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In this post-industrial society many of us are knowledge workers, using information as a key input to create new products, services and ideas.
Particularly in government knowledge is critical. That's why government departments invest a great deal of resources into research, stakeholder engagement and community consultation.
Without a reliable and diverse flow of information government can be crippled. Public servants can become unable to provide the best possible advice, Ministers therefore can't always make the best decisions and departments cannot quickly and cost-effectively track policy impacts and adjust policy delivery over time to address citizen needs.
So what happens if you cut knowledge workers off from important sources of knowledge?
I'd suggest this leads to less considered advice, poorer decisions and therefore worse outcomes. Money is wasted, service recipients get frustrated, citizens end up changing their votes.
In other words, cutting knowledge workers off from important sources of knowledge risks damaging the survival odds of Ministers and the reputation of the public service.
When it comes to online knowledge, government departments are constantly striving to achieve a balance between access to knowledge and minimisation of risks such as hacking, viruses and theft of information.
This isn't an easy balance - and sometimes the approaches to filtering sites can end up with unexpected outcomes.
For example, one of OpenAustralia's founders has just blogged about a department that blocks access to Open Australia - as the outsourced filtering service the department uses mistakenly classifies the website as a 'blog' and the department isn't able to amend the categories (though can make specific exclusions).
There are staff at the department wishing to use the site for legitimate work purposes.
This specific issue (which I am sure the department is rectifying) aside, does it still make sense to block a category such as 'blogs'?
Maybe ten years ago when blogs were new, rare and very, very specialised, they didn't contain much in the way of knowledge that was important for government deliberations.
However this the situation has changed. Blog platforms such as wordpress are now used for websites as well as blog - including by government departments, not-for-profits, businesses, peak bodies, and even political parties.
Also I'd suggest that blogs now come in all shapes and sizes - some are written by teams of experts, others are personal. Many have information and ideas that could help public servants shape their thinking, influence policy deliberations and affect the way services are delivered.
If they can be accessed.
I know that my blog, eGovAU, has been inaccessible to at least two large departments. More importantly, the Gov 2.0 Taskforce's site was inaccessible to at least one department during its consultation phase - I know this because it was brought to the attention of the Taskforce during one of their public meetings.
The APSC is using a blog to consult on Australian Public Servant Values, a blog is driving the APS innovation agenda and AGIMO is making excellent use of their blog for web accessibility, communications and new developments. That's not to mention another 20 or so government blogs I can think of.
Surely just this internal government use of blogs makes it necessary for departments to reconsider the basis for blocking 'blogs' as a category.
And that's not to mention all those stakeholders, individual experts and service recipients whose blogs contain knowledge that may be useful to public servants.
Perhaps there's even a Catch-22 here. If public servants are blocked from accessing potentially useful blogs they can't even assess them for value or build a case for allowing access. The only way they can do this is by taking a personal risk - doing their work at home, outside their corporate network.
So far this has just been about blogs. I've not mentioned forums, social networks and services such as Twitter which can also be extremely rich sources of useful knowledge - so long as they are not blocked.
In the OpenAustralia case, the reason given for blocking 'blogs' was that they posed a security risk to the department's network.
I wonder if this security risk is regularly being weighed against the risk to Departments and Ministers of blocking access to important knowledge.
Do departments need to revisit how they measure security risks and how they protect against them?
Friday, October 29, 2010
How can we be knowledge workers without knowledge? | Tweet |
Thursday, October 28, 2010
The internet isn't a tool for democracy - it's simply a tool | Tweet |
Over the weekend I read an insightful an well written paper by Rebecca McKinnon of Harvard University. Presented at the two day 'Liberation Technology in Authoritarian Regime' conference on 10-11 October, the paper provides some compelling evidence that the internet is not a tool for democracy, it is simply a tool and can be used to support authoritarian regimes just as it can be used to support democratic ones.
Named Networked Authoritarianism in China and Beyond: Implications for global Internet freedom, and sponsored the Hoover Institution & the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), Stanford University, the paper discusses the use of the internet by China. While external sources of political news and influence may be blocked, the Chinese government is making extensive use of the internet internally to empower citizens in support of the present regime - using legal means and extensive censorship controls to channel online discussions into politically acceptable thread.
It discusses the rise of 'networked authoritarianism' - where an authoritarian regime embraces and adjusts to the changes brought by digital communications technologies and co-opts the medium. Permitting citizens the illusion of freedom of speech, the ability to discuss social ills and influence some government policies, while retaining strict control over political expression.
I think it is important to bear in mind that by itself the internet will not necessarily lead to greater transparency, openness and democratic governance. It requires the efforts of individuals and organisations to unleash its potential.
