eGov AU: crowd source

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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Tuesday, August 04, 2015

The Australian Government's entitlements issue is an opportunity for a Gov 2.0 solution

Practically everyone in Australia has followed the entitlements issue triggered by media reports of House of Representatives Speaker, and Liberal politician, Bronwyn Bishop's helicopter trip from Melbourne to Geelong over the last three weeks.

While at times other politicians were reluctant to criticise Bishop's expenses, on the basis that most politicians spend quite a bit of money in meeting the requirements of their positions, the public and media was almost universally negative towards the rolling revelations of expenses that seemed either not in the public interest, or more expansive than necessary in her role.

Now that Bishop has resigned her position as Speaker, with a decade of her expenditures being reviewed by the Department of Finance, and the Prime Minister has announced a new review of parliamentary expenditures and entitlements, including those of senior public servants, it's a good time to look at how digital technology could help Parliament and politicians to regain and build public trust as well as explain how and why politicians spend money in carrying out their duties.

There's a real opportunity to make it easier for politicians to submit expenses, improve the speed at which they're made public, and provide a mechanism for explaining the value of their legitimate expenditures, while making it much harder for inappropriate use of entitlements.

It's hard to believe, in today's world of electronic banking, myTax, myGov and online accounting platforms like Xero, that parliamentarians still have to, by and large, manually collect their receipts and invoices and physically complete paper forms to claim and verify their legitimate expenditures.

The technology to digitally photograph and submit expenses directly into an online system is widely available, as is the capability to digitally verify that all expenditures are accurate and appropriate.

It is also easy to then make these expenditures visible to whoever needs to see them, and to conduct various forms of analysis and reporting (both automated and manual) to identify and query exceptions (such as extremely high cost taxi fares) and, of course, to repay any out-of-pocket work expenses that a politician may have incurred.

While off-the-shelf tools are not really designed for the type of visibility expected of politicians, it wouldn't be too hard to develop a digital system for capturing, querying, reporting and paying these expenses, with the ability for the public and the media to view, in near-real time, all expenses incurred by parliamentarians in their day-to-day roles.

It wouldn't be much harder to allow expenses to be analysed and compared, as the media is already doing in articles like this, to understand the relative spending by MPs and, over time, by Ministers in the same or similar portfolios. This would provide for better comparisons and consideration over time.

What would be truly visionary would be to build in mechanisms for the public to flag certain expenditures and request an explanation, allowing politicians (and their teams) to explain what they are doing and why - improving the democratic compact between politicians and their constituents. This could be based on a minimum threshold of 'please explain' requests and require all requesters to be registered in the system to minimise the risk of nuisance enquiries.

On top of this, the system could provide information on entire itineraries and politicians and their teams could include information on the outcomes of their expenditures. For example an overseas study trip that resulted in a report to parliament and a change in legislation could have these outcomes and outputs linked to the expenditure, helping to verify how valuable it was.

Some might see the above type of approach invasive, taking the view that, once elected, a politician should simply be trusted to do the right thing.

While I can sympathise with this perspective, the reality is that it hasn't been shown to be effective in the real world. Some elected politicians have been shown to misuse or misunderstand their entitlements, and the damage this does to the integrity of the parliament is extreme.

Trust in politicians is low - not just because of questions over their expenditures, but also because of broken promises, failed programs and continual infighting.

Redeeming the reputation of parliament can't be achieved simply by expecting the public to let bygones be bygones and start trusting politicians again, it must be won through positive examples and actions - as Malcolm Turnbull demonstrated in his tram and train trip from Melbourne to Geelong.

Creating a digital parliamentary expenditures system with full near-real time transparency would be a strong visible sign that politicians are committed to serving Australia, not to their own enrichment.

It would also help dispel misunderstandings about how and why politicians spend money and improve the understanding of how expensive it can be to be a politician - particularly one with a large electorate or significant travel requirements.

Of course there's still the need to review the entitlements system itself - or at least adopt the recommendations from the last review of entitlements, however with some shrewd application of Gov 2.0 thinking and digital tools, Australians could be confident in how their politicians behave, not simply confident in the rules that they are expected to follow.

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Friday, September 19, 2014

Designing the sharing state - an interview with Steve Schmid of the Open Technology Foundation

This is the fourth in a series of interviews I'm doing as part of Delib Australia's media partnership with CeBIT in support of GovInnovate. I'll also be livetweeting and blogging the conference on 25-27 November.

View other posts in this series.

With thousands of governments at local, state and national level around the world that need many of the same technological systems to govern effectively, why do governments often believe they must develop new enterprise systems and their related assets (ie guidelines, policies, methods and other shareable ICT assets) from scratch?

This question triggered the creation of one of Australia’s most interesting and innovative organisations, the Open Technology Foundation.

Founded in 2011 with the support of the South Australian government and Carnegie Mellon University Australia, the Open Technology Foundation (or OTF), has the mission to help facilitate technology sharing at all levels of government across Australia and New Zealand.

The OTF’s leader, Stephen Schmid, is passionate about the work his organisation is doing.

“All governments perform the same basic functions but historically we have built our own solutions to meet a need. This tide is changing."

He said, “a very cost effective method of provisioning services is to investigate and potentially reuse what other governments have done when faced with the same challenge – sharing rather than reinventing."

Steve isn’t a newcomer to this vision for government.

After working for Microsoft in Redmond, Worldcom in Colorado Springs and IBM, Steve’s last role in South Australian Government was as Director of the state government’s ICT division, which is responsible for whole-of-government voice and data systems.

“A single data network and voice network servicing all government departments provides significant efficiencies”, Steve says, “Other states could leverage this model as they explore opportunities for converged technologies.”

This work led Steve to the view there was a strong need for a sharing program to support connected governments, and through his role at the OTF he’s working to build a bridge for cooperation between jurisdictions.

The work has already had some significant successes.

“We work cooperatively to facilitate sharing between public administrations across Australia and New Zealand. The OTF is also working on a range of projects with Vietnam and implementing a global knowledge-sharing platform for interoperable technology solutions”

The road has, at times, been bumpy. Steve says that “one federal agency asked us ‘who gave you approval to represent Australia”.

He told me that he doesn’t see the OTF as representing Australia, “we represent our members, jurisdictions who wish to participate in a sharing program with other jurisdictions. We create our own mandate. And everything the OTF does is open to every jurisdiction, with a focus on tangible outcomes.”

Sharing technology resources isn’t simply a nice idea. Steve believes there are significant opportunities to reduce the cost of provisioning public services while improving service delivery, “we’re here for Australian & New Zealand governments to leverage the investments of other jurisdictions and reuse them – in software, materials and other services. We also help share our [AU & NZ] knowledge with other countries, especially in the Asia Pacific region.”

