What competing Australian broadband policies really tell us about how Australian politics and government are changing

Yesterday the Liberal-National Coalition released its broadband policy for Australia, in front of a high-tech set at Sky News, in contrast to the Labor Government's NBN plan and current rollout.

I'm not going to go into the politics of this announcement, nor the potential economic and social impacts of the differences between the policies in the short and long-term for Australia.

Instead I'd like to focus on what, for me, is the real story. Technology has, for the first time, become a leading consideration in Australian federal politics.

Looking over the last fifty years, topics such as industrial relations, jobs, families, resources, taxes and the environment have all been prominent areas for political debate. 

All have had their time in the sun as major electoral issues, while technology issues have largely remained off the main political radar, a minor concern dealt with by individual representatives or Ministers but not capturing the attention of Prime Ministers or entire governments.

Even the internet filtering proposal put forward by the Labor party in 2007 was released quietly only a week before the election, extensively tweaked and adjusted (with at least seven versions over three years) and finally abandoned with some face-saving - yes it became more public than previous technology-related topics and an election issue, but only a minor one, largely dealt with by the responsible Minister rather than a Prime Minister and entire government.

With the NBN and Coalition broadband policy we have seen a very different approach, with technology becoming a major and central electoral issue for the first time. The NBN is a leading topic for the Prime Minister and all of her Ministers, while the Coalition has taken the step to publicly release their rival policy a long way before the election, demonstrating the importance they place on countering the government's position.

This is unprecedented for what could be considered a technology issue and reflects the growing importance placed on internet access and use by Australian communities, businesses and government itself.

So what does this mean for the future?

The importance placed on broadband, whatever the outcome of the next election, means that politicians and their advisors are having to learn more to talk on technology topics, to discuss areas like broadband, ehealth, elearning, video conferencing and digital content.

Politicians who saw the internet as simply additional channels for communicating messages to electorates are now required to come face-to-face with how their electorates are using these channel and wish to use them in engaging with governments.

This flows to politicians having to learn more about the opportunities for governments to use digital channels to become more efficient, cutting costs, improving communication and engagement and becoming more open, transparent and collaborative.

In fact it is unlikely we'll see many new politicians enter parliament who don't have some awareness, appreciation and understanding of the value and importance of technology to Australia.

For a long time people working in and around the technology industry have deplored the low attention played to technology in politics and, besides a few leading lights, the lack of understanding of the potential ability for digital technology to drive Australia's economy and improve our governance.

I think this time is now coming to an end. 

With politicians more aware and engaged with technology issues, due to their higher awareness in the public eye, the implications are that all political parties at all levels of government will need to pay more attention to the impact of technology on society and on government.

They'll need to begin to think more deeply and holistically about how to leverage technology to improve their communities and their government agencies.

The notion of Government 2.0, or whatever political parties choose to call it, will become a more important part of their policy platform and there will be more focus - and funding - for how agencies go about using digital channels to improve government policy development and operations.

We're at the end of the beginning for Government 2.0, and at the beginning of an appreciation and understanding that Government 2.0 is simply Government.

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Web and social media reporting can help Communication get a seat at the decision-makers' table

Yesterday morning I attended the first OPC IT WebEx event for the year, where we heard from three great speakers on intranet development, accessibility and the changing face of the media in Australia.

One particular statement that stuck in my mind was from David Pembroke, CEO of Content Group, who said that it was important for communications people to bring numbers to the table to gain a seat alongside other decision-makers, such as CFOs and CIOs who already have numbers in hand to support their positions.

While most agencies now track the traffic to their website and report raw numbers of followers, comments and mentions on their social channels, I believe there's still a way to go before these numbers are provided in the right way to the right people at the right time to help Communications areas - and particularly Online Communications - have the impact and the influence it deserves.

This has been brought home to me by Slideshare, which recently began sending me reports on the number of views and interactions on the various presentations I've uploaded to the service over the years.

Simply being able to see these basic stats has made me take more notice of the material I'm putting on Slideshare and whether or not it has a wider audience that I should consider when developing my slides.

I'm even considering paying money for an account to get more detailed statistics that will help me finetune material to better match what audiences want.

When working in Government I did place a considerable amount of effort into providing web statistics back to the areas responsible for specific content. I believe this type of reporting is critical to help policy and program areas receive regular and actionable feedback on what they are putting online to help inform their customers, clients, stakeholders and other audiences.

