Vote Compass - not just interesting, but useful for government and the public

Vote Compass App for Australia
abc.net.au/news/elections/federal/2013/votecompass/

The ABC has launched the Vote Compass service
in Australia, designed to help the public match their policy views with the official platforms of Australian political parties.

Vote Compass (votecompass.ca) was developed by political scientists in Canada, where it has been used for both Canadian and US elections. Asides from helping citizens discover which political parties their policy views match, it has been used to stimulate discussion and engagement and identify the underlying policy concerns in the community.

It is particularly useful where political parties do a poor job (sometimes deliberately) of making their policies accessible online in comprable formats to allow citizens to easily understand where parties stand on specific issues and what they offer voters.

Unfortunately it is not always in the interests of political parties to make all their policies widely known. Either because they don't clearly differentiate the party, they have not had significant costing and scrutiny or they might place sections of the community offside if they were widely communicated (such as the now abandoned internet filtering policy released by the Labor party five days prior to the 2007 election).

Some substitute services have emerged - notably the Australian Christian Lobby's Australia Votes site, which compares party policies from the perspective of a particular Christian perspective, the sadly defunct GovMonitor site, and the ABC provides a basic comparison each election.

They do it a little better in the UK, where the Vote for Policies site provides a comparison of the policies of six parties and allows people to 'place' themselves via their views.

I've also suggest the creation of an XML schema for party policies to provide a consistent way for the public to view and compare policies. As this relies on either the support of political parties to adopt the approach, or a community-based organisation to do the 'heavy lifting', I don't see this as a short-term goal.

Services such as Vote Compass are therefore important democratic tools to ensure that citizens have an informed vote in elections, even if political parties would prefer them not to.

However they also have potential value for the public service and government as well.

Views on Government Spending (2011 Canadian election)
votecompass.ca/results/ca-2011/government-spending

Vote Compass, and similar tools that ask citizens where they stand on policy issues, can provide a far more granulated view on the attitudes and concerns of the public than single policy studies or broadbrush voting polls.

With a little demographic data - age, gender, education level, employment status, postcode and maybe a few others - having a view of citizens across policies helps identify and group audiences and map affinities based on similar policy groups (social services, foreign policy, education and so on).

This type of cross-policy data is rarely collected by agencies, who focus almost exclusively on their own policy areas and may miss insights or opportunities across policy domains - similar to how scientists in specific disciplines can miss cross-discipline insights, such as the application of physicists' chaos theory to biological populations or to fluid dynamics.

Where this data is being collected by entities outside of government (even the ABC, which tends to remain at arms length), these insights may not be realised or accepted by policy areas within the public sector.

Demographics on views of Government spending
(2011 Canadian election)
votecompass.ca/results/ca-2011/government-spending 

In my view this makes a decent case for the government to consider adopting or developing tools similar to Vote Compass to help provide agencies and politicians with better insights into citizens, while simultaneously using these tools to give citizens better insights into government policy alternatives.

Certainly this type of information would be useful for the localisation of policy delivery by region - which may make the Department of Regional Australia the logical manager of the process.

For this to happen there would need to be an understanding within government that improving the public understanding of policy positions is a benefit to democracy, rather than a partisan activity designed to support a particular viewpoint. Also there'd have to be a consistent and open way of sharing the information, so it isn't limited to the party which happens to hold government - such as the public release of an online 'policy map' which map policy views on by electorate, age, gender and other demographics in an appropriately anonymised manner.

Of course an organisation such as the ABC might take Vote Compass a little further and, rather than simply using the data they collect to map views to customise reporting across their local radio network, could release it publicly to help everyone.

Should governments rely on media organisations, even publicly-funded ones - to provide this kind of public service?

Or should the education of voters and the use of insights from citizens to inform policy decisions and local delivery be a primary concern of the core of government?

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Breaking news: Australian Government to appoint Government 2.0 Minister

I've just learnt from an inside source that the Australian Government has decided to go several steps further than the Queensland Government (who appointed an Assistant Minister for eGovernment last year), by appointing Australia's first Government 2.0 Minister.

The new Minister, who will be announced later today, will be responsible for taking forward the government's open government, open data and spatial initiatives, with the goal of ensuring that Australia becomes known as the most open and transparent nation in the world, driving government accountability, improved public engagement, economic activity through data and making it harder for inaccurate data to be 'spun' in traditional or new media.

The new Minister will lead a newly formed agency, probably to be called the Department of Openness, Innovation and Transparency (DOIT).

