Craig Thomler's professional blog - AI and digital government thoughts and speculations from an Australian perspective
Craig Thomler
I've worked in the online sector since 1995 in roles including founder, publisher, journalist, webmaster, marketer, channel manager, CIO, COO and visionary. I left the public sector in early 2012 to lead Delib Australia as Managing Director Australia and New Zealand. More...
BuzzNumbers, an Australian social media monitoring service, has launched the free BuzzElection service monitoring election mentions online.
BuzzElection includes a tool tracking the online discussion of election issues by the level of interest, state by state analysis and an analysis of the most influential tweeters in the election debate.
This type of tool allows the public to better understand the broader views and trends during an election, without relying on potentially biased media reports.
This type of online monitoring approach is highly adaptable and could be used, for example, for tracking politician behaviours and attitudes online separate to media coverage.
Below is a chart based on data to 29/7/2010 giving a view of the top election issues discussed online via Twitter.
Steward said that although a lot of good work was being done, agencies needed to identify the internal barriers to embracing Gov 2.0, and develop an “action agenda” not only within their own agencies, but for collaboration with other agencies on common service areas - and the Australian public.
“How many of you are working collaboratively in externally hosted environments?” Steward asked delegates at the National Convention Centre in Canberra, prompting a show of hands. “A few, but not many,” she noted. “We need more activists to lead the way.”
Google has launched the Student Voice initiative, whereby 15-17 year old Australian students will be able to vote online in a mock election reflecting the current Federal election.
The goal is to help these students learn more about elections and also provide a perspective on how Australia's future voters (who will be eligible to vote in the following Federal election) may vote.
I applaud Google for launching and managing this initiative, however it distresses me that no Australian organisation has tried to make something like this a reality. It is a shame that we are relying on a foreign-owned company to broaden Australian democracy, while Australian companies, institutions and other organisations sit on the sidelines and do nothing to support democracy in this country.
Also interesting is that this approach involves online voting. Today's high school students are already likely to expect to be able to vote online in real elections and the Student Voice initiative could further reinforce this expectation.
Perhaps, over time, this type of initiative will be a trigger that encourages Australian governments to support online voting (with appropriate security in place).
Certainly this initiative could help Google position itself as a potential provider of online voting facilities in the future. I would also expect to see them rolling out similar Student Voices in other jurisdictions over time, after using Australia as a guinea pig.
Around the world governments are tightening their belts. After the recent global financial crisis many countries' governments have borrowed heavily from financial markets and released these funds as stimulus packages - placing them in deficit.
Australia is no different, although we have very successfully kept our deficit to a smaller percentage of GDP than most other western nations.
For government agencies, long used to efficiency dividends and a philosophy of doing more with less, it is important to constantly 'health check' their budget decisions to ensure that public money isn't wasted and is most effectively spent.
The US, UK, Canada and other governments have begun more intensively involving citizens and public servants in the process of identifying waste and potential efficiencies - a process which has produced some large results in a short time in some jurisdictions.
How are they doing this?
By employing Gov 2.0 techniques, providing access to budget and revenue data online in machine-readable formats and by engaging their staff and the community via social media tools.
Here's a few examples.
UK Spending Challenge
The UK recently launched a public 'Spending Challenge' asking UK citizens to contribute their ideas for reducing their national deficit.
Managed through a website and a Facebook group, the Challenge has attracted more than 31,000 ideas so far, with the government aiming to include the best in their October 2010 budget review.
US SAVE Award
The US is holding their second annual SAVE award which allow public servants to submit and vote on ideas for cost savings which can be applied within government departments.
Last year SAVE attracted 38,000 ideas and President Obama says (in the video below) that many are being integrated into agency budgets. The top four entries were voted on online by American citizens and the winner got to meet the President and received national acknowledgement.
For the 2010 SAVE award, so far there have been over 17,000 ideas submitted and 153,000 votes.
Canadian public sector data used to expose a $3.2 billion tax fraud David Eaves has written a fabulous case study on how the release of public data in Canada uncovered systemic tax fraud within the charity sector and helped legitimate charities and the government close down these operations.
It is a very powerful case for making public data available to allow people outside governments to apply their expertise to assist governments.
How many of these techniques could be applied in Australia?
I'd argue that all of them have merit and could be applied in appropriate ways by our Federal, State and Local governments - potentially on an ongoing basis.
None of the examples above involved enormous government expense and, where the processes have been concluded (for the 2009 SAVE awards and in the Canadian example), there have been significant measurable returns on investment.
In other words, they've saved the community money in net terms - with the cost of running the different initiatives a tiny fraction of the savings to the public purse.
I'm off to London for a few weeks on Tuesday and will be catching up and speaking with some Gov 2.0 people there to find out what's happening in the UK.
if you have any suggestions on contacts I should catch up with, please drop me a Tweet or email.
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