Should councils run their mayor's social accounts or agencies their Minister's?

It is rare but not unheard off for Mayors (or other Councillors) to ask council officials to run their Facebook, Twitter or other social media accounts - or for State or Federal Ministers to ask agencies to run their social accounts for them.

This can raise challenges for council staff and public servants - where may this cross the line from apolitically to political?

From my perspective this is a matter where a council or agency needs to draw a clear line between the position and person of an elected official.

There's no issue with a council running social media accounts for the Office of the Mayor, or for an agency running the social media account for a Prime Minister or Minister where that account is the respective property of the council or government and is used to post factual and non-partisan information.

However if these accounts are to be held in the name of a particular office holder - an individual politician - or are to be used for political or electoral posts,  there's no way a council or agency can run these accounts without damaging its reputation for being apolitical.

In these cases, where a Mayor or Minister asks for social media accounts that they intend to use in a personal and/or political manner, councils and agencies have to be prepared to step up and say no.

I know of a few cases across Australia where this hasn't happened - the area is still too new, and some public officials do not yet fully comprehend the difference between apolitical and political social media accounts.

The media has also been slow to grasp the distinction and hasn't yet called many public organisations to account for inappropriate operation of Councillor or Ministerial social media accounts, although I have begun getting calls from journalists who are interested in learning which are the right questions to ask.

This is another good reason why senior public officials need to be across the risks and opportunities that arise from social media. Knowing when to say no to a Mayor or Minister to protect the reputation and apolitical standing of their council or agency is part of their job.

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What does the election of a Coalition government in Australia mean for federal Government 2.0 and open data efforts?

As I've blogged previously, when state governments in Australia have changed ruling parties there's often been a temporary hiatus in Government 2.0 and open data activity, if not a series of backsteps - however in almost every case the trend towards greater digitalisation, engagement and openness has resumes.

With the transition from a Labor to Coalition Australian Government the question social media and Government 2.0 practitioners in Commonwealth agencies will be asking is what is their likely future under the new government?

The new Prime Minister has made it very clear that his infrastructure focus is on roads and that he has a very limited understanding of the value and importance of digital channels. The Coalition was also extremely sparing in its use of social media throughout the campaign, preferring to slip under the radar and avoid risk rather than engage with it (and their lesson in winning the election is that this approach wasn't a negative).

I'm also yet to receive any response from Malcolm Turnbull or other Coalition parliamentarians in relation to my questions about their policy position on Government 2.0, open data or membership in the Open Government Partnership - even when Peter Timmins from Open and Shut personally contacted a number of members also seeking a response.

Fortunately there's at least some light at the end of this tunnel.

The Coalition released its egovernment and the digital economy policy platform on Monday 2 September. Amongst a range of topics from NBN to cloud computing, the platform states that the Coalition will release a policy to 'accelerate Government 2.0 efforts to engage online, make agencies transparent and provide expanded access to useful public sector data'

The platform indicates that the Coalition will be taking a 'digital by default' approach, similar to the 'digital first' approach that was beginning to be adopted by the last Labor Government,

Designate the Internet as the default way to interact with users, other than for defined exceptions. We will look to establish a Digital Service Standard and Digital Design Guide, modelled on the UK equivalents, to ensure consistent design of current and future services.

Also modelled on part of the UK approach, the Coalition also outlined an aim to "Seek to ensure every Government interaction that occurs more than 50,000 times per year can be achieved online by 2017."

While slightly less ambitious that Labor's goals, this is a pragmatic approach to prioritising high-frequency transactions for digitalisation - although it is worth noting that there's no evidence this would provide significant cost-efficiencies. Sometimes it is better to prioritise lower frequency, but higher transactional cost services for digitalisation to gain experience in the process, realise cost-savings and as 'quick wins' as they can often be digitalised much faster.

The Coalition has also flagged an interest in mobile service delivery. While no specific goals for making services mobile-ready were outlined in the policy platform, it did go so far as to require agencies to report what proportion of their digital services are not mobile accessible from 2015.