Steve is not the only one who believes these outcomes are worthwhile.

A number of key Australian agencies and governments are represented on the OTF’s governing council. This includes Defense, the Bureau of Meteorology, the New Zealand Government and Australian state governments such as NSW, Queensland and South Australia.

Steve says that there’s also some urgency about the work. Europe is moving ahead with interoperability solutions and technology sharing at a great rate, and the US is moving forward with NIEM, the National Information Exchange Model.

He says that “Australia is still at the starting line, and we can’t afford to be there much longer.”

Steve also discussed four projects the OTF is working on for delivery in the next twelve months.

“Our first project is about modern design for a sustainable government”.

Steve says the aim of this project was to provide a set of principles for developing portable government platforms, including associated guidelines and procurement clauses.

“There was an interoperability approach developed by Australian government back in 2006, but things have progressed since then.”

The OTF aims to deliver an outcome that allows platforms to be portable not only in Australia and New Zealand, but globally.

“European Commission have expressed interest in being involved and we will potentially also have the UN involved, linking into all major regional governments at a global level.”

If the project is successful it will make it far easier for agencies to add standard principles into their procurement clauses. For Australian technology companies this opens a door to global business, providing clarity on how they provide a specific service.

Steve says that they hope to turn the project over to a standards body at a future stage to ensure its sustainability and broader uptake.

The OTF’s second project is related to managing shared guidelines for internal ICT management and for managing vendors. He believes this project will assist both governments and vendors.

“Having vendors spend additional money to meet the separate requirements for each jurisdiction adds significantly to the cost of software to government and the development costs of vendors.”

Steve says that common shared guidelines for many of our technology needs that can be used as a baseline for our public administrations would remove this extra cost.

The project is being led by the NSW government with the initial goal of developing a set of guidelines for cloud that can be shared and reused across jurisdictions.

OTF involves all of its participating jurisdictions in the development process, and hopes to use it as a model for further shared guidelines.

The third project involves investigating whether the European Commission’s eProcurement platform can be reused by Australian governments.

“The EC’s platform was developed to be an end-to-end eProcurement platform for European countries and was released under an open source license. We’re evaluating modules of the platform with Australian state governments to test whether it meets their needs. So far we’ve found it just works, out of the box”

Steve says that the platform, Open e-PRIOR, has been developed to international standards that suite Australian governments and is a good example of how systems developed elsewhere in the world can be reused by local jurisdictions.

“We’ve found that most governments are willing to share most of their investment in ICT with other governments, beyond their secure systems. The primary barriers to sharing are the cultural ones and appropriate licensing.”

Finally, Steve says the OTF is working on building a platform for managing shared enterprise platforms.

“Our member governments feel there is no place for them currently to place their shared enterprise platforms for reuse by other governments.”

Steve says this isn’t simply a Forge for code sharing, but a robust system that incorporates management and support to provide the quality control and support necessary for large government system.

The development of this ITIL-based platform is being led by the Queensland government, with the support of other OTF members. If successful it could revolutionise how Australian governments share their shareable platforms.

Steve believes these projects are some of the foundation stones for building a technology-sharing environment for Australian and New Zealand governments, and go far beyond earlier government attempts at interoperability.

If successful Steve believes they will help herald in an age of more connected and responsive government, dramatically cutting the cost and need for agencies to develop their own new systems.

It’s a big goal but a worthy one.

“Gaining the required levels of participation to make this sharing cooperation a real success story is challenging, but with the continued support of our member governments and networks, we will all benefit in the long term.”

You’ll be able to hear more from Steve at GovInnovate on 25-27 November in Canberra.

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Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Why should governments continue to control voting systems and processes?

Having centralised systems for voting is the standard approach for countries around the world.

In most places it is simply accepted that the government funds the system for election and referendum voting - funding the polling places, ballot boxes, officials and vote counting systems, whether this be directly or at arms length via a body independent of government, but reliant on government funding.

And let's face it, voting is integral to governance. Voting provides legitimacy to a country's government, providing some form of mandate for a ruling party and ensuring that populations are satisfied with a given set of representatives by giving them a role in choosing them.

Looking at it cynically, having governments control voting could be seen as a conflict of interest - the politicians with an interest in re-election both create the electoral laws and fund the system for casting ballots.

Indeed in some parts of the world systematic electoral fraud is a major concern - the government can influence elections outcomes by changing the legal requirements for voting, adjusting electoral boundaries, place onerous condition on forming or operating new parties or on standing for election, limit electoral donations or advertising by opposition parties, or restricting physical access to ballot boxes.

That's before getting to issues with who votes, how many times and how the votes are counted.

In countries where there's substantial trust in governance and the electoral system these issues are generally small-scale, though ever present as we continue to see with voter identification laws introduced in some US states, major parties voting themselves more electoral funding (as Australia's two major parties tried to do in 2013) and individual examples of bad practice by candidates across all democracies.

In places where democracy is fragile and institutions are weak these issues are magnified, and various systems have been developed to keep elections honest - independent observers are often involved (where allowed) to scrutinise an electoral process; citizens and activist groups have photographed and published issues at ballot boxes online via mobile devices, first in ad hoc ways and then via map-based reporting systems such as Ushahidi; entire websites dedicated to exposing electoral fraud and bad practice have popped up around the world.

These systems have often migrated back to established democracies, for example, the mobile phone tool used to scrutinise the 2007 Kenyan elections was reused in the US Presidential race in 2008, demonstrating that in sustaining freedom to vote, eternal vigilance remains important.

However these are simply systems to scrutinise how governments run elections, rather than independent voting processes. They watch and report what happens in electoral systems, but don't seek to replace these systems directly.

Switzerland is perhaps unique in that it has an entrenched system of direct democracy which allows citizens to overrule parliament through a plebiscite vote - but even then the electoral process is funded and managed by the state.

More recently we've seen pseudo-electoral systems emerge - online petition systems like Change.org, which is having a material impact on government decisions. We've also seen systems that allow citizens to put forward laws to parliaments using banking details to validate individual supports (voters) for a given legislative proposal.

Governments broadly keep these systems at arms length, retaining the discretion to ignore these votes where they choose, for whatever reason they see fit - and fair enough, these systems are often flawed electorally, representing specific groups, can be prone to some level of gaming and don't have the same level of scrutiny as a formal government-run electoral process.

However the technology now exists for this to change - and it already is, beginning in Hong Kong.

In June this year two legislative steps by China were seen in Hong Kong to weaken the 'One country, Two system' approach that the city had been operating under since reunification with China.

As a result academics and citizens of Hong Kong started the ‘Occupy Central with Love and Peace’ campaign, which involved the non-violent occupation of the main business district of the city with the goal of achieving universal suffrage for voting in time for the 2017 election of the next Hong Kong Chief Executive.