This department will be formed from the CTO-led section of AGIMO (explaining the recent separation of CIO and CTO), the Office of Spatial Policy and sections of the Department of Innovation focused on public sector innovation, particularly DesignGov.

The new department will also oversee the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

DOIT will have a mandate to ensure other commonwealth agencies develop and implement open data and Gov 2.0 plans under a 'Digital First' strategy, similar to the UK's 'Digital by Default' approach.

Under this mandate the department will take on the role of maintaining whole of government standards for social media engagement, mobile app development, accessibility and open copyright, as well as sophisticated searchable (topic/agency/use) registers for all mobile apps, social media channels and Gov 2.0 tools created by commonwealth agencies (more expansive than the lists in Australia.gov.au).

The department will be responsible for developing, managing and maintaining whole-of-government web services, including existing GovSpace, GovDex and Data.gov.au sites, as well as creating new services, which may include an Australian equivalent of Challenge.gov, an epetitions site, a 'govforge' site for sharing and reusing code across agencies and a whole-of-government FOI site as a central repository containing all agency releases.

The new department will also take responsibility under the APS200 for unlocking Australia's geospatial data and finalising the development of an open source 'mymaps' system, which will form the basis for the public release of all future public sector map information - a universal base map and WebGIS system that every agency will use.

The new Minister and Department were to be announced in February, however this was delayed due to budgetary considerations and political distractions (such as leadership speculation).

The announcement of the Minister will occur later today (Monday 1 April 2013), with the news that Australia is joining the Open Government Partnership, relaunching data.gov.au using CKAN and creating the pilot.australia.gov.au site (not yet live) as a visionary testbed to demonstrate how modern technologies can transform how government agencies design and manage websites.

So who will be the Minister responsible for this new Department?

Now that would be telling, but I've sure you can all guess... that today was 1st April, and this is an April Fools prank.

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Should political accounts for governments declare they're not run by the public service?

I blogged last December on the topic of whether social media was blurring the non-partisan status of appointed public servants.

At the time I was reflecting on the confusion that can be caused when political operatives and members of a politician's own staff use social networks in ways that can mislead parts of the broader community into thinking those accounts are run by appointed professional public servants.

Examples I used included the Prime Minister's @JuliaGillard Twitter account, which was listed, and remains in the list of official government accounts in Australia.gov.au. It's the only account in the list not operated by the Australian Public Service (APS) and it is regularly used to tweet in a partisan way. I don't dispute whether the Prime Minister should use her account in this way, it is her right, only that it appears as the sole politically operated account on a list of APS accounts, potentially confusing members of the community.

I also used an example of the Queensland State Budget account (@QLDStateBudget) - which has now been deleted after receiving significant criticism.

In this case the confusion went further - the account appeared to be operated by the QLD Treasury, but in fact was operated by a QLD Liberal party advisor and used for partisan purposes. This created significant confusion amongst Twitter users and controversy in other media during its brief existence.

Now we have a another account that fits this model.

Operated by the Prime Minister's Media Office, @PMOPressOffice is tweeting a combination of useful facts, partisan comparisons and commentary.

I recognise this account is operated by the PM's Office, not the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, and thereby by staff appointed by the ruling party, not by the Australian Public Service (APS). They're called Member of Parliament Staff (MOPS) and are not required to abide by the Public Service Act, instead falling under the Members of Parliament Staff Act.

As such they're not required to be seen to be apolitical when carrying out official duties (such as running Twitter accounts) and are largely appointed party operatives.

However this distinction isn't clear to everyone - and there's already been quite a bit of discussion, and even criticism, directed at the (apolitical) APS, due to a mistaken understanding that this account is operated by them.

This is precisely the concern I wrote about in December, blurring the lines between public service and political operatives can damage trust in the machinery of government, making it harder for the public service to achieve the goals that the ruling political party sets for them.

As I commented about these types of accounts last year, I don't think it is inappropriate for the PM's Office to operate this account - it is making a valuable contribution to public discussion about policy and politics and by providing facts which are sometimes thin on the ground.

However I would suggest that the account makes it clear in its Twitter profile that it is not operated by the public service - mitigating controversy, questions and any mistaken loss of respect for the APS.

This could be as simple as rewriting the profile as follows (fits 160 character limit):

From:

The official Twitter account of the Prime Minister of Australia's Press Office. All tweets are on the record.

To:

Official Twitter account of the Prime Minister of Australia's Press Office. All tweets are on the record. Operated by MOP staff not Australian Public Servants.