To quote two of Rebecca's conclusions:
The business and regulatory environment for telecommunications and Internet services must become a new and important focus of human rights activism and policy. Free and democratic political discourse requires Internet and telecommunications regulation and policymaking that is transparent, accountable, and open to reform both through the courts and the political system. Without such baseline conditions, opposition, dissent, and reform movements will face an increasingly uphill battle against increasingly innovative forms of censorship and surveillance, assisted by companies that operate and shape activists’ digital environment.
Finally citizens and policymakers of democratic nations must not forget that global Internet freedom begins at home. One of the most urgent tasks of the world’s democracies is to develop best practices for openness, accountability, rule of law, and transparent governance of their own digital networks. That is the best possible long-term weapon against the spread of networked authoritarianism. It is also essential in order to ensure the long-term health of the world’s existing democracies.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
APSC consulting on improving Australian Public Service values via public blog | Tweet |
The Australian Public Service Commission (APSC) has just launched a blog-based consultation on the Australian Public Service (APS) values. It will be open until 12 November for comments.
This is the second stage of the consultation, the first stage used a custom online engagement system.
If you'd like to contribute to the consultation - or simply look at how they're using the blog, go to Our Values.
The APSC has also revamped their Senior Executive Service site with a 'live update' - essentially a blog but without comments.
World e.Gov Forum review Part 2: Gov 2.0 case studies | Tweet |
This is the second part of my series of posts on the World e.Gov forum I attended in early October 2010 in Paris, France. The previous part is World e.Gov Forum review Part 1: Gov 2.0 flavours.
In this part I'd like to share six case studies of Gov 2.0 and eGovernment activity from around the world that I was briefed on as part of the World e.Gov Forum.
The briefing was held at Cisco's Paris office using their telepresence system to speak with each of the countries in turn.
Any errors in the information are due to my understanding of the programs.
India - lifting people out of poverty through connectivity
We first spoke with India, where the challenges for internet use centred around their low literacy rate (64.8%) and access to high speed (or any speed) internet connections.
The internet is seen as a key development tool in India, critical to help lift people out of poverty through access to knowledge, markets and services. In a country where transportation and communication is a challenge, mobile devices and internet connectivity are the primary infrastructure necessary for modernisation and civic enablement.
The country is experiencing a huge boom in mobile connectivity at present, with 15 million new mobile connections each month - a huge number in Australian terms, and while only a fraction of India's 1.2 billion people, it still suggests that most of the country will have mobile phones within 5 years.
In 2008 the government initiated a 10 billion rupee programme to roll out eKiosks in 100,000 locations, in the largest public-private partnership in Indian history.
The kiosks form the central component of Common Service Centres (CSCs) in rural districts, which allows online bill payments, booking tickets, applying for jobs, searching for market information, selling of local produce and broader internet access services. In particular the kiosks provide access to eGovernment services - allowing the Indian government to better service remote locations. CSCs are managed by village level entrepreneurs, and are designed to be a central point for villagers to access services and government schemes.
The project is being coordinated through a set of government partners, such as Sahaj, which has won the tender to roll out 24,780 kiosks in six India states, servicing 150,000 villages.
Currently over 84,000 locations are in place and are being used for telemedicine (allowing remote villages to access doctors), provide educational courses for children and adults, support the social inclusion of women, improve agricultural efficiency and a variety of other purposes. They also serve as banking centres.
The public-private partnership is giving local entrepreneurs four years of revenue support to help them get on their feet. As part of the rollout around 10,000 WiMax towers have been put in place to provide connectivity.
Canada - improving government efficiency through collaboration
As a economically and politically developed and stable country with huge geographic distances and a relatively small population (33 million people), Canada's challenge was how to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the public service through enhancing collaboration.
Therefore for Canada we looked at a very different government initiative, GCPedia, the government's internal knowledge sharing wiki.
Originally established and released by the Canadian Government CIO as a pilot in August 2008 (and he didn't wait for political approval), the wiki was designed as a cross-government platform that could be used however Canadian public servants saw fit - within their codes of conduct.
By not restricting the ways GCPedia could be used, providing a blank slate as it were, other than the need to access it from a government IP address, this has unleashed enormous innovation, with public servants using it to meet their needs - from managing cross-government taskforces to organising car pooling.
There are over 200 active communities of practice and over 18,000 users (out of a potential 250,000). As the Canadian government representative said, once people get in they don't leave.
Over the last two years the representative said that people had become bolder and less scared of being seen. With this confidence had come greater usage of the service, fresh waves of innovation and broader benefits such as a greater willingness to engage with risk when considering public-facing engagement initiatives.