Attached to this process was an unofficial city referendum which took place from June 20th – June 29th 2014. The poll asked two simple questions: which proposal for universal suffrage would you like to see implemented in Hong Kong and should the legislative council adopts an universal suffrage system if it does not abide with the international definition?

This was held outside (and without the support) of Hong Kong's government by citizens, involving online, mobile and physical voting at 20 'pop-up' polling booths set up across the city, with all Hong Kong residents aged over 18 eligible to vote.

While there were official efforts to prevent the referendum, including a large scale attack on the referendum website, the confiscation of voting boxes by Chinese officials and censorship of mentions of the referendum online by Chinese authorities, these did not prevent large scale voting by citizens.

At the end of the ten day process, 798,000 residents had voted - over 20 per cent of the eligible population. Most had voted via the mobile apps, with the second most popular way being online.

Despite the turnout, the Hong Kong government took the view that civil referendums had no legal standing under Hong Kong law, and therefore the result could be ignored.

This led to the largest public protest in Hong Kong since 2003, with over 500,000 people taking to the streets on July 1st 2014.

A good article detailing the process in detail is at Free Speech Debate, as Vote for Hong Kong – on the streets and online.

This type of unofficial civil referendum, where citizens get together to develop robust electoral systems and use them to state a view to a government, is possible today in much of the world.

The notion that voting systems are the province of governments, that only a central jurisdiction can manage a fair national electoral approach, simply no longer holds true.

So while citizens may choose to allow governments to manage these systems, it is feasible to outsource them - on a case-by-case or a permanent basis, detaching electoral processes from the individuals and groups seeking power.

In the future we may see more populations hold their own civil referendums on government policy or on who governs them.

While governments might decry these as illegitimate, as they are not covered within the laws that parliaments have created, these civil electoral processes may indeed be more legitimate in the long run - as the voting process and system are not designed or modified at the whim of those who hold power.

Indeed it will be interesting to see how the government of an advanced democracy reacts in the face of a civil referendum. Even if they deny the legitimacy of the process, they may find it hard to ignore the democratic backlash.

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Monday, July 21, 2014

You're probably not the audience

I've been reflecting on the number of comments and decisions I've witnessed lately where people have decided that a particular online approach, website design, engagement channel, interface design, fact sheet or other design or content is no good as it didn't appeal personally to them.

There's definitely a tendency in our society for individuals to think they are the central audience for everything they are exposed to - advertisements, entertainment, news and online content.

This individual viewpoint has been fostered over decades for both commercial and political ends.

The advertising industry has applied psychological triggers to make individuals feel that they are unique and worthy of consideration, while selling them mass produced goods on an epic scale. Hundreds of ads are targeted at each of us every day, attempting to influence our buying decisions by making us feel special or by convincing us that by buying their products we will become special.

Political leaders adjust their messages for their audiences, to help create an emotional bond. In effect they tell everyone separately that the view of the specific audience/industry/organisation/club they are talking to are special and therefore deserve to be heard and respected.

Schools do it when they refuse to give failing grades, simply 'needs improvement' and parents do it when they don't hold children accountable for their actions.

Even employers do it - using the notion of 'special' as a key tool for recruiting and retaining key worlers. Of course your staff are special - intelligent, hard-working, committed - otherwise you'd have hired someone else.

All of this helps build a belief in the infallibility and centrality of the individual. This isn't by itself negative, having strong self-belief is a key attribute for success in almost every field.

However it can also lead to ego pitfalls, the belief that an individual's opinion must be worth more than that of another person, or a view that the world needs to organise itself neatly around what we want or believe.

One of the areas I see this coming out frequently is in how governments design services, policies, content and engagements. All of these have traditionally been organised around what public servants or politicians believe are the right way to do them.

And by the 'right way' I mean the way that the politician or public servant would personally prefer to use or engage with government.

Again this isn't a universally bad thing - a particular politician or public servant may accurately represent the audience of the service, policy or content, or engage via the same channels and approaches as the citizens they seek to involve.

However, more often than not, they aren't the audience.

The late-40s male white public servant really doesn't comprehend the life experience of an early 20s female African migrant.

The career politician who has unfailingly worked for their party for forty years to achieve a seat as a older lady, doesn't have the life experience of spending 20 years running start-up businesses in the technology sector.

This isn't to say they aren't good people, committed to good outcomes, or unable to represent communities or administer programs on the public's behalf.

However it does beg the question of why we hold up senior bureaucrats and politicians as the final decision makers on programs, policies, content and engagement processes which are aimed at supporting more diverse communities.

What if the next time a website needed to be approved for launch, instead of a Secretary or Minister, the agency went to the community and asked, 'does this meet your needs' as the final approval step?

What if a policy team had to report to a citizen starring committee to approve a particular policy direction, or an agency delivering public services had to approve every process change with citizen stakeholders?

And I don't simply mean engaging with stakeholder groups - bodies purporting to represent different groups of citizens - I mean going directly to citizens and bypassing bodies with their own agendas.

The ABC does this in quite a sound way, inviting citizens to nominate for its board and having live audiences for a number of shows (there's no better way to ensure performance and detect bad concepts fast).

Our justice system does it too - we empanel juries of people, pay them a small sum for giving up their time, and have them involved as the decision-makers in trials, under the impartial eyes of a court-appointed judge.

Many councils around the world - and even some provincial/state and national governments appoint citizen oversight panels for various decisions.

This approach could be extended into the Australian Government as well. Rather than simply having members of parliament elected based on who decides to stand - a self-selecting bunch who often see politics as their career - we could seek to appoint panels of citizens to oversee a range of decisions and processes.

True it could cost a bit to set up and operate such a scheme, however the savings from adjusting decisions formerly approved by individuals who weren't the audience, to be approved by those who are, could lead to massive savings over time.

Fewer policies would have to be discarded, fewer services reconfigured and fewer actions apologised for and compensated in court.

So when you are next faced with deciding on a direction or approving the final version of a policy, service, program, website, mobile app, or other government decision - take a moment to reflect on whether you're the audience and whether you're the right person to be making that final decision.

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Saturday, March 15, 2014

Learning how to crowd fund - and launch of Social Media Planner Kickstarter

This morning at BarCamp Canberra I gave the presentation below on how to setup a crowdfunding campaign, based on my personal experience setting up a Kickstarter for Social Media Planner.

For people interested in crowdfunding I've embedded my presentation below.

If you're interested in learning more about Social Media Planner, and potentially backing it, see: kickstarter.com/projects/socialmediaplanner/social-media-planner

Crowdfunding: How to set up a campaign (from my personal experience) from Craig Thomler

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Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Crowdfunding gaining strength as an FOI tool - but will governments seek a seat at the table?

