Showing posts with label transparency. Show all posts
Showing posts with label transparency. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Prime Minister pre-announces Climate Change blog on Twitter

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has pre-announced the launch of his new Climate Change blog with the following Tweet via the KevinRuddPM Twitter stream,

Starting my blog tomorrow on Climate Change. Like to hear your ideas on practical action. KRudd
Another step for the Australian Government into the online consultation space, it will be interesting to see how the blog will operate - stay tuned!

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Friday, July 10, 2009

Does Australia need Safer Social Networking Principles?

Around the world governments are struggling to understand and address some of the age-old issues that have been accelerated by the intranet.

One attracting particularly high attention is the protection of young people from illegal and inappropriate material, cyberstalking, cyberbullying and, sometimes, themselves.

Various governments are attempting different approaches to address these issues, with the European Union using a balance of approaches including new law enforcement initiatives, legislative change, parent and carer education, young people education and industry self-regulation in consultation with government.

I have been reviewing the Safer Social Networking Principles for the EU (PDF), released in February this year, which clearly defines the unacceptable range of practices,

As with many products and services, the misuse of these technologies can present an element of potential risk to children and young people. SNS [CT: Social Network Service] providers must assess if and how these potential risks apply to their own services. Potential online risks to children and young people fall into four categories:
  • ‘Illegal content’, such as images of child abuse and unlawful hate speech
  • ‘Age-inappropriate content’, such as pornography or sexual content, violence, or other content with adult themes which may be inappropriate for young people.
  • ‘Contact’, which relates to inappropriate contact from adults with a sexual interest in children or by young people who solicit other young people.
  • ‘Conduct’, which relates to how young people behave online. This includes bullying or victimisation (behaviours such as spreading rumours, excluding peers from one’s social group, and withdrawing friendship or acceptance) and potentially risky behaviours (which may include for example, divulging personal information, posting sexually provocative photographs, lying about real age or arranging to meet face-to-face with people only ever previously met online).
With the interactivity that web 2.0 technologies enable, it is also important to remember that in addition to being victims young people can also initiate or participate in anti-social or criminal activities.
The principles make acceptable and unacceptable conduct very clear and have become a benchmark for parents, educators and governments to judge companies against.

A number of Social Network Service providers have signed these principles and taken steps to make their services compliant and supportive of the principles.

I wonder whether Australia should look at a similar approach.

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Thursday, June 11, 2009

How are governments overseas using Government 2.0? (Public Sphere Camp Series)

Government 2.0 is a global trend and many governments around the world are already deep into online initiatives of this type.

Below I'm going to touch on three examples which demonstrate some of the potential benefits of government 2.0 - accessibility, collaboration, transparency and engagement.

If these only whet your appetite, there are further examples at the Government 2.0 Best Practices wiki, which has aggregated a list of examples from around the world.

US's Data.gov
One of the first actions of President Obama when he took office in the United States was to make it clear to the senior executives of US federal government agencies that he wished them to make public information available online using the latest and most appropriate technologies and formats.

One of the key areas his administration focused on was data and statistics. Under US law data collected by the federal government using public funds is copyright-free and should be made freely available to the public unless if there are strong reasons to not make specific data sets available (such as national security matters).

The challenge was to make the data freely available online via a central point, in formats that could be readily reused by other websites, organisations and the public.

Recently the US government launched the Data.gov site, which intends to aggregate hundreds of thousands of US government data feeds in machine readable forms online.

As an initiative supported centrally by the President's office, the site launched with about 49 datasets from a variety of agencies, however has been adding new feeds regularly. Eventually this site will become the data hub for the US government with citizens and organisations able to access any public federal data from it quickly and easily.

Even more importantly the data feeds can be reused by other websites, web applications and even mobile applications in ways that add value, such as superimposing data on maps or combining different datasets to provide new insights.

While data.gov is still in its infancy, the US government has demonstrated its commitment to accessible government through this approach and it will become very difficult for a future president to turn back the clock to the fragmented and difficult to access government data of the past.