The service has provided great knowledge sharing benefits and started to become a corporate history for the Canadian public service - capturing information that otherwise left when public servants retired or otherwise left the service.
As in October 2010 the service has over 9,000 articles (pages) and 4.6 million page views.
The Canadian government is also working on their Gov 2.0 strategy, including guidance on social media use - using GCPedia of course - with a big launch planned for (northern hemisphere) spring 2011.
Bahrain - enabling eGovernment
Bahrain already has 120% mobile phone penetration, however computer-based internet connectivity is still low in many areas. A key challenge the country faced was providing government services more efficiently to the public by improving access to the internet and mobile-enabling services.
Bahrain partnered on a kiosk model in April 2010, with the goal of rolling out an initial 35 kiosks in public areas such as shopping centres. The intention is to roll out the kiosks over time in strategic locations across the kingdom. The free kiosks provide access to a range of eGovernment services as well as broader internet access.
At the same time the government has worked to roll out many egovernment services for both computer and mobile device access and now has over 150 integrated e-services available from 26 government agencies.
So far these e-services have collected over $44 million, involving 240,000 payments and 24 million pageviews.
One notable initiative has been the 'eBirth' service from the Ministry of Health which allows the birth of babies to be registered and their ID card ordered and paid for online as soon as the baby is born. This replaces a paper-based process which required significantly more effort from parents.
US - adoption of cross-government cloud computing
Next we spoke with the US regarding their new Apps.gov service, designed to be a framework to improve the adoption of cloud computing across government.
Launched only recently, Apps.gov has been designed to provide US Federal government agencies with turnkey solutions for many common business IT needs. Rather than having individual agencies identify potential solutions, conduct tender and due diligence processes, address IT security issues and host or manage solutions, they are all able to access a central 'bank' of services that have been reviewed, tested and certified by the government as a whole.
This provides enormous cost and productivity benefits. Services can be put in place very quickly, with little or no ICT costs (similar to AGIMO's provision of GovDex and GovSpace).
This is part of the US government's strategy to only build software where it meets a unique need and otherwise source it from the market.
Also part of the cloud philosophy, the FedRAMP program, aims to identify around 10 private providers of cloud computing services and certify them for US Federal government use. Agencies would then be able to pick and choose the cloud provider from within that group without needing to undertake significant additional due diligence to verify their acceptability.
The goal is again to reduce the duplication of effort by individual agencies conducting their own tender and review processes by providing a 'panel' of pre-certified services. It also is designed to reduce government IT costs while improving scalability and agility as cloud services are designed to be ramped up and down very quickly - so you have the capacity you need when you need it, but don't pay for it when you don't.
As another example of a cross-government cloud-like service, the US representative discussed their Challenge.gov service, which I've mentioned in an earlier post. As a platform for challenges and prizes the service is able to aggregate communities of interest around specific government problems and deliver innovative and cost-effective solutions.
Germany - a single phone number for all government services
Germany discussed a slightly different approach to digital government, the unification of government phone-based customer service into a single phone number (0115).
In Germany people prefer to visit government offices, then phone and then go online (the direct opposite of the Australian experience). To save money and improve efficiency Germany decided to offer a single phone number for all government information across local state and federal levels (as the representative said, people don't know which specific agency or government level provides particular services).
The service is a work in progress and it will be several years before it is fully in place. The biggest challenge has been working with the internal systems across government. Many agencies don't have knowledge management systems or professional service centres and often do not have a formal understanding or statistics on the most common enquiries made to them.
The service, by integrating government information, will also support a standard approach for collecting information from people and reduce the duplication of information collection. It also has benefits for online, providing a central knowledge database which can be used to enable a single online point of contact as well, in the future.
The approach was touted as a potential cross-European service over time, allowing people across the EU to call a single number for any government service. Several other European states are looking at the 'one number' approach and eventually it may be possible to integrate them into a single solution.
Scotland - national telehealth strategy
Scotland has a separate health system to England, managed through the Scottish government, and saw a key need to provide services to remote regions and support people in living in their homes rather than increase the burden on the health system, and reduce peoples' quality of life, by forcing them into hospitals for long-term and chronic conditions.
One of the challenges they faced wasn't a lack of interest, but the sheer number of telehealth pilots being run all over Scotland. There were hundreds of little local initiatives underway, funded in a variety of ways and, in many cases, not readily scalable.
Another issue - as yet unresolved - is the definition of telehealth. The term is being used to refer to a range of different types of health delivery and there are also a set of similar terms, such as eHealth, in use - often referring to the same type of services. Even the experts haven't been able to agree on a common definition as yet.
There is now a central group in place overseeing telehealth across Scotland.
