What would a federal Coalition government mean for Government 2.0 in Australia?

A month ago (20 May) I sent an email to Malcolm Turnbull, Shadow Minister for Communications and Broadband, in my capacity as a Government 2.0 commentator, asking a range of questions about how a Coalition Government, if elected later this year, would approach Government 2.0 and federal agency use of social media in official engagement (the questions from my email are included at the end of this post).

Despite a quick exchange on Twitter several weeks ago, I've received no response to my email, or even an acknowledgement of receipt.

Some might say this isn't really a high profile issue for Australia - it's not like the economy, live exports, asylum seekers, climate change or education in terms of priority for the community.

Of course, the reality is more complex - Gov 2.0 crosses most government policy and focus areas, as a way of enabling better government, improving citizen engagement, improving transparency and accountability.

Therefore, at least in my view, a government's position on Gov 2.0 is fundamental to their approach on most policy areas - whether they engage the community effectively, are transparent, accountable and influential or whether a government is more concerned about control, shutting down sources of information and limiting public engagement.

As we've seen in successive state elections across Australia, a change of government can have a significant impact on the approach and substance of online engagement by agencies, due more to the experience and views of incoming Ministers and their advisers, rather than due to ideological differences around openness and transparency.

Victoria, NSW and Queensland in particular 'held their breath' for some time after a change in political leadership, although several of these states are now forging ahead with new initiatives.

Federally we've seen the Liberal party be cautious in how it approaches social media and online engagement, and the National party is even more so.

While some elected members of both Coalition parties use social media quite well, the actual parties themselves have, on occasion, expressed concern over the risk of prominent party member saying something online that paints a target on themselves - with the Sydney Morning Herald reporting in December 2012 that the Liberal party had slapped 'a social media gag on MPs'.

This was illustrated this week as the President of the Cessnock Hunter Young Liberals branch was suspended over Twitter comments.

Despite, or perhaps because of, this caution, the Financial Review recently reported that the Liberal Party now led Labor on the use of social media, however the real question for me is how will the Coalition's caution or capability in social media translate into their policy position for agencies.

Will the Coalition support and progress - even improve - the current initiatives underway across government, to release more data and encourage appropriate use of social media channels by agencies for communication, consultation and engagement purposes?

Will it embrace and take a global leadership role in Government 2.0, forging its own path, with clear executive support and commitment?

Or will an incoming Coalition Government put on hold or even shut down existing Gov 2.0 initiatives, including sites like data.gov.au, govspace.gov.au and transcribe.naa.gov.au?

Will it instruct agencies to reduce resourcing social media channels such as youtube.com/user/ImmiTV and facebook.com/FamiliesInAustralia, redirecting funds to traditional media?

Will the Coalition withdraw Australia from the Open Government Partnership (which we hadn't joined when I wrote my email below), as Russia recently did?

We simply don't yet know.

My email:

Dear Mr Turnbull,

I am Australia's leading blogger on egovernment and Government 2.0. My blog is syndicated on five continents and I speak frequently about Government 2.0 with Commonwealth agencies and state governments, as well as presenting at conferences here and overseas about the Australian Government's adoption of digital channels.

Given the increasing emphasis on open data, online public engagement and the use of social media by Commonwealth agencies, I would like to understand and report in my blog on the Coalition's Government 2.0 position and policies ahead of the next Federal election.

Please note this is not about IT spending, which often focuses on internal systems, neither is it about websites, which are still largely used in government for outbound communication.

It is about how government brings citizens inside the tent on decision making and improves transparency to deliver better governance, outcomes and efficiencies. 

I've included a number of questions below, and would appreciate any further information you can provide regarding the Coalition's policies in this area.

I understand these areas might not be considered as being within your portfolio and appreciate if you need to consult other Shadow Ministers.

I am also able to speak with you personally if that would be an easier way for you to respond. I am based in Canberra and could meet with you in a future sitting week.

