Guest post: Moving things forward – addressing the information gaps

This is a guest post written by Rosie Williams, a leading Australian Open Data Developer and Citizen Journalist, who created and manages infoAus.net and writes for NoFibs.com.au. It's republished from OpenAus with her permission.

The Power to Persuade blog fosters new ways to collaborate across sectors for better social policy. Power to Persuade recently published a post of mine on open data in which I argued for the role of transparency in addressing social policy questions.

I recounted a recent attempt to discover the number of homeless shelters across Australia, only to be met with a quote for over $1,000 in consideration of it not being previously published and due to difficulties in extracting the information from the system. The most interesting thing bar the cost of the service is that the reason I was forced to seek this data directly from the AIHW in the first place was exactly because I had not found it in any of the reports published by government or community sector.

As a financial and political transparency activist I have been looking into how decisions regarding the funding of housing/homeless services flow through the policy process in order to understand why such a substantial unmet need for specialist homeless services is tolerated. Australian Institute of Health & Welfare figures show that nearly 60% of people making a request for accommodation on any given day are turned away. I want to understand what process leads to this outcome.

I have also heard privately from service providers, the very organisations required to report their own data to government that they do not have access to key metrics.

Open data is a fairly new concept for Australia.Open data is data that is made available free for re-use for commercial or non-commercial purposes. The government is yet to fulfil it’s obligations to the Open Government Partnership although there are rumours this is finally about to change. The OGP requires the Australian government to submit a National Action Plan detailing extensive consultation in the areas of fiscal transparency, access to information, income and asset disclosure, and citizen engagement, all areas which affect our power to make society answerable to our needs and the needs of the vulnerable.

The government has been opening data for the last few years but there are few instances of that data being re-used. My own projects in financial and political transparency are an exception. The Commonwealth government is now implementing new grants reporting requirements to provide consistency in reporting grant recipients and locations for every relevant agency. This data set is not yet complete or available in one spot but what is available is searchable at OpenAus.

It is only when data is put to use for a specific purpose that it becomes obvious where data sets are missing or data quality needs work. One of the biggest challenges to open data is where the need for data crosses jurisdictional boundaries as it does with many questions of social policy. Issues such as domestic violence or homelessness require data not just from federal services but also state agencies. With every state potentially doing it’s own thing with regard to data collection and publication, trying to find or use data covering multiple agencies or jurisdictions is a major hurdle in any attempt to make use of open data in Australia for improved transparency, policy or practice.

To address these issues, there needs to be engagement between jurisdictions and also between sectors. Government agencies responsible for gathering and publishing data need to engage with both end users of that data and contributors to that data in order to improve quality and foster awareness of the existence and uses for that data.

To provide a pathway forward I have set up a Slack community open to practitioners in social and data science, researchers and government. The goals of this community are as follows:

Community Goals

• provide venue to engage end users of data, organisations contributing data to government and data custodians to better address social issues
• lobby for improved data and transparency
• provide answers on specific data questions eg where can I find information on x?
• run events /produce materials in support of these goals

Community Participants

This community is for practitioners, researchers, policy makers and anyone who can provide assistance to these groups in terms of answering questions about where data can be found and what can be done with it.

My various networks cross the boundaries of journalism, technology, data science and politics. Providing a bridge between these groups paves the way for people with diverse skills and information to come together to help professional communities realise their aims. If you would like access to this community please email me from your work account for an invitation.

Slack is a platform that allows for chat between teams and private messaging and integrates with a host of other services. It is easy to join and use, taking the place of both email and forums for purposes of discussion and planning.

How to Participate

Email Rosie at admin @ openaus.net.au from your work email to enable me to send you the invitation.

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The Rise of the Fifth Estate - a good yarn worth reading

This morning I read Greg Jerico's book 'The Rise of the Fifth Estate' which chronicles the rise of political blogging and social media reporting in Australia.

Some of you may remember Greg better as Grog of Grogs Gamut, a blogger and former public servant, known for his detailed analysis of political and sporting matters.

He was outed by The Australian back in 2010, a matter covered widely by both mainstream media and the blogosphere at the time.

I had already been reading Greg's keen insights into Australian politics for some time - and he was exposed after attending the Media 140 conference, which I also attended and spoke at.

Greg's situation was a key test for how the Australian Public Service and our politicians handled public sector bloggers. Despite some time lag, it was handled well, with Greg's right to blog on a personal basis supported within his Department, Prime Minister and Cabinet.

This based on the APS code of conduct, which allows public servants to participate in politics, provided it doesn't compromise their ability or perception of being non-partisan.