They are focusing on four key areas to start with,
- Telestroke - monitoring people in their homes to detect strokes before or as they occur and get them appropriate medical support.
- Paediatrics - providing access to specialist services in remote and rural areas, and providing better monitoring of infants for home births and in clinics so that the stabilisation time for distressed infants is shortened, reducing infant mortality and permanent injury
- Mental health support - moving towards online services to support people at risk of or experiencing mental health issues, particularly counselling services
- Management of long term conditions such as Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease through remote monitoring and online support
NEXT TIME
In the next part of this review I'm going to look at the finalists for the e-Democracy Awards, though at this stage I don't expect to have this part ready until next week (though I have a few posts planned in the meantime).
So keep an eye out for World e.Gov Forum review Part 3: e-Democracy Award finalists.
Monday, October 25, 2010
World e.Gov Forum review Part 1: Gov 2.0 flavours | Tweet |
Due to jetlag, work and other activities (such as TEDxCanberra) it has taken me longer than I anticipated to get around to write my impressions and review of the World e.Gov Forum I attended from the 13-15 October in Paris.
I attended the event as one of Top 10 Who Are Changing the World of Internet and Politics for 2010, along with Senator Kate Lundy and eight others from around the world. As 'Top 10' we were also nominees for the International eDemocracy Award.
Several Australians, Allison Hornery and John Wells (of CivicTec), flew in from London to support us on the second day of the conference, listening to the nomination speeches for the eDemocracy Awards, attending the prize giving, in which Senator Lundy won the International eDemocracy Award, and subsequent dinner cruise.
I self-funded my attendance (with support from the organisers), taking leave to do so - which is generally how I attend international, and some domestic Gov 2.0 events - and found it was an excellent opportunity to gain insights into how Government 2.0 is progressing in non-English speaking nations.
In Australia we have a tendency to pay most attention to the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand as they are all majority English speaking and have political systems with similar roots - making them more accessible to us.
I've consciously supported this tendency in this blog because it is easier to learn what is occurring in English speaking jurisdictions and easier to communicate it to Australians. However English speakers are not the leaders in many areas of eDemocracy, eGovernment or Gov 2.0.
This was demonstrated during my trip, which also reinforced for me that there are different 'flavours' of Government 2.0 thriving in different parts of the world.
English speaking countries are focusing on Government 2.0 initiatives, increasing the openness and transparency of governments and increasing the level of community and public sector engagement. These efforts are largely led by government itself, supported to varying degrees by information philanthropy through not-for-profits (almost none in Australia and New Zealand, quite a few in the US and UK), individual citizens and the media or independent entities (primarily in the US and UK again).
In Europe eDemocracy appears to be the leading area, aiming to deliver social goods, increase the accountability of politicians and the transparency of governance processes, but without a significant emphasis on public sector engagement. Not-for-profits lead the eDemocracy charge, largely funded through government grants, followed by governments themselves at political levels.
South America has made progress on collaborative eDemocratic approaches, with a number of governments providing direct avenues for the public to influence government spending decisions (collaborative budgeting). Due to greater digital divides in these nations, governments are investing in innovative ways to provide digital access to citizens - mobile kiosks, internet centres and similar public access facilities supported by training and education.
The Middle-East is concentrating on eGovernment, digital enablement of government services. The area hosts a number of specialised eGovernment conferences each year and is using mobile services to address otherwise unconnected constituents, some of whom still follow traditional nomadic lives.
Africa has a huge focus on mobile technologies, as fixed broadband is too expensive to roll out into many remote areas and can be difficult to defend in wartorn zones. Digital enablement through information, such as providing weather, market prices and efficient farming practices to farmers, is very important. Emergency and disaster management are also big topics, with two of the world's best emergency/disaster management internet platforms emerging from the continent. eDemocracy is also a major driver, largely enabled through not-for-profit civil right groups using SMS and, increasingly, mobile internet to allow individuals to report electorate fraud.
Asia is a very mixed bag. India and other relatively under-developed countries are focused on eGovernment, with an emphasis on increasing connectivity and citizen enablement through literacy and computer skills programs. More advanced economies such as Malaysia, Singapore, China/Hong Kong and Japan, are providing more direct routes for citizen engagement but in forms that are culturally relevant to the nation, quite different in detail from Gov 2.0 initiatives in English speaking nations.
Each of these different flavours has its own strengths and challenges - and we can learn from all of them.
Tomorrow I'll publish World e.Gov Forum review Part 2: Gov 2.0 case studies - detailing six case studies from Europe, the Americas, Middle-East and Asia that we explored in a Cisco telepresence session at the conference.
