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The UK government's HM Revenue & Customs service (roughly equivalent to the ATO) has launched an online consultation site seeking public input into its proposed charter.
Named Have your say the site asks citizens to answer questions around the proposed charter and provide their views of what it contains and should contain.
It's a fairly basic consultation process that could be supported through many survey tools, however it is equally very powerful in inviting citizens to directly comment on policy before it becomes enshrined in law.
Over in the US the new President has also instituted a mandatory public review stage for most legislation, making it available online for public scrutiny and comment before it is considered by the Senate.
These steps represent the scope of the shift the internet can provide democracies, taking representative democracy back to the people via direct policy consultation.
Naturally not all citizens choose to comment, however the process can add an additional level of realism to government legislation, ensuring a higher consultation bar than has been possible using paper-based communications tools.
I'm looking forward to posting about the first Australian initiative of this type - so if anyone know of one, please drop me a line.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
UK government's HM Revenue & Customs service now collecting opinions online alongside tax | Tweet |
Monday, February 09, 2009
BarCamp Canberra coming up - 28 March | Tweet |
The second BarCamp Canberra has been confirmed for 28 March, to be held at the ANU.
In case you're not familiar with the concept (quoting from the official site),
A BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants. Here is a quote from the wikipedia description:BarCamps are a global phenomenon, regularly held in at least a dozen countries, from the US to India to New Zealand.
'BarCamp is an international network of unconferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies and social protocols.'
The UK has previously held a very successful Government-only BarCamp and, due to the nature of Canberra, many attendees of the previous Canberra BarCamp last year worked within or in areas related to government.
BarCamps are not-for-profit and cost nothing to attend.
More information is available at the official BarCamp Canberra site or at the Facebook group.
Podcasts of previous presentations are available online at http://barcampcanberra.org/blog/podcasts/
Note that I am personally on the committee coordinating the event and will be presenting on the day.
What would you do? Balancing intranet needs across corporate and local objectives | Tweet |
James Robertson of Step Two Designs has published an interesting scenario regarding how a mid-sized government agency can meet global needs (corporate communications, top-level strategy, culture), while also meeting varying local needs.
He's opened the floor for ideas on how to most effectively support the needs of both management and staff.
Judging by the comments so far, this isn't a unique challenge. A number of Departments and agencies are wrestling with similar scenarios and the tensions between top-down and bottom-up needs.
Take a look over at Tackling the global-local challenge?
Type rest of the post here
Friday, February 06, 2009
Government 2.0: The Rise of the Goverati | Tweet |
The US has had a watershed year for government and political use of the internet.
The Obama campaign has triggered a series of initiatives both at public sector and political levels by demonstrating that millions of people are willing and able to engage and mobilise online.
Now the US is beginning to talk about the rise of the new breed of public servants and political players. Those that are web and social media savvy and looking to use the online channel for the benefit of citizens.
This is covered in a new post in ReadWriteWeb, Government 2.0: The Rise of the Goverati.
I'm keeping a close eye on this trend.
US military launches website to cut software development time from years to weeks | Tweet |
The US's Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has launched the Forge.mil site supporting software developers to collaborate online in developing open-source software for engineering applications.
The goal is to cut software development cycles from years to weeks, saving costs and improving time to market enormously.
Reported in Nextgov in the article, Defense launches online software development site,
The collaborative open source software development site, called Forge.mil, is modeled on the widely used SourceForge open source Web site, which provides Defense software engineers with the environment and tools to create Defense software for engineering applications in weeks, rather than the years it usually takes, David Mihelcic, the agency's CTO, told the monthly meeting of the Washington Chapter of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association.
The site, launched on 23 January, has already delivered its first software package.
This type of approach and application to software development is not new. Linux and similar systems in widespread use were developed in this type of collaborative, fast iteration environment.
Any organisation or administration capable of stealing the jump on others by speeding their software development cycles by a factor of ten or more is likely to have a large competitive advantage into the future.
In fact I'd go so far to say that in the future those who do not adopt this more cost-effective method of software development are likely to find themselves losing ground to more highly evolved organisations and nations.
imagine the efficiencies of having a whole-of-government collaborative software development site where developers across agencies could share code and coding techniques, evolving whole-of-government standards and supporting each other in developing better software and systems for a variety of government departments.
Simply the ability to reuse code developed by other agencies would save government millions. The potential of incorporating major non-government partners into the mix on specific projects would add even more to the value.
Certainly security would be a consideration, however the systems exist to manage this effectively and policies and processes could be placed around such a vehicle to reduce risks of inappropriate code escaping into the wild.
Clearly, with the US Military leading the way, this isn't simply a pipedream, it's an important strategy for future survival.