1. What is the Coalition's position on openness and transparency in government?
   
   
2. The Labor Government, under Kevin Rudd, made a Declaration of Open Government (http://agimo.gov.au/2010/07/16/declaration-of-open-government/), via then Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner. 
   Does the Coalition, if it wins government, intend to endorse, amend, replace or rescind this Declaration of Open Government?
   
   
3. In the latest Open Knowledge Foundation's Open Government Data Census, the Australian Government is ranked 4th behind the UK, US and Norway (http://census.okfn.org/country/). 
   Does the Coalition intend to take steps to improve the Australian Government's ranking in the Data Census should it be elected?
   
   
4. The current Labor Government has not yet made a firm commitment to join the Open Government Partnership (www.opengovpartnership.org/), despite being invited to join in 2011 as a founding member. 58 countries are now members, with Australia increasingly conspicuous by its absence (http://www.itnews.com.au/News/295243,australia-reserves-open-government-decision.aspx). 
   What is the Coalition's position regarding Australian membership of the Open Government Partnership and will the Coalition take immediate steps should it be elected to government?
   
   
5. In 2009 the Labor government released a beta open data site, which has subsequently been replaced with a more advanced site (http://data.gov.au/). The site has a very limited subset of data, frequently in non-reusable formats, and there is no clear mandate from the Prime Minister on government release of data, as there is in the UK, US, New Zealand, Singapore, in Queensland and NSW,  amongst over 50 other federal and state jurisdictions. 
   Would a Coalition government mandate that Commonwealth agencies release the majority of their data (where personal privacy, commercial confidence and national security are not a consideration) in machine-readable formats, as Premier Campbell Newman mandated last year in Queensland and President Obama recently mandated in the US?
   
   
6. The current Labor Government has been criticised for not mandating Government 2.0 at a Prime Ministerial level or appointing a Minister to be responsible for overseeing the Australian Public Service to improve their openness and transparency and adopt Government 2.0 tools. Whereas the Queensland Premier Campbell Newman directly spoke on the matter and appointed Ray Stevens to the position of Assistant Minister for eGovernment to oversee the Queensland Government's move towards open data. 
   Would a Coalition Government appoint a Minister, Assistant Minister or Parliamentary Secretary for eGovernment or Government 2.0 to lead this area across government?
   
   
7. The Australian Public Service is increasingly adopting social media as a business as usual channel for monitoring, communicating with and engaging companies, stakeholder groups and the community, however in the last APS report only 36% of APS had access to social media, there was no requirement for agencies to have social media policies or strategies and there were no formal training programs in place to ensure that the Australian Public Service had the skills to effectively engage via social media.
   While I have seen excellent social media engagement by the APS, I have also seen very poor engagement - most often from agencies which ban social media access to staff.
   Would a Coalition Government take any steps to ensure that the APS was adequately trained and equipped to take best advantage of social media?

(Note - I worked in roles leading online/social media initiatives within the APS from 2006 to 2012, and currently advise and train agencies in effective social media use)

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Do government agencies and councils deliberately make it harder for citizens to engage?

I've been watching a great TEDx talk by Dave Meslin on citizen engagement, which asks the question - if governments want to be open and engaging, why do they make it so hard for citizens to engage?

He raises a very good point, and demonstrates it very clearly in the video (below).



This is one of the areas I've struggled with for years.

Some of the processes governments and councils put in place around citizen engagement are designed to address political considerations, such as minimising the advertising spend (so government is not seen to promote itself too much), or address agency resourcing or timing limits, such as having extremely short engagement processes or 'hiding' consultations deep in a website so they receive only a few responses to analyse.

There's also cases where the people managing the consultation don't really understand the audience they are consulting. They may use specialist terminology, language or documents so long and complex they are impenetrable to the average Australian (who has an 8th grade reading level - that of a 14-15 year old), let alone the 46% of Australians who were considered functionally illiterate just a few years ago.

As an example, I recall an Australian council development proposal just a few years ago that was 385 pages long, provided via a sub-page in their website (with a limited number of printed copies) where people were expected to provide feedback within two weeks, responding via email.

Most Australians couldn't finish a 385 page novel in two weeks (given the amount of time per day they'd have available to read), let alone a complex planning document - even if they could find it in the council's website in time.