New Zealand's Policing Act wiki
During 2007-08 New Zealand reviewed its Policing Act, updating a piece of legislation that had grown old and out of touch with the community.

Alongside traditional consultation approaches the New Zealand government decided to provide the text of the legislation in a wiki which would allow anyone who registered to make changes directly to the text, add comments and have conversations and debates over the content of the Act.

The Police Act wiki, which used a simple set of moderation principles received an "overwhelming response" and became a major influence in how the updated legislation was crafted.

The wiki was extremely low cost to run and manage and attracted a range of participants that would not have the time or inclination to attend physical consultation events.

This example demonstrates how governments can practically and successfully use web 2.0 approaches to collaboratively engage citizens in the democratic process.

Rather than relying on a small set of experts and expensive and time-consuming physical consultations, governments are able to quickly, simply and cheaply get feedback and input on proposals online.

UK's Lords of the blog

Finally, the UK the House of Lords is commonly considered old and stodgy. However the UK's Upper House is also one of the most active groups of bloggers in government - with their Lords of the Blog site featuring the posts of 15 Lords discussing the workings of UK government and the specific legislation they are considering.

The blog, which accepts comments from the public (again under a simple moderation policy), was initially trialled as a way to build public engagement in UK democracy and illustrate the valuable role played by the House of Lords.

It has now been operating successfully for 18 months and has been credited with reinvigorating public interest in the democratic process.

This type of approach makes politicians and government processes more accessible to the public, creates greater openness and transparency on the part of the government and leads to increased engagement and participation in democracy by the public.

Blogs can also become tools for testing concepts or introducing news that traditional media outlets do not tend to carry. Essentially they become a direct personal link between the blogger(s) and their constituents.

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Thursday, June 04, 2009

ACT government launches online public consultation about how citizens wish to be engaged

The ACT Chief Minister's Office, in conjunction with Bang The Table, has launched a consultation asking Canberra residents how they prefer to be engaged by the government.

I've been taking a look at some of the comments being made and there are some very clear preferences for not using telephone consultation, ensuring that people get the opportunity to speak in physical consultations and ensuring that engagement occurs before political decisions are made.

If you're a Canberran, take a look at the consultation and have a go at participating in it if you wish to better understand how this form of online consultation can work.

The consultation is online here.

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Wednesday, May 20, 2009

What does 'transparent' mean for government?

eGovernment, or government 2.0, is often discussed as a means to create greater transparency in government.

However has there been a clear definition of what transparency really means for government in Australia?

At the furthest extreme transparency would be like living in a glass house with glass furniture - everyone could see in and view everything that was taking place at all times.

This approach clearly isn't practical for governments. Some processes are hidden to prevent foreign nations taking advantage of local changes - such as defense force movements. Others are hidden to protect the privacy of citizens, public servants or politicians and reduce the risk of pressure being placed on individuals by unscrupulous parties - witness protection, fostering and adoption processes spring to mind.

Moving along the scale of transparency, at some point the level becomes too low to sustain democratic processes. When a government hides its budgets there is no accountability to the public, if voting is secret it is easily rigged.

Transparency is also influenced by time and access. For example, the Register of Members Interests for the Australian Federal Government has been publicly available for years. However to see it required physically traveling to Canberra and going to the office where it was available.

Not until recently, when OpenAustralia (a non-government not-for-profit organisation) scanned a copy of the paper-based Register and placed it online was it easy to access without travel.

Timeliness may still be an issue - I'm not sure of the processes whereby OpenAustralia is informed of updates to the Register so they can rescan it to keep the online version current.

Accessibility may also still be an issue - scanned documents are not as accessible as digitally encoded online information. They are harder to transmit or reuse.

Taking the above into account in order to move to a more precise definition, I would define transparency in government as:

Making government data, processes, decisions and activities available in the most timely and accessible formats available at the time - except where making it available would cause direct harm to the nation or its citizens.

