanically and safety wise), more attractive cars outsell less attractive cars, people develop more attachment to them, use them more and stick with the brand.

So to with products on supermarket shelves. In many cases people are selecting between products which differ little in their composition (or they don't understand the technical differences), simply choosing on the basis of how the packaging looks and makes them feel. Companies build their brands around their visual and emotional connection with customers, with ingredients a secondary (though still important) consideration.

So it is for software and websites. Well designed software systems and sites attract more use - even where they may be technically inferior (who can tell if a site is a few milliseconds slower than a competitor).

And so it is for open government sites. It is certainly possible to make an open government site with brilliant functionality and the best data - however if it doesn't visually resonate with the audience, if it isn't appealing for them to explore and use, it won't be broadly used.

Governments who seek to be open should recognise that it isn't simply about exposing lots of data, or opening the doors for user participation on a mass scale online. Design must be core to the thinking, how sites are designed, how users interact with the system, the structure of the language and of the navigation.

For openness to succeed in attracting broad interest and active participation from citizens, governments must not only think about what they release, how they release it and how they invite citizens to participate.

They must equally consider the citizen-experience, whether citizens can access information or participate in an intuitive and comfortable way, how citizens feel when using the site - excited, engaged and empowered (for a well-designed site), or frustrated, marginalised and stupid (for a poorly designed site).

Design is important and needs to be involved from the start of the development process. How people should feel when engaging should help drive the features and their operation, rather than trying to 'retroengineer' a clumsy system to meet user needs (a far more expensive and unsatisfying process).

So I stand by my view on open government - a technically open site that is unusable for casual users due to inconsistent, inaccessible & generally poor design isn't open.


Indeed, if a government is only playing lip service to openness (forbid the thought), poor design might be an effective tactic to hide things 'in plain sight', reduce the number of user and 'tick boxes' without revealing anything they are required to publish, but don't want easily found.

So where a government, or agency, releases poorly designed open data or engagement sites (particularly as a second or third version), just as they may release a 'bad news' media release under cover of a major news story, or an old report deep in their site (so they can say it is public even though no-one can find it), citizens really need to consider whether there really is a government commitment, or simply the appearance, of openness and transparency.

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Why should governments be open and transparent in their budgets

I'm speaking at the eGovernment Summit today on how Australia is performing in the open government stakes, and what are the benefits of openness to government.

As a reference I reviewed the 2012 Open Budget Survey (infographic right), released in January this year, which provides valuable insights into why openness in budgeting is important and which nations are doing well.

The Survey points out openness is important in overcoming public sector corruption, helps government manage debt, helps build foreign investment and trade, provides access to cheaper capital for infrastructure and assists in building trust with citizens.

The 2012 Survey found that the world has a long way to go towards government openness, at least in budgetary terms. It found that the national budgets of 77 of the 100 countries assessed, countries that are home to half the world’s population, failed to meet basic standards of budget transparency. Only one nation, South Korea, was considered strong.

Australia was not assessed in this Open Budget Survey and, based on other measures, already does reasonably well in making our Commonwealth and State budgets open to citizen understanding and scrutiny.

However the question we should always ask is how can we do better?

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How the internet makes governments look worse (and what agencies can do about it)

One of the major impacts of the internet on society has been the reduction on barriers to communication. Suddenly people didn’t need to be a trained journalist, media license holder, a wealthy individual or company or to be in the right place at the right time (often just luck) to have a significant public voice.

This has largely turned mainstream media from being a story leader into a story follower, reporting news that was already in the public domain via social media.

It has similarly allowed politicians and government agencies to become their own real-time media outlets, with email newsletters, RSS feeds, Twitter accounts, Facebook Pages, blogs and more allowing them to easily and quickly make facts and figures, or their side of a story, public.

However in lowering the barriers to public communication, the widespread use of the internet has also lowered the barriers to public complain.

Often this has been invited by organisations – both private and public. It is far more cost-efficient to have an online complaint form than people on telephones, responding to letters or sitting in shop fronts.

Most organisations seeking to improve their efficiency and reduce costs have moved their complaints and comment processes largely online.

Additionally many organisations have put a lot of information online, with the aim of addressing simple complaints and enquiries. Again an FAQ or Q&A online looks very tempting to organisations as a way to reduce staff time on common questions and issues.

However there’s a downside that often isn’t considered to these efficiencies. It has also become far more efficient for people to complaint.

The barriers to a complaint used to be quite high – people had to physically travel to a specific location between specific times; or write a letter, put it in an envelope, buy a stamp and go to the nearest postbox. While phoning seemed easy, navigating computerised call systems, waiting on hold and having to actually communicate with a real person in a confrontational manner often dissuaded people from trivial complaints.