Response methods are equally an issue.

Holding a community forum or town hall meeting is still a popular way of consulting, and suits people who have the time and the interest to dedicate several hours to travel to and attend such an event in order to speak for a few minutes for or against a proposal. However many are increasingly dominated by retirees, the unemployed or students - who have the time to attend.

Professionals, people with young families, shift workers and tradies often don't have the time available when councils and agencies wish to hold these events.

Email-based online consultation, which is still the predominant way Australian governments ask for feedback via the internet, is dangerous in a number of ways. Emails may be blocked due to large document attachments or misclassified as spam and lost (as has happened on several occasions in the last few years - almost costing Ministers their jobs).

The generic form of responses received through emails may not suit the complexity of the consultation process. An email response to, for example, that 385 page document, may be very difficult to match against the key topics and themes, requiring a lot of time for a council or agency to analyse.

Then there's the cost and complexity of publishing responses. One of my pet hates while working in government online communications was the policy area who came to us and said, "we've just held a consultation and received 500 email responses - could you publish them in the website within two days please."

The resourcing required to publish email responses - even without considering the accessibility and privacy considerations - was immense, and was never budgeted for by the policy area.


These issues reflect on what I feel is the key issue with citizen engagement - not the common view that citizens are disengaged, but the challenge to governments to adapt their engagement approaches to provide the right environment and information for citizens to get involved and respond.

While governments tout their openness and transparency, how they are adopting a 'citizen-centric' focus and employing techniques like crowdsourcing and co-design to involve communities in decision-making, are they making the necessary changes in their own processes, approaches and people to ensure that citizen engagement is actually inclusion and effective?

In my view there's a long way to go - in Australia and in similar nations around the world - to retrain public servants, politicians and even the media, to put citizens at the centre of engagement.

It's not simply about engaging more or using online. It is about rewriting community engagement guidelines, redeveloping consultation procedures and revisiting political concerns to ensure that citizen engagement is indeed about engaging citizens, and not simply about ticking a procedural box in a government process.

For citizens to be central in engagement, perhaps governments and councils should be approaching citizens to involve them in codesigning their engagement processes.

Perhaps groups of citizens should be commissioned (at a small fee for their time) oversee or audit agency and council engagements, to provide advise and suggestions on how specific processes could be improved, or consultation materials adjusted to suit the audience being targeted.

Perhaps governments should even crowdsource the development of major consultation processes. Before asking citizens 'do you want....' they should ask 'how should we engage you on do you want....' for each major engagement.

Whatever the approaches taken, one thing is clear. If governments and councils want citizens to feel more engaged, they need to start by changing the way they engage.

Repeatedly using the same approaches to citizen engagement as have been used in the past is unlikely to deliver improved outcomes.

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Register now for the Canberra Gov 2.0 lunchtime event - 18 June 2013

This month the Gov 2.0 event in Canberra has been organised at the last minute to take advantage of a rare visit to Canberra by Facebook's Manager of Public Policy, Katie Harbath.

All the details are on the Eventbrite page at: http://www.eventbrite.com.au/event/6670292023

You can also find out more about Katie from her Facebook page: www.facebook.com/katieharbath

See you there!

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Sentiment analysis: where 'disabled' and 'disability' are often considered negative terms

It's come to my attention that a number of automated sentiment analysis tools include 'disabled' and 'disability' as negative terms.

This means that when calculating whether a particular statement in social media is positive or negative, the use of these words is used by these sentiment analysis tools as an indication that the statement is negative towards the topic of the statement - such as a topic, issue, individual or organisation.

I've checked a number of sentiment dictionaries online and found that both 'disabled' and 'disability' appear frequently as negative terms. However I have not yet been able to confirm whether any sentiment analysis products treat these words in this manner.

This disturbs me, given the efforts of governments and civic organisations in Australia and many other countries to remove negative stigma attached to the word 'disabled', even given its potential application in statements such as 'their system has been disabled'.