Many people rallied around to support Greg at the time, including myself. It can be very lonely being a public servant and a blogger - and public sector workplaces do not necessarily understand, yet, how to provide appropriate support during this type of event.

Greg subsequently left the public service, though he has continued to blog. Subsequently he's worked on television programs and written for ABC's The Drum, while working on his book.

This gets me to the point of this post, reviewing Greg's newly released 'The Rise of the Fifth Estate'.

His book is written in Greg's easy to read, yet well-evidenced style (with the odd chart), which makes it an easy and accessible read, yet with a good deal of depth and analysis.

In it he tells the story of the start of Australia's political blogosphere, analyses its players and looks at the interplay between journalists and politicians, particularly on Twitter.

His book also chronicles the 'war of bloggers' that mainstream journalism, particularly News Ltd, have waged on the "anonymous armchair amateurs" of the blogging world, including his own experience as well as those of others.

He also draws some commonsense conclusions, cutting through the hype and mystique that the journalistic profession have used to justify their own specialness and detailing the convoluted mental gymnastics and lack of self-reflection that some mainstream journalists have employed to explain why real journalism can't come from a blog.

The Rise of the Fifth Estate is really the first book in Australia to chronicle the opening stages in the rising media culture ways, as old media strains to remain relevant and profitable in the face of new modes of journalism.

Given the cuts at Fairfax and News Ltd lately, this comes at a good time to help explain a little more about why events are unfolding as they are.


I did, however, ultimately feel a little let down by Greg's 'Fifth Estate'.

He's told a good yarn, in the best journalistic vernacular, a good current history and analysis of the past and present of the rise of the blogging and Twitter as political and political journalism tools.

However I was hoping for a few more glimpses into the future, some of his insights as to how the Fourth and Fifth estates might find a workable balance that profits both, with a maximum of mutual understanding and a minimum of ongoing friction.

In conclusion, I heartily recommend 'The Rise of the Fifth Estate' as a good read and as a great record of the first few years of what is proving to be a period of turbulent change for journalism and political communication.

However, don't buy it expecting any kind of model of how to build a collaborative journalistic model, involving both professional journalists and citizens, new media and old media, into the future.

For this we'll have to wait for Greg's next book (that's a hint Greg!)


You can read the first chapter of 'The Rise of the Fifth Estate' for free at Grogs Gamut.

For other reviews see:

• Dragonista's blog, Grog’s Rise of the Fifth Estate
• Fancy Goods, Eloise Keating, BOOK REVIEW: The Rise of the Fifth Estate (Greg Jericho, Scribe)
• The Monthly Quadrant Review, FakePaulKeating: The Rise of the Fifth Estate by Greg (@grogsgamut) Jericho

There's also an interview with Greg on ABC Radio National, Social media and blogs: the fifth estate?

The Canberra book launch is on 30 August at Paperchain in Manuka. For other launches (currently underway), see Greg's publisher, Scribe.

CAVEAT: Note that I helped Greg with some curation of the list of political blogs and supported Greg with some contacts and ideas. As a result I am named a couple of times in the book.

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Paywalls for media providers mean government agencies need blogs and social media more

With the news this week that Fairfax is following News Ltd in introducing paywalls to their major metro online news mastheads, organisations need to think deeper about their social media strategy.

With a paywall strategy two things happen.

Firstly a large number of people stop using the paywalled websites. For example it's been reported in Wired's article, How The New York Times Paywall Is Working, that the New York Times, which has successfully increased online revenue using a paywall, has seen their visitors fall by more than 60% - and note that some (if not most) of their remaining visitors are not paying, therefore can only see a few articles each month.

That's with a two-tiered model, with some free content still available. If a single-tier model is used, such as by the London Times, visits can drop 90% or more.

Secondly, the reach of paywalled articles falls dramatically. Content behind paywalls cannot be easily shared via social media or email with people who do not pay for the content, reducing the 'readership' even more than the 'circulation'.

So regardless of whether paywalls work for the proprietor, raising their online revenue, they can gut readership and circulation - the reach that is important to media and PR professionals.


So let's consider the numbers based on the Sydney Morning Herald, for example.

As of their report for January - March 2012, as covered in Mumbrella, Fairfax reports that the Sydney Morning Herald receives 2,889,000 unique visitors per month and that they visit 158,656,000 pages - or an average of 55 pages per unique visitor.

Let's say that the Sydney Morning Herald introduces its paywall, on a two-tier model that allows people 20 free articles per month. Let's also assume that they are as successful as the New York Times and only shed 60% of their audience (note they're likely to shed more initially and 'win' some of it back over time, but we'll keep this simple).