In fact, without web reporting many of these areas only receive ad hoc and irregular feedback on the content they are producing - an annual survey, or some Ministerial Correspondence. This makes it harder for them to understand whether their content is targeted correctly and also means they place much lower emphasis on what they are communicating online - what isn't measured isn't managed or valued.

Now with social media in the picture, web reporting needs to jump to a higher level of competency. While agencies might have made some steps to ensure that various areas of their business are receiving reports on the content they are providing through websites, the new frontier is to provide them with actionable information on what people are saying about their programs and policies across the broader web.

This helps areas within agencies not only assess how people are responding to the information they do provide online, but also gives them some understanding of what questions and issues are being discussed due to the lack of content.

In other words, web reporting helps tell agencies the quality and effectiveness of their own website content. Social media reporting helps tell agencies about the community's content needs beyond existing content.

The benefits to agencies of this social media monitoring are immense, not only can we capture known unknowns, but also the unknown unknowns - intelligence that could shape the entire way a program or campaign is designed and communicated.

It is also very important to differentiate social media monitoring from media monitoring - something that is getting harder to do as media monitoring companies move to bundle social within their media offerings.

Media monitoring tracks what commentators say about an agency and its activities when posturing to a broad audience.

Social media monitoring tracks what your customers and stakeholders are saying about an agency and its activities to each other.

In other words social media monitoring can provides a granular and specific view on what your actual customers think and understand about specific programs and how they interact with them in the real world, while media monitoring only provides a shallow reputational view on what people are saying for an audience - which may simply be an act.

So while there is a clear incentive for Online and Communication teams to roll social media monitoring in as an extension to (traditional) media monitoring, it can be dangerous to consider the intelligence received through both avenues in the same light.

As agencies get better at both web reporting and social media monitoring, and develop standardised ways to communicate actionable insights to the right people, at the right time, we're likely to see more ability for the groups providing these insights to have meaningful influence on agency decisions. This is right and proper - better information leads to better decisions and outcomes.

However it is up to Communication and Online teams and their leadership to recognise how web and social monitoring can advance their ability to positively influence decisions and take the lead on providing insights, otherwise they will find themselves on the margins as more traditional numbers-orientated disciplines take over the responsibility for these activities.

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Opening the vault - Open data in Queensland - watch the livestream

Today the 'Opening the vault' event is being held in Brisbane, discussing open data in the context of the state.

Following from the Queensland Government's commitment to open data (with the appointment of Australia's first e-Government Assistant Minister), the event was opened by Premier Newman and is being livestreamed on the web - demonstrating the level of importance placed on this area in the state.

You may follow the event on Twitter using the #dataqld hashtag, and watch the livestream at data.qld.gov.au.

Keep an eye on the session after 11:30am Queensland time (12:30pm AEST) for the finalists in the latest data competition and to vote on who should win.

I've also embedded the livestream below.

Streaming by Ustream

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Innovating in the public sector - The Pitch: Five presentations. Five minutes. Five big ideas.

The Institute of Public Administration Australia (IPAA), in partnership with the CPA Australia, has introduced a fantastic innovation competition for public servants.

Named The Pitch, In an IPAA first, the 2013 IPAA National Conference is providing an opportunity to pitch ideas for an original policy initiative or public sector innovation that could make people's lives better and/or the public service smarter, better and broader.

The creators of the best five ideas will receive a free invitation to the IPAA's National Conference in November and have five-minutes to pitch their idea to senior public sector decision makers in Canberra.

The winner of The Pitch will also receive a cash prize of $500.

There's also a category for younger (to 36yrs old) entrants, the CPA Australia Young Professionals Pitch Competition, with a $200 prize, where the winner will become one of the five finalists (and presumably eligible to win the $500 prize as well).

Entry is open to anyone in Australia, and ideas will be judged against the following criteria:

• originality of the idea 
• capacity of the idea to help government improve people's lives 
• innovation 
• practicality and cost effectiveness 
• ability to address the topic 
• engaging presentation style (during the pitch), and 
• length of pitch (not to exceed 5 minutes).

For more information, and to enter The Pitch, visit: http://ipaa2013.org.au/get-involved/the-pitch

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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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