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The power of open data is often in serendipity

I often hear talk from government agencies about their wish to release more of their data openly, but their concern over how they allocate resources to ensure the most useful data is released first.

In several conversations I've had in different parts of Australia, the agency view was that they only wanted to release useful data, and were prepared to set up an internal review process to assess how useful data could be, then selectively release what they decided was valuable.

I strongly oppose this approach on the basis that it shouldn't be agencies who decide what data is useful, to whom, when or where.

There's no evidence that government agencies have the skills to successfully decide which data may be useful to particular groups in the broader community, or which won't. There's also no evidence that they are good at successfully predicting the future, which data will become useful at a future date.

My view is that agencies should simply release all the data they can without trying to assign levels of usefulness.

Decisions on usefulness should be left to the users - the community - allowing serendipity to thrive.


An example of this was featured at a Gov 2.0 Canberra lunch in November 2012, where Jake McMullin spoke about his use of a open dataset from the National Library to create a unique mobile app.

When he'd created the prototype app, he walked into the library and showed the first staff member he saw (who happened to be the project manager for their iPhone catalogue app).

As a result of this serendipitous meeting, the National Library funded the app, which has just been released in the iTunes store under the name Forte, with an accompanying event (on 25 March) and video (below).

Forte provides a way to explore the National Library's digitalised Australian sheet music catalogue by decade and composer.

The dataset Jake used had been released a year earlier by the National Library for a hack event, however had not been previously used, as another National Library staff member, Paul Hagon, discusses in his blog.

Government agencies cannot predict these types of events - which, when, where or how a dataset will become useful if it is released as open data. And they shouldn't try.

The power of open data is often in serendipity.

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South Australia consulting on ICT policy

The South Australian government has released its draft ICT policy, SA Connected, for public consultation via the SA Plan consultation site.

The five key perspectives in the SA draft ICT policy 

The position paper, which has already undergone industry consultation, presents five key perspectives for the future of South Australian government IT,

• Serving People
• Innovating Now
• Securing Resilience
• Working Together, and
• Improving Delivery

In what may be a first, the plan is available in ePub format for eReaders, although there's no HTML version and consultation is only via email reply.

The plan emphasises the need for government to innovate in partnership with industry,

We want to embed a new culture of innovation between government agencies, and between government and industry. Using and improving technology allows us to break down barriers that have previously prevented us finding shared solutions to common problems. To improve our ability to innovate, we will work more closely with industry to develop a practical and sensible framework for introducing new technologies into government.

It also recognises the need for the public sector to work in a co-ordinated manner, not simple as agency silos, and to employ an agile and iterative approach to ICT.

SA Connected also neatly uses personas to portray the potential future uses of ICT in government by 2030 - presenting a very positive view of how it could enable citizens and agencies.

There's also some very positive short-term improvements outlined, with real-time Adelaide Metro information becoming progressively available in 2013 for buses, trams and trains. Also a whole-of-government collaboration platform, StateLink, is being rolled out, incorporating instant messaging, desktop videoconferencing, meeting spaces and desktop and application sharing.

The boldest goal in the plan is to move to digital by default and collaborative democracy - placing citizens at the centre of government and digital at the centre of the web of channels used by government to engage.

There is also a goal to move agencies from competing to sharing - although I believe this will continue to be a challenge for all Australian governments while budgetary approaches and Ministers remain competitive and focused on their own interests ahead of whole-of-government.

The plan also outlines the intent to move from risk averse to risk managed behaviour and from large monolithic projects to rapid prototyping, with a multi-disciplinary design approach rather than a technology driven one.

This is also a challenging change for governments due to cultural and structural reasons and I will be interested to see how South Australia intends to achieve this.

The paper also provides a commitment to the establishment of a government innovation lab 'DemoLab',   for conducting trials and experiments in collaborative democracy. DemoLab will,

coordinate multi‑disciplinary teams made up of staff seconded from agencies, and people drawn from industry, academia and the community. DemoLab will use the best technical, operational, and behavioural thinking to address specific challenges and opportunities. Project teams will spend no more than thirty days developing small‑scale, operational prototypes of their solutions. Lessons will be learned, connections made, and successes will be recorded and replicated across the public sector.

I think this is a great idea - a government, like any other organisation, that doesn't reinvent itself will be reinvented from the outside, a far more unpleasant and messy outcome.

The positioning paper is written in a very conversational style (unlike many government papers - or most ICT plans), and is well worth reading and commenting on.

So if you want to have some input and influence over the South Australian government's future ICT strategy and aspirations, visit the SA Connected consultation.

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