Immediately we see a fall in unique visitors to 1,155,600. However page views drop far further than you'd expect as not all their remaining visitors will pay. So assuming that 50% of their remaining visitors pay and maintain a 55 page average, while the others only view 20 pages per month (the unpaid maximum), page views drop to 43,287,200 per month.

That's about a quarter of the pageviews before the paywall was introduced.

(Of course, if the fall in unique users is much greater, as may particularly be the case in the short term and was the case for the New York Times, these numbers could be much worse.)


Now assume this is happening, as planned, across Fairfax's Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Canberra Times, as well as across The Australian and News Ltd's other state-based mastheads.

Essentially all of Australia's major online metro news publications.

And what happens?

Suddenly all those media releases crafted and distributed to mainstream media are reaching a small fraction of the audience they reached in the pre-paywall days.

Your media release, which you could reliably claim to a Minister's office was reaching a large number of Australians, is no longer as effective by a long, long, long way.

Equally your advertising in 'mainstream' online news outlets reaches a lot less people. Hopefully this will reduce the cost as well - although historically as traditional media audiences have shrunk, advertising costs have grown.

So what should government agencies do to preserve their reach in a media landscape where the majority of Australians have abandoned traditional media in favour of free, but more niche, news sites?

Extend their social media presence and their own media channels (such as blogs) of course.


While paywalls may help traditional media players better monetise their online mastheads, they will not help organisations that need reach.

As a government agency, if you have information you MUST get out to Australians, the introduction of paywalls means you will need alternatives to traditional media channels for distribution.

So it's worth ensuring now that you have the skills, experience, procedures and governance in place to switch to a social media focused information distribution strategy to ensure that you preserve your reach while traditional media battens down their hatches to preserve their revenues.

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How nine year olds can now reform governments, one bite at a time

With the tools available today, influence over government policy is no longer the preserve of the wealthy, the well-connected or those people with a significant TV, radio or newspaper presence.

While traditional media and interests still have significant influence, social media has allowed individuals to become far more influential.

Blogs, forums and social networks give individuals and small groups the ability to have a national or global public platform, at little or no cost, that can be used to tell their stories and present different views or facts.

This is both challenging and an opportunity for governments. Governments, including politicians and officials, that seek to ignore, marginalise or otherwise discredit individuals for standing up for their beliefs or reporting facts are much more likely to be publicly exposed, their reputations damaged and any hypocrisy cast into the public eye.

Governments that embrace the opportunity to bring more people inside the tent, balance well-connected interests with individual views and question whether traditional lobby and representative groups actually represent the groups they claim to represent, are likely to find their work more complex but ultimately more effective, with better policy and more relevant service delivery outcome.

A great example of the influence of individuals due to social media (bolstered by traditional media once the groundswell grew) has occurred over the last week.

NeverSeconds
Some of you may be aware of the NeverSeconds blog, and the struggles its 9-year author has had with the Scottish council, which banned her taking photos of her school lunches until convinced otherwise by online public opinion, celebrities and the Scottish Education Minister.

However if you're not, here's the story in a nutshell (referencing Wired's story NeverSeconds shuts down).

In April this year nine-year-old Martha Payne in Scotland, with some technical help from her father, started a blog as a writing exercise to document what she ate each day for lunch in her school, Lochgilphead Primary.

Martha's lunch on 18 June

Before starting the blog, she and her father (who is a local farmer), encouraged by her mother (a GP), surfed foodie blogs for inspiration. Martha decided as a result that she wanted to photo each of her lunches and provide a report including how much she liked the food, the number of bites each meal took to eat, the health rating (from a nine-year old's perspective), the price and the number of hairs in the food.

The blog was approved by the school and was written entirely by Martha under supervision from her father.

Over the first two months of the blog's life, Martha attracted a huge audience from around the world, with more than a million views of her posts.

Her blog started driving good outcomes. Her local council 'remembered' to tell the school that students were entitiled to unlimited salad, fruit and bread, she and her father were invited to participate in a workshop on school lunches, other students from around the world began sending her photos of their lunches (which she posted in her blog too). A newspaper sent her some money for use of her photos, which she donated to a charity (more on this later).

The media caught wind of her blog and began writing articles about it, including Time, the Telegraph, and the Daily Mail. She was interviewed on the BBC and also attracted the attention of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, who has crusaded on the topic of healthy school lunches in Britain.

This, however, is where bureaucracy stepped in.

Martha's lunch on 30 May

An article in a newspaper used a throw-away headline, "Time to fire the dinner ladies", while discussing Martha's involvement in a thinktank on health school meals.

The local Council, Argyll and Bute Council decided that this criticism was too much, and claimed media coverage of the blog had led catering staff to fear for their jobs.

They promptly decreed on 14 June that students would no longer be allowed to take cameras into their school canteen.