However an online complaints has very low barriers to use. The vast majority of people in Australia have ready access to a computing device and internet connection. Most online complaint forms in organisational websites are designed to be easy to find and respond to and where they are not, a person can quickly complain on Twitter, Facebook, a blog or other social channel, not only responding to an organisation but also informing their peer group – which can lead to further amplification of their complaint, plus many other people emboldened to complain as well.

Suddenly, enabled by the internet, there can be a huge increase in complaints, which makes it look as though a government or agency is performing extremely badly – particularly compared to earlier times, when such easy routes to complaining were not available, or complaints were kept out of the public eye.

A further factor amplifies this even further. Due to all the FAQs and other information organisations have been putting online, suddenly people, even those who had trivial or no complaints, can easily find out what they should be getting or what their experience should look like. They can inform themselves through organisational sites and sometimes also through community-run forums, blogs and websites, making their complaints far more detailed and specific.

This adds to the complexity of enquiries and complaints, often making each more individualized and requiring greater effort to resolve.

In other words the efficiencies gained by organisations by putting information on the internet to reduce the incident of simple enquiries and complaints can be more than offset by informed customers and citizens with detailed and individual issues, which require far more staff time to resolve.

Now lets be clear about one other thing. I’m not saying that people are complaining more because government is performing worse than in the past (which may or may not be the case). However because the barriers to complaining are lower, citizens who would have let things pass and coped with a policy or service ‘as is’ are now far more likely to complain than to remain silent.

So the internet has lowered the bar on complaining, while raising the bar on complaint complexity by informing citizens of their rights and obligations – how can an agency use this to their own advantage?

Firstly, the internet allows agencies to conduct far more cost-effective testing of policies, processes and services before they are introduced. By using a citizen-centric approach to policy and service design, using online avenues to model and test scenarios and proposals before a policy becomes law, or a service is delivered, agencies can reduce their error rate and, therefore the number of complaints.

This can lead to real improvements in policies and services, where they are more fit for purpose with the community. It helps reduce the real rate of complaints – which we are only now seeing because the barriers to complaint are so low. In other words, it delivers better government.

Secondly, agencies should see citizens who complain as supporters who are helping agencies improve. Rather than just fobbing them off with generic forms or complex rectification processes, they should be ‘co-opted’ into advisory groups to help inform and improve an agency’s processes and engagement.

This can be done through a variety of approaches, but essentially involves building an understanding of the nature of the complaint, identifying what rectification activities are possible and proposing these in the next iteration of a policy or service’s development. This can be achieved cost-effectively by creating an online advisory group, selecting (complaining) citizens who are prepared to work with the agency in a productive and positive way.

Over time, where an agency can rectify certain complaints altogether, involved citizens can become public advocates for the way in which the agency has engaged and resolved the issues, turning a negative into a positive.

This approach can seem very difficult for agencies, however I have seen it used at bureaucratic organisations quite successfully when they committed to the process.

There are undoubtedly other approaches to turn complaints into positives, however it is also worth thinking about how an agency should empower its staff online to address complaints and concerns online.

While agencies have been extremely willing to provide FAQs and online complaint forms, they have been much slower to empower their own staff to engage with these complaints through the same mediums.

This can be scary for agencies – the concept of trusting staff to respond to the public online raises many risks in the minds of bureaucrats. However there are techniques to manage and mitigate these risks, employing similar strategies to the other channels agencies already use to respond to complaints.

For instance, many agencies already have staff tasked with responding to customer enquiries and complaints – whether contact centres or officials who write responses to Ministerials. Allowing these staff to respond in a managed way through a new channel is a challenge of degree, adapting procedures and preparing standard guidance just as call scripts are provided for phone conversations.

Many organisations in the private sector already have adopted various tools for fast and direct online responses to online enquiries and complaints – airlines, telecommunications providers, consumer goods companies, ecommerce providers and others – from text chat to online voice chat. There’s also been the use of automated agents, a ‘face’ on FAQ systems that provide a more interactive experience, as well as direct responses via social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

These contact approaches are increasingly supported by call centre software platforms as well as by many discrete online platforms, including approval and delegation controls as well as comprehensive logging of discussions.

In situations where online complaints and enquiries are rapidly increasing as agencies encourage the use of online tools for efficiency reasons) deploying appropriate systems for staff is a logical step to ensure these efficiencies are realised, rather than having agencies generate new inefficiencies as they attempt to use existing response approaches to address online issues.

What is needed now is the willingness of agencies to invest in these systems and the appropriate training and support of staff.

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