It also concerns me that agencies engaging online about disabilities or with disabled people, might accept that the sentiment reported by their social media monitoring tools indicates negativity where in actuality no negativity exists.

I would caution government agencies using automated sentiment analysis tools to get to know they work and check how terms such as 'disability' and 'disabled' are treated in these systems.

I'd welcome comments from makers of sentiment analysis tools to confirm how they treat these words or from agencies using automated sentiment tracking if they've seen these words or others rated negatively or positively in ways which might be misleading and misrepresent the actual sentiment.

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Is it time to drop 'www' from government site promotions?

National Australia Bank (nab.com.au)

Banks do it, utilities do it, even media does it, is it time for government to also do it - drop the 'www' from web site promotions in advertising and links?

This came to my attention while playing with the Australian Department of Health and Ageing's new my child's eHealth record app.

Looking at the information for people without an eHealth account, the help page lists the new my.gov.au site in two places as www.my.gov.au, and once as my.gov.au.

It also states that people can register for an ehealth account at www.ehealth.gov.au - ehealth.gov.au would work just as well.

The designation 'www' stems from the earliest days of the world wide web. It was used to indicate to web browsers that a given resource was a web page rather than a different type of content, such as a file repository (ftp).

As the web grew, so did the use of www, even though technology improved such that web browsers no longer needed it to recognise a web page and web servers no longer needed to use it to select the right page to serve.

In fact 'www' has been technically unnecessary since the late 1990s. It continued to be used out of habit by marketers, due to the use of old web server technology and as it was recognised by early internet users as a designator of a web site.

AGL (agl.com.au)

Since the early 2000s we've seen a decline in the use of 'www' in sites and site promotion as the online community matured and moved on from needing it for recognition of sites.

First pure online services such as Google and Facebook stopped using it - rebranding themselves as google.com and facebook.com.

Next the news media, banks and utilities started dropping www from their website addresses. Most advertising by these organisations in Australia now excludes www, illustrated in the advertising images at right (look at the small print) as 'TheAustralian.com.au', 'AGL.com.au' and 'nab.com.au'.

Government has pursued a more uneven course. There's still inconsistency as to when and whether agencies and councils use 'www' or exclude it from web addresses.

I can appreciate that there may be concerns over whether government's audiences may not understand that a web address without 'www' may not be a web page - though I'd love to see the research in support (and understand what they think it might be instead).

I expect that these concerns are most commonly voiced by older public servants, who more clearly remember the early days of the internet and remember the days when 'www' was necessary.

The Australian (TheAustralian.com.au)

However times have changed.

It seems clear Australian banks, utilities and news media are convinced 'www' is now unnecessary and have put in place consistency policies avoiding its use.

It's also clear most web-based services have also dropped the use of 'www' - to shorten their name and focus on their brand.

In fact none of the top ten sites visited by Australians still use 'www' in their branding or advertising.

Australian governments have few, if any, customers, clients or stakeholders who would not use one or more of the private services considered above. Australians are big users of web-based email, of search engines, of online banking and media.

Given government is being inconsistent - sometimes using 'www', sometimes not, this can only confuse audiences at best, or make government look less professional and old-fashioned at worst. So isn't it time for agencies to come to a common view on its use?

The Australian Government has firm web standards in place through AGIMO's webguide (which drops its own www). The Webguide already states that agencies should accomodate users who don't use 'www':

When you are setting up a website on a domain, you should ensure that the website can be reached whether or not a user adds ‘www.‘ at the front of the domain name when typing it into their browser. It is very common today for users to drop ‘www.’ from website addresses and agencies should accommodate this behaviour.

Source: http://webguide.gov.au/initial-requirements/domain-names-naming-your-site/ 

The next step is to mandate an approach - either using 'www' or dropping it.

If required 'www' should be used consistently in advertising, branding and links.

If 'www' isn't required it should be dropped from these communications devices - at least on a moving forward basis.

Either way, it's time for government across Australia to consider their policy around the use of 'www'.

Whether to ban it or use it consistently, the worst outcome is to leave things as they stand, to be inconsistent in the use of 'www'.

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