Martha was accordingly called out of maths class and told that she could no longer photo her lunches.

By this time Martha had had 2 million views of her blog and had raised £2000 for charity, including £50 from the newspaper mentioned earlier.

However, as an obedient nine-year old, Martha wrote a goodbye post on her blog.

At this point her readers became activated, and the media coverage exponentially increased. She received 2,370 comments on her goodbye post and over 200 articles were posted in newspapers, plus radio and TV stories around the world. She received celebrity support from Jamie Oliver and Neil Gaiman.

Twelve hours later, the Argyll and Bute Council published an official statement (now removed from their site, but still visible online thanks to @peterwalker99 at http://www.twitlonger.com/show/hrom1r).

This statement, in part, accused Martha of misrepresenting what was on offer in the canteen,

 "The Council has directly avoided any criticism of anyone involved in the ‘never seconds’ blog for obvious reasons despite a strongly held view that the information presented in it misrepresented the options and choices available to pupils"

Martha's lunch on 16 May

It went on to state the Council's dedication to good food standards in school canteens, said they'd not received formal complaints about the food in the last two years other than from Martha's family, and that the blog had, and would have, no influence on what they served students anyway. (It is interesting to compare the quality of the statement's writing with the quality of Martha's writing.)

Around this time the charity Martha was supporting, Mary's Meals, reported that they'd now received over £40,000 in donations from her blog - more than enough to build a new kitchen at Lirangwe Primary School in Blantyre, Malawi, to feed its 1,963 students. The kitchen is to be named 'Friends of NeverSeconds'.

Three hours after the Argyll and Bute Council published its statement, the council's leader, Roddy McCuish, told the BBC that he was rescinding the ban on photos in school canteens, and the council issued a statement commending Martha's blog and indicating that the council would be involving students in their efforts to keep improving school meals,

We need to find a united way forward so I am going to bring together our catering staff, the pupils, councillors and council officials - to ensure that the council continues to provide  healthy, nutrious and attractive school meals.  That "School Meals Summit" will take place later this summer.

 I will also meet Martha and her father as soon as I can, along with our lead councillor on Education, Michael Breslin to seek her continued engagement, along with lots of other pupils, in helping the council to get this issue right.   By so doing Martha Payne and her friends  will have had a strong and lasting influence not just on school meals, but on the whole of Argyll & Bute.

Martha has resumed her blogging, and has now raised over £87,000 for the Mary's Meal charity - see her total, and give to the charity here.

Meanwhile the issue of healthy school lunches is being more widely discussed and debated, and the council has learnt it needs to more closely consider the views of its constituents and the children it serves. Shutting down debate is no longer an option for successful governance.

And the children of Lirangwe Primary School in Malawi are extremely happy, with the short video below a fitting tribute to the impact individuals can now have on governments - one bite at a time.

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Canberra event: Public interest journalism and its digital future

Organised by the Public Interest Journalism Foundation, as part of the New News public events program, Public interest journalism and its digital future is a public event in Canberra on the evening of 29 May.

I'm taking part in the discussion, alongside Mr Denmore and Professor Matthew Ricketson.

It should be a very interesting evening!

Details

Those with an interest in the future of public interest journalism in the digital age are invited to attend a Meetup event in Canberra on May 29.

At: Tilly’s Pub, corner of Brigalow and Wattle Sts, Lyneham, Canberra
From: 7pm
On: Tuesday, May 29

Discuss your ideas and questions about public interest journalism in the digital age with:

• Well known blogger and media analyst, Mr Denmore, of the blog, The Failed Estate: rejuvenating journalism in a jaded age. Mr Denmore was a journalist for 26 years. He has worked in radio, television, newspapers and online media. He now works in the corporate sector. His blog is a finalist in the Best Australian Blogs 2012 competition. Follow him on Twitter: @MrDenmore
  
• Professor Matthew Ricketson, who assisted Ray Finkelstein QC with his inquiry into media regulation, and is a journalist and the inaugural Professor of Journalism at the University of Canberra. His PhD was titled “Ethical Issues in the Practice of Book-length Journalism”. Follow him on Twitter: @MRicketson
  
• Craig Thomler, Managing Director of digital democracy company Delib Australia, and a Gov 2.0 advocate who spent five years in the APS leading and supporting online initiatives. An author and former freelance journalist, he was awarded the Individual Gov 2.0 Innovator Award by the Gov 2.0 Taskforce and was awarded as one of the ‘Top ten changing the face of the Internet and Politics’ by PoliticsOnline and the World eDemocracy Forum in Paris. Follow him on Twitter: @CraigThomler

Please register via: http://www.meetup.com/Public-Interest-Journalism/

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