As reported by Peter Timmins in his Open & Shut blog, and as I have commented on Twitter, crowdfunding is beginning to become an interesting tool for fundraising the cash requested by government agencies for fulfilling FOI responses.

Where governments are still using charging for FOI searches as a cost-recovery tool (and potentially occasionally as a barrier to releasing information), crowdfunding offers the advantage of spreading the cost across a range of people and organisations in a structured way.

Peter points to an article in FreedomInfo, Crowdfunding FOI Requests Gains in Use, Seems to Work, which highlights how this tactic is being used in four jurisdictions.

Where these crowdfunding approaches are public, which is the usual case, they also draw greater attention to these FOI requests, potentially marshalling a range of interested parties around the release request.

While it is still very early days for this approach, it does raise the prospect of a new wave of organising around areas where government is perceived to be secretive or evasive - where interested individuals, activists and even business interests can raise public and even media attention for a range of topics that otherwise would remain under the radar.

There's a few permutations of this approach likely to emerge involving 'crowd' but without always being about 'funding'. For example we've already seen crowdsourcing of insights from FOI responses (including by The Guardian in the UK and Fairfax in Australia) and have also seen FOI requests around a given topic being coordinated by grassroots groups seeking a full understanding of complex situations.

There's also the potential to establish collaborative funding models - where there's X dollars placed in a pool to fully or partially fund different FOI requests each month or year, and contributors to the fund can vote on which FOI requests these funds are applied to.

I also expect to see crowdfunding mechanisms built into more FOI platforms, such as Right to Know in Australia, and increasing use of 'crowd' approaches to FOI across by individuals, activists and media outlets.

The most interesting question is whether governments will seek to have some influence in these processes by implementing their own central platforms for crowdfunding FOI requests, or will continue to pursue a 'hands-off' fragmented process to FOI as the majority do today.

Given the success of the US and UK governments' ePetition platforms, and the steps into collaborative law making in Scandinavian countries, I would tip these jurisdictions as the most likely to take a step into providing an FOI request and crowdfunding platform.

This would also allow governments to realise cost benefits through standardising and streamlining FOI request and review processes within and across agencies as well as aggregating similar FOI requests and providing centralised access to already released information, thereby saving agency time and money in attempting to discover this or telling people manually that information is already in the public domain.

Establishing their own FOI management and crowdfunding system may also allow the governments concerned to allocate a monthly budget offsetting legitimate FOI costs, which could be accessed by individual FOI requests through approaches such as collaborative budgeting or an 80/20 approach (if 80% is funded, the government contributes the other 20%), as has been used in the UK successfully for other crowdfunding.

If governments decide not to enter this space, larger civic groups will, leading to a situation over time where governments will increasingly find increased public scrutiny over what is released, to whom and for how much - as well as what is refused release or where charges appear high.

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Wednesday, February 19, 2014

First the internet, then social media and now crowdfunding is disrupting government

Government has proven no more immune to disruption by digital than any other industry.

The internet changed the model for governments in delivering information and dealing with pressure groups. It has been a largely positive disruption, facilitated billions in savings as government moved services online in egovernment initiatives. At the same time it has seen governments able to provide the same, or more, services to citizens without growing staff numbers at the same rate as population growth.

In Australia the Australian Public Service employs roughly the same number of staff as in 1990, despite a 30% increase in our population. While not all attributable to egovernment, I think it is fair to say that considering the range of services and activities of the Australian Government today, compared to 40 years ago, digitalisation has had a substantial impact in respect of job numbers.

Social media has been a more uncomfortable disruption for government, thus far providing for a mixed experience. Governments in Australia have rapidly adopted the use of social media - as I track through the proxy of Twitter accounts (over 920 today compared to none in early 2007) - using social platforms for activities from communication to engagement, customer service, codesign and policy development.

At the same time social media has challenged government by giving millions a more public voice and way to organise groups - from simple petitions for bank notes usable by blind people through to connecting people and facilitating the organisation of mass rallies during the Arab Spring.

Governments have found it more difficult to ignore self-organising groups than single isolated individuals, and have begun to face continual critiquing of every decision as soon as it is announced - an unprecedented environment of scrutiny and noise.

However the clamour of critics on social networks can be ignored - we've already seen several elected politicians cancel social media accounts and put much greater constraints around how their staff use these networks.

The next disruption, crowdfunding, is already showing some signs of having a material impact beyond that of raised voices and organised protests.

Historically when governments stopped funding activities or services, or changed what they delivered - as a result of electoral and policy changes - the media would comment, the public would talk about it for a few weeks, maybe even protest, and then generally governments could get on with delivering their new mix without significant disruption.

Governments were in control - they chose where their budget was spent and things that were cut remained cut.

Of course some form of charity or other provider might choose to find alternative funding to continue delivering a service on a small scale, however this could be safely ignored, or even declared a win by government as it was clear that government didn't need to fund that service anyway.

This line was actually used very recently by the current Australian government after it defunded the Climate Change Commission (a government-funded body for providing expert advice on climate change to the public) and the commissioners went out to find alternative funding.

However something was different on this occasion.

Rather than having a few organisations or wealthy and concerned individuals provide funds to keep the Climate Change Commission alive under a new name, the Climate Council, the Commissioners used a crowdfunding route.

The first donation to keep the Climate Council live was $15. Over the first 12 hours it raised $160,000 - literally overnight.

At the end of the first week the Climate Council had raised one million dollars, and the donations continued to arrive.

For awhile it was unclear whether this was a once-off event. The Climate Commission dealt with an emotive topic - climate change - and was led by prominent and well-respected Australian, Professor Tim Flannery. It was an existing body with an existing purpose, so already had structure and goals.

This was a useful combination for crowdfunding, providing a leg-up for marshalling the right crowd to provide the donations required to continue operations.

However we're now seeing crowd funding used to underpin the completion of another defunded Australian Government project, the Blueprint for an Ageing Australia.

While it is unclear whether this project will meet its goal, it is beginning to suggest that crowdfunding may become a regular tactic used to counter government decisions.

Effectively communities could use crowdfunding, in certain casesm as an alternative to government funding. The approach allows them to self-organise and finance public initiatives that they feel are important but governments, for funding or ideological reasons, do not.

The impact of this crowdfunding may be benign - communities simply getting the services they wish, regardless of the government's priorities - or may be considered highly political.

If a government defunds something and then supporters find the funds in the crowd to keep it alive, what does that say about the community's view of the government's priorities and decisions? Will governments be forced to back down or change their approach? Will it affect elections?

This is still very early days, however it is worth governments beginning to build their awareness of crowdfunding and how it is beginning to be used - as well as how it can be used for the benefit of government, such as by seeking some public crowdfunding for an initiative before agreeing to put public money into the mix.

