My kilotalk submission
Posted by Jacques Chester on Saturday, April 5, 2008
Per pestering by Dave Bath:
TOPIC 9: The future of Australian governance
“Google Government” should be a motto going forward. FOI should be altered to place the emphasis on departments to decide at the point of creation whether a document is sensitive; the default should be full disclosure. All possible government documents and data should be accessible and queryable by any member of the public.
By opening up the vast documentary and data sources of government, we can tap the wisdom of experts outside of government. This can only improve efficiency, accountability and efficacy.
Work in this direction has already been done by AGIMO and the National Archives. What is needed now is cabinet-level commitment to the overall vision of technologically-driven transparency. The push needs to be wired into the technology used every day by government workers. It needs to be welded into policy and it needs to have strong champions of a ministerial level.
Government workers should be allowed and encouraged to discuss their work with the public at large. A government-wide system of blogging should be introduced. Subject only to standard clearance, any worker — from front desk to minister — should be able to activate a personal blog at the click of a button. Experience in large companies like Microsoft and Sun Microsystems shows that this helps to close the gap between the producers and consumers; many of the best ideas consequently come from outside of the companies. Neither does it damage the top-level direction, strategy and communications as readers are able to distinguish between personal and corporate identities.
Australia could lead the world in the openness and smarts of its governance. All it would take is a few nerds, a few years and a generous dose of political common sense.
Dave has cannily pointed out that it will be interesting to compare what goes in to what comes out. So if you do decide to submit, perhaps you could pop it up on your blog for comparison.
This entry was posted on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 4:29 PM and filed under Economics and public policy, IT and Internet, Politics - national.
Follow comments here with the RSS 2.0 feed.
Apologies. Comments and trackbacks are both currently closed.
[...] flesh it out with relevant links later, but this is in quick response to Jacques Chester’s Submission Cut/Paste on the same topic on Club Troppo. Independently, we seem to be pretty well [...]
Posted on 05-Apr-08 at 4:57 pm | PermalinkJacques: I’ll be fleshing out the above post that pinged you with a host of related links to the AGIMO/NAA work we both mention, and other open-government eDemocracy resources.
Perhaps the major difference between the common parts of our submissions was that you said “Google”, while I (carefully, although I think Google the best of them) used “search engine”.
Well done!!! Let’s hope this topic, so dear to the blogosphere, actually get things going.
Posted on 05-Apr-08 at 5:02 pm | PermalinkJacques – This is an interesting idea. When working for the previous government, I came to realise that there was quite a lot of information that could be classified as not secret, but not published either (though it will often be given out if someone asks, without any need for FoI). The difficulty is that there is expense in publishing, even on the web, and given that much of the information would interest only a small number of people the cost may not be worth it.
Posted on 05-Apr-08 at 5:07 pm | PermalinkAndrew;
The secret is automation. A proper setup will ensure that the right documents become available in the right way. Overlaid with modern search engine technology it would make the documentary base of government highly transparent.
Such a project would involve two quite separate components: a general technology-and-policy effort to ensure that every document, every email, every spreadsheet, every database, is marked with the metadata to automate its classification and publication.
The second is to progressively bring existing documents and systems into line. That’s going to be slow and expensive, but it’s a once-off expense. Once it’s done, you get all the benefits.
Imagine, for example, being able to do statistical analyses across raw data held by Treasury, the RBA and the ABS. Or being able to do document analyses to track the way policies formed during previous decades. Or for organisations like the CIS to have systems constantly mining government data for instances of waste.
It’s not until you gather and make the cost of access very low that these things could become possible.
Posted on 05-Apr-08 at 5:20 pm | PermalinkAndrew Norton:
The cost is absolutely minimal if documents are classified (“metadata-ed up”) as they are created and/or edited. This is particularly easy for policy documents. Then simply buy a Google. (Google mini for small business works at about 7c a document entry level (including the hardware!!!), and drops considerably when you buy upgrades of the number of documents it searches. Details here . It also looks after visibility criteria. A “Whole Of Government Google” is a no-brainer.)
And if you cannot classify a document when you create or edit it (it should take a mere minute or five, cheap compared to the hours you spend writing the darn thing), then you probably shouldn’t be writing it!!! (The “you” is the theoretical author, not you personally).
Checkout “DIRKS” at NAA.gov.au. Agencies (and businesses) are like a paper-based library that acquires books and doesn’t fill in the subject/author/title index cards as they go. I often say “It doesn’t matter if it is clay tablets of optical computing, the real information management issues never change”.