This definition is still flawed - 'direct harm' is subject to interpretation.

The definition doesn't consider the cost/benefit - someone must pay to make available data that may only be accessed a few times per year.

Others will see other flaws in my definition - and I would welcome a better one.

However, taking my definition above into account, I see a shift in how government needs to look at its data, processes and decisions.

Firstly, governments need to stop asking IF data should be publicly available and instead take the approach that everything should be available EXCEPT IF it would cause direct damage.

Secondly, governments need to ensure that every system they put in place allows data and processes to be readily exposed in a timely and accessible manner. In my mind this means web-enablement. Legacy systems and processes also need to be bootstrapped into the modern age.

The question I finish on is what will transparency mean for governments?

By nature governments are risk-adverse and prefer to analyse and consider all of the consequences of action before they act. This is a good thing when considering the impact legislation can have on peoples' lives, a mistake in a law can drive thousands into poverty, allow criminals to prosper, or create other severe side-effects.

However in the case of transparency the consequences remain unclear.

Certainly transparency can be seen as a threat - suddenly politicians and government agencies can be held publicly accountable for more of their decisions and actions. Inconsistencies, poor decisions and mistakes can be blown-up into conspiracy theories and lead to unwarranted scalpings. Everyone makes mistakes and all systems need to have built-in tolerances to allow mistakes to be made.

Transparency can also be extremely costly to implement and the benefits are not always clear. Who in the public gains from knowing about some of the low level processes at work in government? Will they provide a net benefit for democracy after taking into account the time and resources required to make the process visible? Will the public even care?

I don't have easy answers to these questions. I don't think any government or individual does.

Here are some other thoughts on the topic of transparency in government:

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Wednesday, May 06, 2009

A blueprint for making government data reusable online

US federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, has outlined a blueprint for government data at the 2009 Government Web Managers conference.

As reported in GCN, Kundra advised that,

Government data prepared for public reuse should be offered in multiple-formats, be machine-readable and adhere as closely as possible to lightweight standards
This is likely to be a guiding principle for the upcoming www.data.gov site, which has the express purpose of making US government data available for citizen reuse as a governmentwide repository of data feeds.

This vision goes far beyond merely making a limited set of US government information publicly available in proprietary formats. In Kundra's words, “We need to make sure that all that data that’s not private can be made public”.

Per an earlier GCN article,
By opening vast realms of data that federal agencies are now keeping in-house, Kundra hopes to spark new ways of using that information to better serve citizens and even create new industries.

In principle that would be a fantastic outcome for any government to achieve for its country - but is it realistic?

Kundra has addressed this topic as well,
Kundra cited examples of how the publishing federal government information has already “fundamentally transformed the economy” in certain areas. When the National Institutes of Health published its results from mapping the human genome, the agency “created a revolution in personalized medicine," in which hundreds of new drugs were created. When the Defense Department opened Global Positioning System readings for public use, an entire new industry of geolocational devices was born.


In Australia we're beginning to see governments unlock their vaults of data, with services such as CData from the ABS being one of the most impressive steps.

However in this, as in most other areas of egovernance, there's many challenges to overcome before either the US or Australia can fully realise the potential benefits of allowing the community to innovate with public data from a range of agencies.

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Friday, May 01, 2009

Victoria police launches local crime stats online in MyPlace

I applaud Victoria Police for their latest foray into online engagement, MyPlace.

As highlighted in Victoria's eGovernment Resource Centre, the Victorian Police have launched MyPlace as,

An interactive mapping service provide by Victoria Police which is updated every three months so you can see what is happening in your suburbs and hear directly from your local police Inspector about the work being done by police in your neighbourhood.

It is great to see government making this type of public information more easily available to the public in more intuitive and usable ways.

The chat function is an extra bonus. Scheduled chats with the Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police are a great tool for raising community engagement. The general public do not often get to communicate with senior police in a convenient and open environment. I hope in future this will be broadened to include chats with other senior Police officers, and potentially an ongoing blog highlighting the good work done by Victoria Police.