At the end of the day an individual putting down their personal cash to back a crowdfunding project is a significantly greater commitment of belief and value than a signature on a petition, a social media backlash or even a march on the street. Governments need to appreciate and understand this and treat it accordingly.

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Wednesday, February 05, 2014

How Cancer Research UK is using mobile gaming to conduct medical research

Recently the World Health Organisation announced that cancer had overtaken heart disease as the number one killer of Australians, as well as being the number one killer of people globally.

The WHO had another message as well. That cancer was a largely preventable disease.

Humans have lots of medical data about cancer. With millions of cases each year there's a vast amount of data available to researchers that can help them understand how to prevent and treat the disease.

Much of this data needs to be analysed by the human eye as computers are not flexible or sophisticated enough to recognise the patterns that humans can detect.

This is where the bottleneck occurs. Lots of data, but few paid researchers.

To address this issue Cancer Research UK, a charity focused on cancer research, held a GameJam in March 2013 in London hoping to come up with game concepts that would help analyse cancer data.

Within 48 hours they had 9 working games and 12 game prototypes, different approaches combining cancer data analysis with fun and replayability.

Over the last year the charity has been working with a game developer to refine several of these games to the level where they could be publicly released.

Now, Cancer Research UK has just launched the first free mobile game (for Android and iOS) that has players analysing cancer data while they're having fun.

Named Genes in Space, players must map their way through subspace then fly the route in a custom spaceship, collecting a fictional substance called Element Alpha and dodging or blowing up asteroids on the way. The more Element Alpha they collect, the more money they make, allowing them to further customise their ship.

Meanwhile cancer researchers harvest the data created by players at two points, when they map their route and when they fly it. The subspace that players map is real genetic data, and while Element Alpha is fictional, what players are actually collecting is data that helps researchers make sense of the genetic structure.

I've long been a fan of combining data with gameplay. We need to make research and science fun to lead more people into the area. If people think they're simply playing a game rather than doing science, that's fine too.

I hope that one day soon we'll see an Grade A game developer take an interest in this area and set out to integrate elements of science data research into a high quality game.

However to get here, we'll also need to see research institutes and governments, who hold the data, interested in pursuing new ways to analyse data, rather than relying on a few expensive researchers.

Until that happens, I guess we'll have to be satisfied playing Genes in Space.

Or Cellslider, or FoldIt...

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Friday, November 15, 2013

Who's open sourcing in Australian government?

Open source is no longer new news. The movement has been around for over 30 years, longer than the public internet or widespread use of mobile phones, and around the same age as the desktop computing revolution which saw computers on every office worker's desks.

However for some reason open source has taken a very long time to get any traction in government. Even ten years ago there weren't many government framework in place allowing agencies to use open source software, let alone create and release open source software, documents or tools.

In fact misconceptions about what 'open source' means are still quite common. I still encounter folk who believe that 'open' means insecure and unsupported - even though some of the most widely used and deployed systems in the world rely on open source platforms - such as Apache web servers, Drupal and Wordpress websites - which have vast numbers of developers globally finding and fixing bugs and improving performance.

Others confuse 'open' and 'free' - there's always cost in deploying a solution, whether proprietary or open source. The difference is that with open source there's no ongoing licensing fees and vendor lock-in, which can add a great deal to development costs over time.

There's also sometimes concerns that open source may not be robust enough for intense use by large organisations. Of course this varies according to specific software, however there's no evidence backing this up as a general claim (particularly given Apache runs an estimated 65% of web servers)

Fortunately, the attitude of government towards open source appears to have begun to change.

In Australia several governments have IT policies which requires the consideration of open source in software decisions (though why it remains necessary to use policy to force IT management to consider potentially better solutions remains to be seen).

Governments are also deploying open source software, at least for web use - with the Australian Government's Department of Finance offering its GovSpace platform (which uses Wordpress) to any government agency at a relatively low ($4,500 annual) price.

Drupal websites are also flourishing - the last website I was responsible for in government, MyRegion, was a Drupal installation with an open source mapping stack (alas now the department has been absorbed, I understand the site will also disappear - I hope the code will be preserved for other agencies to reuse).

Some governments have even begun releasing their own open source software and materials, available for reuse by other agencies, governments and the broader community.

The US government has done it with We The People, the UK government has done it with ePetitions, their Service Design Manual and a variety of other materials, Canada has released their Web Experience Toolkit (WET), Philadelphia has released mobile apps, the City of San Francisco has released their entire municipal law base and New Zealand Land Information has released a range of coding tools.

In Australia the ACT government has released several code snippets and their Open Data Policy as open source and the former AusAID partnered with the Indonesian government to release the InaSAFE natural hazard impact scenarios plugin (get the code here).

The US even has a closed community where government employees and contractors share information about the open source software they're releasing and that is available for them to us (the Open Source Center).

This makes perfect sense if you consider that government-created software is a public asset, rather than a cost.

While some software may rightly need to be tightly controlled, there's a vast range of potential code for which there's no cost to government, and potentially significant value in open sourcing, allowing other eyes to spot bugs and provide improvements, while reducing the need for duplicate code development within and across jurisdictions.

When code is open it means that agencies can properly scrutinise it, understanding how it functions, the security risks and detect any potential backdoors - something much harder to do in proprietary software, which is closed source (customers can't analyse or edit it).

There's a great list of case studies and examples of governments open sourcing code and content at Github's new Government centre, http://government.github.com, unfortunately though in Australia we don't seem to have any comprehensive list of which governments and councils are creating and releasing open source materials.

So I've created a spreadsheet, which I'll add to over time, of open sourcing going on across the Australian public sector.

If you're open sourcing materials, have used or know about others who have created or used open source code or materials from Australian governments or council, please let me know in the comments below.

Hopefully over time we'll see this list grow and become more official (maybe governments will even list their open source materials in their own sites one day!) - joining the government open source community.

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Wednesday, October 09, 2013

Online challenges arrive in Australian government

With psychedelic splendour, the ACT government has become the first Australian jurisdiction to launch a serious whole-of-government online challenges site.

Through the Digital Canberra Challenge website, the ACT is now asking "Canberra's brightest minds" to help improve government services.

The first round contains two challenges, to improve the process of event approvals and to make it easier to book a government service (such as a driving test).

The process is a little vague, however the two finalists for the round (one per challenge) can receive up to $5,000 of expenses reimbursed (on presentation of valid invoices) and the winner of the competition (over a number of rounds) will receive $12,500 - with the runner up receiving $7,500.

To participate individuals must be Canberra-based, teams must have at least one ACT resident and organisations must be both ACT-based and have less than 20 people.