This is encouraging, but potentially misleading. An agency with hundreds of low-use services may find it far more difficult and expensive than an agency with a few high-use services to deliver and report a high proportion of mobile accessible services.

Equally 'mobile accessible' can easily manipulated to mean different things - I can access many services via the web browser on my tablet and smartphone which are still essentially unusable on these devices due to factors including poor design, form complexity, or the requirement for a human conversation to explain specific requirements (hard to call a service desk while using a smartphone to complete the online form).

The 'digital inbox' concept sounds like a great idea in theory, however its practical value depends on how well it is implemented. In fact this is the perfect project to have a start-up develop, free of the bureaucratic constraints of government.

Having previously worked on CSAOnline, which allowed Child Support clients to access their letters from the agency online indefinitely via a secure logon, I recognise that some government approaches to developing digital services can be poorly tuned to delivering on customer needs - costing far more and taking far longer than comparative start-up development cycles.

The Coalition policy section on 'Government 2.0 and Big Data' seems oddly named and reflects a very narrow view of Gov 2.0 as meaning open data and 'tech stuff', whereas most of the international Gov 2.0 community takes the broader view of Government 2.0 being about transforming how governments and citizens interact with the aid of new tools and techniques enabled by digital channels.

The section essentially focuses on having AGIMO ask communities and businesses which data should be made open - something they already do (albeit in a low-key way) and advocating support for public-private partnership proposals from industry and researchers to use big data for public benefit. There doesn't appear to be a budget attached to this latter approach, so what the statement "The highest return proposals will be supported to proof-of-concept and beyond" means is anyone's guess.

The Coalition policy doesn't discuss how the government will or should use social and other digital channels to develop policy, shape services, engage and empower citizens, or provide any guidance as to whether events and approaches to encourage and support civic use of open data will continue to be supported.

Overall it has a very transactional 'government as vending machine' view - which is good as far as it goes (creating efficiencies is valuable) - but doesn't consider the participatory democracy aspects of Government 2.0, where digital channels can be used to support and build democratic engagement, reduce the risks of government getting policies and services wrong and introduce more ideas and analysis to 'black-box' agency processes.

We live in a world where the experts don't all live within the walls of an agency - or an ideological group - and this hasn't been reflected in either the construction or policy instruments outlines in the Coalition policy.

For all these flaws and concerns, at least the Coalition has policies in this area, and overall it isn't worse (if not much better) than Labor's policies.

As the policy platform hits the 'road' of practical governance I am sure there will be a rising interest in how digital channels can support the Coalition's goals in government, and agencies will continue using social channels for communication, customer service, engagement and other purposes.

On that basis I don't expect much slowdown in Government 2.0 progress under the Coalition, although we are unlikely to see an acceleration (as the US did under Obama and the UK under Cameron).

Ultimately Government 2.0 is not an ideological topic - it is about effective governance - there's enormous opportunities in Australia for both conservative and progressive politicians to use the bandwagon to improve government in this country, if they are willing to step onboard.

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How Australia compares on the basis of voter participation and invalid (donkey) votes

We hear a great deal about the number of people in Australia that are of voting age, but haven't registered to vote, however we don't hear a lot about how Australia compares to the rest of the world in this regard.

I sought out some data from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) to compare Australia with the rest of the world, to see how well we had been doing in electoral participation - which provides some indication of how engaged citizens are with government.

IDEA has data on national elections since 1945 for about 235 countries. This is available online as tables (such as this one) as well as downloadable custom files (through this interface) and great quick snapshots - though there's no datafeeds or APIs available.

As such it took only a short time for me to download the data, plug it into a Google Fusion table and produce the below map and charts.

This shows that Australia is amongst the roughly 18% of nations which have compulsory voting for their parliaments.



Australia also compares well in terms of voter turnout, sitting close to the top of the list (6th as below - mouseover the graph for details) based on the latest election results (looking at the period from 2009-2013), despite being one of our lowest turnouts since World War II.



Our invalid voting rate has been creeping up, particularly since 1984, and is now amongst the top 30 in the world in their last election (looking at the period from 2009-2013) - see close to far right on the chart below. This indicates a growing disillusionment with existing political parties, but hardly one which is fatal to our system.



