I’ve made various suggestions about the possible terrificness of open source approaches to government, for instance here.
The Poms are having a crack at this kind of thing. They’re trying to use suggestion boxes to improve policy. Thus the front page of betterregulation.gov.uk run by the Better Regulation Executive is a big suggestion box calling for suggestions for better regulation. It’s a good idea. What do you get for putting in a suggestion? Not a lot, but the responses are public and thus fairly well reasoned. And there seems to be good work going on there, though how resources intensive and so cost effective it is is another question.
And the British are getting active in promoting public sector access to information, and in trying to work out how to get value out of it. Showusabetterway.com – interesting that it’s .com, and not .gov and not .gov.uk or co.uk – goes one step further.
The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated. The Power of Information Taskforce is running a competition on the Government’s behalf, and we have a £20,000 prize fund to develop the best ideas to the next level. You can see the type of thing we are are looking for here.
A good thing methinks and it will be interesting to see how they go.
No HT? http://tokblog.org/?p=637
The Power of Information Committee that is driving the Show Us A Better Way project is also running an excellent blog: http://tokblog.org/?p=614 – definitely worth subscribing to.
Similarly, the UK Archives has just published an online strategy that builds on the Power of Information principles in a really constructive way IMHO: http://tokblog.org/?p=655
Sorry – the UK Archives link should have been http://tokblog.org/?p=654
If only the Lisbon Treaty would take a suggestion from the box.
In an Australian context, AGIMO (part of finance.gov.au) notified me of the release of the report from consultations about an Australian Government “Consultation Blog”.
In my opinion, it’s a good report. I hope that Jacques (of ClubTroppo) and Robert Merkel (of LP), who also contributed to the consultation, post their thoughts about the report.
Aaah, notice the “html” extension rather than “htm”. Good to see!
Let’s hope that AGIMO produce a recommendations paper, and makes it public, as well as a report summarizing the next round of consultations between agencies.