It's a good attempt, though in my view the complexity of the criteria to enter, the way prizes are awarded and the actual psychedelic website itself risk overwhelming the actual goal, to involve residents in improving the delivery of government services.

That said, the goal is fantastic and all kudos to the ACT Government for making a start in this area. I hope that after the process they consider making this approach a standard one for involving residents, reflecting the success of challenge.gov in the US.

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Thursday, May 16, 2013

How governments in the US and UK are using crowdfunding

Delib UK has taken my thoughts on crowdfunding within government and researched a number of other examples where local governments are using innovative ways to engage citizens in paying for communal facilities.

Worth a read at How councils are crowdfunding community projects.

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Friday, May 03, 2013

When senior public officials use online platforms to lead social change, we're witnessing a paradigm shift in government

I don't think this has been widely noticed in government yet, but Australia achieved an interesting Gov 2.0 first this week on the back of the Myers disability scandal.

The backstory: after the Prime Minister announced that DisabilityCare, the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), would be partially funded through an increase of 0.5% in the Medicare levy, the CEO of Myer, Bernie Brookes, was reported to have told a Macquarie Investment seminar that the levy was a bad idea as it was '' something they would have spent with us [Myer]''.

This led to a social media protest using the hashtag #boycottmyer, a number of critical articles in newspapers and roughly a 6% drop in Myer's share price. These reactions led to a 'backdown' by Mr Brooks, who made a (non)apology ''to those who may have been offended or hurt'', but didn't back away from his comments.

However what is really interesting from a government perspective was what happened next.

An epetition was started on Change.org as a reaction to Mr Brook's comments. This epetition asked Mr Brook and Myer to make a "real commitment to people with disabilities", by increasing disability employment to 10% by 2015.

Within 24 hours this epetition amassed over 24,000 signatures (including mine).

It might be hard to see in the image besides this text, but below the epetition is the name of its creator, Graeme Innes.

Graeme Innes happens to include his title as well 'Disability Discrimination Commissioner for Australia'.

That's right, Mr Innes is the federally appointed Disability Discrimination Commissioner and has been since 2005, a senior public servant working in the Human Rights Commission, a statutory body solely funded by the Australian Government.

So let's consider this again. The CEO of one of Australia's largest companies makes a comment at a fairly small event about his views regarding how disability care should and should not be funded.

He learnt, as Mitt Romney did earlier this year, that due to technology and empowered citizens, there's now only one room, and everyone can be in it all the time, as his comments get reported in the media and on social media.

The government's most senior official responsible for the disabilities area responds by officially creating an epetition on a leading online platform for fostering civic participation - an epetition specifically designed to attract and attracting a significant level of public engagement and support.

Can anyone remember how this type of scenario would have played out before the internet or, more recently, before the rise of social media and digitally engaged citizens (as long ago as when Mr Innes took up his present role in 2005)?

Firstly, the CEO's comments would likely not have been recorded and reported. Even if reported in the newspapers there would have been limited, if any, ability for the community to react to his words in a public manner other than letters to the editor the next day.

If reported, the Disability Discrimination Commissioner would have (at most) released a media release calling the comments 'inappropriate'. Or, post-internet, issued the release and added it to the Commission's website, and that would have been the end of it.

There would likely have been no public backlash, no public (un)apology by the CEO and the Disability Discrimination Commissioner would have not made an attempt to bring the weight of public opinion to bear. There simply wasn't a way for the Commissioner to do so - even for Mr Innes in 2005.

So what we've seen this week isn't simply a minor spat fed by an out-of-touch and close to retirement CEO making comments that appear to place his company's profits ahead of a significant social issue.

What we've seen is a senior public servant step out of the shadows to lead and shape community sentiment - engaging and leading the crowd through the use of an online social media platform specifically designed to foster social change.

To my knowledge that has never happened before in Australia.

When governments and their appointed or elected officers begin engaging and empowering the 'crowd' to aid social change we're witnessing a major change, even a paradigm shift, in how governments interact with and engage their citizens.

Expect to see much more of this type of engagement as Government 2.0 and social media become business as usual across Australia, and around the world.

In the immortal words of Bob Dylan, the times they are a'changin.

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Tuesday, April 16, 2013

VicHealth Seed Challenge and the history and potential for government challenges

VicHealth has just announced the start of the VicHealth Seed Challenge, where the agency is asking people from across the nutrition sector, fruit and vegetable industries, researchers, social innovators/entrepreneurs and the digital world to collaborate and seek solutions to the wicked problem:

"How do we improve fruit and vegetable supply and access, as well as develop and promote a culture of healthy eating in Victoria?"

The challenge takes the format of a competition, where VicHealth, with support from The Australian Centre for Social Innovation, will initially select and fund the most promising ideas with a one-off investment to further refine and develop a business case.

From here, the two most promising ideas that demonstrate a fresh way of thinking will be selected to receive ongoing mentoring, coaching, business development and financial support of up to $100,000.

For more information about the VicHealth Seed Challenge, and upcoming information sessions on 1 May, visit its website: http://www.vichealth.vic.gov.au/seedchallenge

This type of challenge isn't new or unique in government - although it certainly qualifies as innovative in the way it involves the community in the process of addressing difficult, or wicked, problems and in how digital channels are being integrated into the challenge process.

In fact the first significant government challenge I am aware of began nearly 300 years ago in 1714, with the offer of the Longitude Prize by the British parliament.

This challenge offered a significant cash prize for the inventor who could come up with an accurate way to measure longitude at sea.

This had become a vital technology for an island nation reliant on its navy for protection and its merchant fleet to allow economic growth and to feed a fast growing population. At the time existing technology was not able to retain its accuracy with the rolling movement of ships.

The prizes ranged from £10,000 to £20,000 depending on accuracy - equivalent to several million dollars today.

The Longitude Prize created a whirlwind of innovation across the nation, with many people working to win the prize and the glory - however with the slow speed of technological advancement, the prize was not awarded until 1761 - 47 years later.

The winner of the prize, Yorkshire carpenter John Harrison, submitted his first project in 1730 and a second in 1735, however when trialled in 1741 neither model was able to compensate for centrifugal force, although they did compensate for gravity and ship motion.

His third attempt in 1759 introduced several major innovations such as caged ball bearings (still used today), however still proved inaccurate, but his fourth attempt in 1761, which resembled a pocketwatch, was successful and was awarded the £20,000 top prize.

In the three hundred years since the Longitude Prize, many governments have used challenges and prizes to encourage public participation in the progress of science, the development of physical structures and the solution of difficult social and economic problems.

Notable examples in Australia include the 1912 competition to design an 'Ideal City' as the capital of the country, leading to the selection of Walter Burleigh-Griffin's design for Canberra and the 1956 competition for the construction of a national opera house at Bennelong Point in Sydney, which led to the construction of the Sydney Opera House.