However, and this is a small however, I am disappointed that all the wonderful data provided by MyPlace is not available as a standard geoRSS or XML feed or API so that people can reuse the data (under appropriate Creative Commons copyright).

Google launched a wonderful feature last Tuesday which makes it much easier for the public to access, interact with and understand data from US government - doing a fantastic job of integrating data from various different local, state and federal agencies into a seamless experience.

If Victoria Police had taken an open approach to their public data Google, Microsoft and other online services could have shared the 'heavy lifting' of modelling the data by postcode at no cost to the government. This would have then allowed developers across Victoria and across the world, to build innovative new applications using the data.

These applications could include heat maps of crime statistics, integrating crime figures into rental, home and business purchase listings or school selections or even allow high school students doing school projects to compare crime stats with employment and income levels and other ABS census data (if the ABS made its data available in this manner as well) to explore the factors that lead to crime. Many other useful applications are possible, however will, for now, remain unexplored.

At the end of the day MyPlace is a great first step for Victoria Police - and should be considered by every other police force in Australia - and it would be fantastic to see it taken further into openness and transparency, by Victoria or others.

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Thursday, April 30, 2009

Senator Kate Lundy launches a public discussion on high speed broadband

Illustrating one of the ways in which parliamentarians are now actively engaging the public online, Senator Kate Lundy has posted in her blog about a series of online 'Public Spheres' she will be hosting to,

facilitate regular topics of interest to both the general public and to the government.
Discussed in her post, Public Sphere #1 - High Bandwidth for Australia, this type of online initiative provides a significant opportunity for broad participation from the Australian public on high interest topics.

This approach to public engagement is critical for the future of democratic governance in Australia. My thoughts on the topic are well stated in the following quote from a post by Matt Crozier of Bang The Table, Opportunity and Need,
The ways in which government have traditionally engaged, by hosing [sic] events that require attendance, by asking for submissions or by market research cannot engage most of these people [CT: The broader community] because there are barriers to participation. It is difficult to participate in a meeting if you are not confident and articulate or if someone who is more so is hogging the floor. Many people don't feel comfortable writing submissions, either that or they can't be bothered. Market researchers get hung up on by busy people so their sample (no matter how demographically representative) is always self selecting and biased towards more activist groups in the community.

The great thing about online engagement (as a compliment [sic] to these other techniques) is that it breaks down these barriers. People can get involved easily and at a time and place of their own choosing. My faith in the rest of the community has grown as we have watched them engage on all sorts of issues. We have councils talking about their management plans getting 400 people visiting, looking at the plan and occasionally commenting when previously there were meetings to which nobody turned up. We have raging debates about heritage issues, transport and anything involving pets. The minorities are there too, sometimes noisy, still trying to dominate the debate and very welcome but more and more people are joining in, visiting and having a say. Why? Because it's easy and they are interested. Its all very gratifying and will lead inexorably to greater community ownership of decisions and better more enduring results.

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Monday, April 06, 2009

What's the government's role in improving access to information about government online?

I love the work that Matthew Landauer and a small group of non-partisan, patriotic Australians have done to set up OpenAustralia.

If you're not aware of the site, it's designed to make the discussions on parliamentary floors visible to the public in an easily accessible way.

The site also provides information on Members' interests (on the record) and with further development could also support parliamentarian voting records, track bills and their amendments (and who is proposing them) and more.

OpenAustralia is modeled on (and uses the open-source software developed for) a similar (not-for-profit) UK site, TheyWorkForYou. Further sites of the same type are appearing around the world and attracting significant audiences - demonstrating there is a public interest in political processes and activities by elected representatives.

My question is, should this type of site be developed by individuals in their spare time, or it is an area that the Australian government needs to invest in itself to support the democratic process?

Below is a presentation with more information on OpenAustralia.



And here is a video by the founder/developer of TheyWorkForYou.

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