Posted on 05-Apr-08 at 5:26 pm | PermalinkThat should read (typo) “clay tablets OR optical computing”
Posted on 05-Apr-08 at 5:28 pm | PermalinkConsidering that both clay tablets and optronics rely on silicon, I think we can let it slide Dave.
Posted on 05-Apr-08 at 5:29 pm | PermalinkJC: I mean the problem is in the wetware: management practices, attitudes and dedication. Silicon doesn’t possess these …. yet.
Posted on 05-Apr-08 at 5:58 pm | Permalink[...] Chester has posted his submission to the Australia 2020 Summit at Club Troppo and it includes a lot of the Power of [...]
Posted on 05-Apr-08 at 7:19 pm | PermalinkApparently in Norway everybodies income tax return is published on the Internet. That’s a little too open for my liking.
Posted on 05-Apr-08 at 7:39 pm | PermalinkSure. That’s why the whole project needs a champion of ministerial level, to stop it being put into tickbox policy hell.
Posted on 05-Apr-08 at 8:08 pm | PermalinkThe risk with ‘open government’ is overly status quo government – we’ve seen this recently when budget proposals are leaked to generate a populist negative response. I’d be more comfortable with routine data collection being published this way than the level of disclosure being considered here.
Posted on 06-Apr-08 at 10:53 am | PermalinkAndrew;
I think the problem with closed government is worse. When everything is strictly managed, the media will beat up any small thing for a story. If there’s full disclosure they can actually choose to focus on serious stuff.
Posted on 06-Apr-08 at 11:56 am | Permalink“If there’s full disclosure they can actually choose to focus on the serious stuff.”
Posted on 06-Apr-08 at 3:28 pm | PermalinkWhere is the evidence to think that could happen? Unfortunately,the suggestion is simply naivete of the first order.
Graham;
Where’s the evidence to say it won’t? Right now political communication is tighter than a cat’s sphincter. So we get stuck talking about people’s hairdos.
Criticism and accountability are unalloyed goods. It’s naive to pretend otherwise.
Posted on 06-Apr-08 at 6:52 pm | Permalink“where is the evidence” asks JC
All around you JC if you care to look.
There are currently many “serious” issues to be reported or commented on which are only dealt with by the media (if at all) in a peripheral manner – yet we are still told of (hand)waves becoming salutes, the PM’s wife fashion sense etc
To suggest that the media (or even the serious press) would be particularly interested in issues which you (or perhaps I) may think are newsworthy is simply ingenuous.
Though I am sympathetic to your aims, I am in the broader sense probably in the Andrew Norton camp (at least on this issue!) in that completly open government is essentially status quo government. The key must lie in finding a reasonable balance between transparency of governance and a democratically elected Goverment’s capacity to pursue its policies in a flexible (but non-corrupt)manner.
Not an easily found balance let alone one that might be generally agreed upon!!
Posted on 06-Apr-08 at 8:21 pm | PermalinkOK, I see your point. But can we at least agree that the pendulum needs an energetic wrench in the direction of openness?
Posted on 07-Apr-08 at 1:16 pm | PermalinkIf balance, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder, then by what criteria do I make such a judgment?
Posted on 07-Apr-08 at 3:47 pm | PermalinkUnfortunately I don’t have an defendable answer to that question. Despite these reservations, I would certainly agree that the pendulum does need a significant push in the direction of greater accountability in government – which ,of course, is meaningless without transparency.
[...] Amy King’s Big Idea today which echoes the Power of Information mantra that this blog and others have been beating the drum for recently. Question: If you could do one thing in your stream area, [...]
Posted on 07-Apr-08 at 6:04 pm | Permalink[...] Troppo’s Jacque Chester has some interesting suggestions around open government.
Posted on 08-Apr-08 at 7:26 pm | PermalinkJacques, Why can I only see the troppo armadillo’s backside? Does anybody else have this problem?
Posted on 09-Apr-08 at 2:57 pm | PermalinkIt’s like that on my work PC too, although I’m pretty certain it’s only recently happened because i’m sure i would have noticed if it had been that way for very long.
Posted on 09-Apr-08 at 3:06 pm | Permalink[...] Chester’s piece about same issue at Club Troppo – "My kilotalk submission" (2008-04-05), which includes "Google Government" should be a motto going [...]
Posted on 23-Jul-08 at 4:43 pm | Permalink