Jumping forward a few years, we've seen the arrival of the internet vastly increase the potential reach and flexibility of challenges for government, while significantly reducing the timeframes required to enter or the cost of running these challenges.

In the US the Federal Government has had a central online challenge platform in place for several years (challenge.gov), which has seen dozens of agencies hold close to 200 competitions.

In Australia the process has been far more piecemeal and conservative, with straight competitions (such as the photo competition I ran at the Department of Regional Australia, attracting well over 2,000 entries) being the norm - designed to engage citizens, rather than to source ideas or solutions from them.

We have seen some challenges recently tied to the open data movement - beginning with a broad MashUpAustralia challenge held by the Gov 2.0 taskforce in 2009 and more directed and specific open data challenges held most recently by the NSW government in the transport and health areas.

While digital is now the preferred channel for holding these challenges, due to the speed of engagement and low cost, it is a mistake to solely link challenges to open data, or to focus them purely on programming skills.

As the US has demonstrated via Challenge.gov, there are a vast array of issues where government-run challenges can add value in finding solutions, improving communication or developing new or better services - open data challenges have their place, but are only one subset of what is possible.

The VicHealth Seed Challenge is an example of one of the possibilities for government challenges in the digital age - where the challenge isn't about data, but about solving a known wicked problem, using all the tools available today - digital and otherwise.

I hope other governments pay attention to this great work by VicHealth and consider the history and potential of challenges beyond the small open data subset.

Government challenges can be a cost-effective way to solve wicked social, transport, economic and health problems - every agency and council should consider them, where relevant, within policy and service deliberations.

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Wednesday, April 03, 2013

Innovating in the public sector - The Pitch: Five presentations. Five minutes. Five big ideas.

The Institute of Public Administration Australia (IPAA), in partnership with the CPA Australia, has introduced a fantastic innovation competition for public servants.

Named The Pitch, In an IPAA first, the 2013 IPAA National Conference is providing an opportunity to pitch ideas for an original policy initiative or public sector innovation that could make people's lives better and/or the public service smarter, better and broader.

The creators of the best five ideas will receive a free invitation to the IPAA's National Conference in November and have five-minutes to pitch their idea to senior public sector decision makers in Canberra.

The winner of The Pitch will also receive a cash prize of $500.

There's also a category for younger (to 36yrs old) entrants, the CPA Australia Young Professionals Pitch Competition, with a $200 prize, where the winner will become one of the five finalists (and presumably eligible to win the $500 prize as well).

Entry is open to anyone in Australia, and ideas will be judged against the following criteria:

originality of the idea
capacity of the idea to help government improve people's lives
innovation
practicality and cost effectiveness
ability to address the topic
engaging presentation style (during the pitch), and
length of pitch (not to exceed 5 minutes).

For more information, and to enter The Pitch, visit: http://ipaa2013.org.au/get-involved/the-pitch

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Friday, February 08, 2013

Your help needed: Crowdfunding the Tim Berners-Lee tour

Whether or not you attended one of the events given in Australia by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in his TBLDownunder tour, it's likely his visit will have an impact on how Australian governments and their agencies think about openness, digital channels and online engagement.

During his visit Sir Tim, the inventor of the world wide web, raised the profile of open government, privacy, open data, high speed broadband amongst many of Australia's senior government Ministers and bureaucrats.

He spoke about digital democracy, privacy and open data - what governments can and should do, and what they should not - to decision-makers, policy writers and the public; 5,500 in-person at events and thousands more online.

The tour was sponsored, however at the last minute one sponsor pulled out, leaving a $20,000 shortfall.

To meet this, the tour's organisers have launched a crowdfunding exercise. As they say on the crowdfunding site's page, "If just 1000 individuals donate $20 each, we can cover this shortfall."

If you were pivileged to hear Sir Tim present during his Australian tour, consider donating.

If you were not able to hear Sir Tim speak, but believe that his tour will help you overcome barriers at your work, consider donating.

And if you don't think Sir Tim's presentations will help you in your job but will help Australian governments become more open and improve citizen engagement, consider donating.

$20,000 isn't that much to raise, if we're each prepared to give a little.

I've given. How about you?

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Thursday, January 31, 2013

Let's crowdsource the Style Manual for government

The Australian Government Style Manual:
For Authors, Editors and Printers, 6th Edition
image via Wiley Press

When I joined the Australian Public Service in 2006, one of the first manuals I was made aware of was the Style Manual: For Authors, Editors and Printers.

The Style Manual was the bible for communications professionals and senior executives in the APS, containing detailed advice on how to plan, design, write, structure, edit and publish content that met the standards expected of Australia's Government.

The Style Manual was, for the most part, practical; clearly and concisely written while covering a vast range of material in a relatively short 550 pages.

From my perspective the Manual only had one major flaw - it was a print-only publication with a price tag for purchase ($44.95).

What this meant, in practice, was that agencies never had enough Manuals to go around.

While Communications team always had quite a few, and many senior executives had their own copies, many people across departments, who wrote policy, program documents, business cases and other materials for a living, didn't have ready and ongoing access to a Style Manual.

Sure the price wasn't that much (and many people bought their own), however when an agency has hundreds or thousands of staff who could benefit from access to the Style Manual, the cost quickly added up.

Another issue caused by the print-only nature of the Style Manual was the speed at which it updated.

At the time I joined the public service the latest edition, the 6th, was four years old. It was already out-of-date due to rapid changes in web communications. Now the 6th Edition of the Style Manual is over ten years old, it is far out of touch with modern writing approaches and channels.

The first Style Manual was published in 1966 and, on average, editions had been published every six years. That may have been fine in the 'old days' when there were three mass media and before desktop computers and the internet, however it fails to meet the speed of change today.

So I was please earlier this week to see that the Australian Government was going to be going to market to update the Style Manual. However, when I looked into what was initially proposed I was concerned:

The Department of Finance and Deregulation (Finance) is preparing for an approach to market in mid 2013 seeking to form a joint arrangement with a suitably qualified provider to develop, publish and distribute the 7th edition of the Style manual for authors, editors and printers (Style manual).

Phase 1 of the project involves consulting with industry in order to explore and better understand potential business models under which the 7th edition could be produced, published and distributed. Finance is particularly interested in business models where the provider recovers development costs through collecting revenue from selling the Style manual, rather than Finance providing the capital to develop the 7th edition....

Government News summed up the situation well in their article, Paywall to surround official government Style guide.

I believe it is time for a rethink of how the Style Manual is constructed, managed and distributed, matching the modern technologies we now have.

Here's my proposal.

Let's crowdsource the Style Manual

The principles under which the government Style Manual should operate, in my view, are as follows.