Finally, below is a view of the entire world based on voter turnout in their last election (looking at the period from 2009-2013) - click on the coloured dots for a run-down of the voting statistics for each country, based on their latest parliamentary elections.
(larger version here)



Based on this data Australia remains a highly politically engaged state, although we've been in decline for around 30 years.

It would be nice to see Australian governments turn around this trend, reversing the decline in engaged voters and improving civic participation at all levels.

Certainly there's lots of good effort underway to engage citizens more actively in government, although this may be being undermined by increasing disillusionment with the way politics is being played.

The answer might be a rethink of politics, rather than a rethink of government - although this would need to be driven by some very courageous politicians.

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Weird and wonderful uses for open data - visualising 250 million protests and mapping electoral preferences

One of the interesting aspects about open data is how creatively it can be used to generate new insights, identify patterns and make information easier to absorb.

Yesterday I encountered two separate visualisations, designed on opposite sides of the world, which illustrated this creativity in very different ways.

First was the animated visualisation of 250 million protests across the world from 1979 to 2013 (see below).

Based on Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) data, John Beieler, a Penn State doctoral candidate, has created a visual feast that busts myths about the decline in physical protests as people move online and exposes the rising concerns people have around the world.

Imagine further encoding this data by protest topic and displaying trends of popular issues in different countries or states, or looking at the locations of protests in more detail to identify 'hot spots' - in fact John has done part of this work already, as can be read about in his blog (http://johnbeieler.org/)


Second is the splendid Senate preferences map for the 2013 Australian Government election, developed by Peter Neish from Melbourne.

Developed again from public information, this is the first time I have ever seen a map detailing the flow of preferences between political parties, and it illustrates some very interesting patterns.

The image below is of NSW Senate candidates, and thus is the most complex of the states, but shows how this type of information can be visualised in ways never before possible by citizens without the involvement of traditional media or large organisations.

For visualisations of all states and territories, visit Peter's site at http://peterneish.github.io/preferences/

These types of open data visualisation lend themselves to a change in the way the community communicates and offer both an opportunity and a threat to established interests.

Governments and other organisations who grasp the power of data visualisation will be able to cut through much of the chatter and complexity of data to communicate more clearly to the community, whereas agencies and companies who hang back, using complex text and tables, will increasingly find themselves gazumped by those able to present their stories in more visual and understandable forms.

We're beginning to see some government agencies make good use of visualisations and animation, I hope in the near future that more will consider using more than words to convey meaning. 

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Enter the Queensland Premier's Award for Open Data

The Queensland Government is currently running their first Premier's Award for Open Data, a competition designed to encourage and support the use of data released by the government and raise awareness of how it can add value to the community.

Open data competitions are no longer new for Australia, however it is great to see that Queensland hasn't put limitations on where entrants can come from - unlike previous state open data competitions.

This is a major step forward as it allows the Queensland Government to tap into good ideas from anywhere in the world, rather than limiting them to a geographic area.

The competition only offered $20,000 in prizes spread across four categories ($5,000 in each), howeve received a major boost with support from Microsoft, who is contributing an additional prize, which I value at close to $100,000. This Microsoft Start-Up Accelerator Award will be awarded to the team who develops the most innovative concept with the best start-up potential and will include: · five Nokia Lumia 920s, five Asus VivTab tablets, one four-month course at Founder Institute for the nominated team founder to attend from February 2014 and a maximum of $60,000 worth of Windows Azure for a maximum period of two years.

This size of prize pool is important for open data competitions given the efforts that teams and individuals put into development. I generally also suggest splitting prizes into a range of awards to give more teams the opportunity to win and thereby increasing participation and engagement.

Overall this looks like a good competition and it will be interesting to see the level and range of entries and the winners.

The support offered beyond the competition to entrants will also be interesting to observe, as open data competitions both in Australia and overseas have often suffered from being 'flashs in the pan' - with most apps and services created being abandoned after the end of the competition process.

To find out more or enter the competition, visit data.qld.gov.au/data-event/premiers-awards

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