The Style Manual should be:

developed by the people who most understand it and need it - development of the new edition should involve writing and media experts, but also should involve the people who use these mediums for government every day, the users of the current 6th Edition Style Manual. Many of these people have suggestions for improvements and ideas for extensions to the Manual which aren't commonly captured or respected in a centrally managed updating process.
readily available - to all government officials and to all organisations and individuals who engage or contract with government on the platform and in the place of their choosing.
continually current - a 'living document', updated on an ongoing basis to reflect changing communication channels and language usage.
relevant - a communal document, with communications specialists (particularly those in government who rely on it) able to participate in its development and ongoing updating so that it addresses their needs and reflects best practice, prompting engagement and use.
accessible - meeting the WCAG 2.0 AA accessibility standards
useful - providing examples, templates and allowing people to pose challenges and respond with advice and ideas in an active communal way.
open and transparent - the style guide should support and reinforce the government's stated open government agenda.

On this basis, I see the 'native' format being a cross between a wiki and an online community, a living Style Manual where people can search for and reference all the content, plus additional examples and templates that cannot be delivered effectively in a print publication.

Every piece of guidance in the Style Manual would support a discussion, with the community of public servants able to ask questions, debate points of style and offer improvements, which could be implemented through a managed consensus and voting approach.

To support people who needed an offline Manual, or who prefer a printed version, regular (perhaps annual) print versions could be released from the website for departments and other organisations to print (at their own cost or via the site) as books or distribute as ebooks across mobile platforms.

If a revenue model is critical, perhaps the site can charge government departments - not individuals - an annual subscription fee based on their headcount. With around 260,000 public servants, a charge of $2 per head would be more than sufficient to cover the running costs of the site, meaning a large agency with 20,000 staff would pay only $40,000 for an annual subscription for all staff, equaivalent to buying 800 copies of the current 6th Edition Style Manual book (one book per 25 people), while a smaller 500 person agency would pay only $1,000 per year.

This subscription fee would allow full access to the online Style Manual and the right to print as many copies as they chose (at their own cost), as well as including full access to enewsletters and the ability to both suggest edits to the guide and to participate in the community, asking and answering questions related to 'gray' areas in style.

Outside organisations may be able to pay for this access as well, at a higher rate.

In summary, we need a government Style Manual. It provides a basis for standardisation of language and common understanding within and without government.

It needs to always be current and accessible, to engage and support the community by going beyond what a book or website can do by fostering a community of communicators within government - whether they use paper, video, voice or the web as their mediums for communication.

We have the technology today to do this in a cost-effective and managed way. It doesn't require a book publisher or distributor to achieve this goal. In fact these companies are often the worst placed to deliver the outcome as they are tied to legacy investments.

Finally, we need the Style Guide to demonstrate and support the government's open government agenda - something a book publisher, seeking profits, would be disinclined to do.

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Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Can governments crowdfund (some of the time) rather than tax?

Taxation has become the accepted approach used by most governments to raise most of their funds.

In its simplest form it involves taking a percentage share of the income earnt by citizens and other eligible entities, such as corporations and putting all this money in a big pool for the government's use.

The government then decides how to spend this money - providing public services and infrastructure, welfare and health care, and paying for the machinery of government.

Taxation is often supplemented by other revenue raising approaches including 'user-pays' tolls or levies and the sale or rent of goods, public assets or rights.

While there's plenty of debate over how the money in government's pool is spent, the main approaches used to raise these funds have remained largely unchallenged for centuries.

With the rise of the internet, however, another approach to funding government is becoming more viable - crowdfunding.

Crowdfunding involves asking people to provide funds for worthwhile projects on a micro-scale, many individuals each donating a small amount.

This isn't a totally new approach. Rich philanthropists have donated millions for worthwhile causes, communities have come together to fund (and build) small public works and individuals have adopted park benches and potholes for many years.

However the internet has lifted crowdfunding to a new level, with the potential to cost-effectively raise millions of dollars through tiny individual donations in a managed way.

The practice is already beginning to grow in the US, as illustrated in the video below. US platforms like Neighbor.ly already exist and new ones, like Citizinvestor are sprouting.

A european platform, Brickstarter, is being built with a pilot planned with the Finnish city of Kotka later this year.

In the Netherlands, a foot bridge is being crowdsourced by Rotterdam's government, testing the concept for broader use.

There's even some use in Australia. ScreenWest (WA's government film financing body), has a crowdfunding project in partnership with Pozible to support the funding of WA films.

While it is still too early to tell how useful crowdfunding will be for governments, the crowdfunding approach has been successful in raising funds for arts projects and commercial products, even for establishing the world's first Tesla museum (which I've invested in).

Micro-financing, a related approach supporting people to lift themselves out of poverty with loans too small for banks to bother with, has also proven successful in many cases (I recommend checking out Kiva, which I use).

Perhaps, over the next few years, rather than debating tax increases or expenditure cuts, governments will consider broader, internet-enabled options for funding some activities or infrastructure - such as crowdfunding.

All it takes is an open mind and a willingness to innovate in revenue raising. As the video below illustrates, this is already starting to get underway.

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Monday, January 14, 2013

Transcribe Australia's archival records - earn points towards publications and posters

Late last year the National Archives of Australia launched a global first for national archives, allowing the public to collaborate in the digital transcription of Australian archival records.

The system, at transcribe.naa.gov.au, basically allowed the public to register for an account, pick from hundreds of digitally scanned public records and correct any errors in the automatic text recognition (of which there's lots!)

For each record corrected, a user earns points, which accumulate on a leaderboard so they can compare themselves to others in a competitive way (I'm currently 40th).

This approach by itself is innovative and has only been previously used in Australia by the National Library, which has operated its newspaper archives in the same crowdsourcing way for around six years.

However the National Archives have taken an additional exciting step. Users can now use the points they gain from correcting archival transcripts to earn copies of Archives' publications, posters and files.

Essentially, rather than spending money on publications from the NAA, the public can 'earn' those publications by improving Australia's historic record.

Now that's a fantastic example of how to both involve the public and to reward them for participation in a meaningful way.

There might still be some further need required to tweak the system so that people feel the level of work they do is appropriate to the rewards - currently the cheapest reward, the Collections booklet requires 50,000 points - which only the top eight leaderboard members have reached. However this is the first time a government agency has taken this type of step, so some refinement is to be expected.

That said, I'm motivated to get back to work improving Australia's historic record and earning myself a material reward in thanks for doing so.

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Craig Thomler

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Saturday, September 05, 2015

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

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

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

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

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Friday, November 15, 2013

Wednesday, October 09, 2013

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Friday, May 03, 2013

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Wednesday, April 03, 2013

Friday, February 08, 2013

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Let's crowdsource the Style Manual

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Monday, January 14, 2013