I’ve been having to go further and further in the world to get anyone to listen to me. But in any event, I enjoyed this breakfast radio interview in Regina Saskatchewan.
Government as impresario, the platform as impresario
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Category Archives: Web and Government 2.0
Secrecy by default: How ‘performing government’ is trumping transparency
A few months ago, Sam Roggeveen from the Lowy Institute asked me to talk at a function the Institute was holding on secrecy. I said I wasn’t particularly well qualified to talk directly on secrecy regarding national security and foreign affairs, but I was happy to speak about the growing benefits of openness and of the power of ‘secrecy by default’.
The event is on Friday but there are a series of blog posts in the run up to it. Here’s my blog post – which is also up on the Lowy blog. You can read the all the posts leading up to the event here (I recommend Paul Monk’s posts particularly).
‘Soft’ secrecy in the media age
by Nicholas Gruen – 12 March 2012 10:42AM
Nicholas Gruen is CEO of Lateral Economics and was Chair of the Government 2.0 Task Force.
I recently took my son to the stage play of the TV show Yes, Prime Minister. One could predict the kind of plot that would ensue and ensue it did. The Prime Minister and his minions manoeuvre for advantage between each other and navigate a range of dilemmas and eventually a resolution is arrived at. Life goes on happily enough for the characters and we appreciate the bon mot that Wikiquote tells us is wrongly attributed to Bismarck: ‘Laws are like sausages — it is best not to see them being made’.
But the decades have made a huge difference in the sensibility of the new production – which is written by the original authors of the TV series. The series ran through most of the 1980s, a period that contained its share of tumult, from the destruction of union militancy to the Falkland’s War. The series reflected bastardry enough.
But somehow the dramas were genteel, reflecting battles between those privileged enough to be in the system. Waste in government continued, powerful people and time-servers were protected when they should have been exposed and dealt with. But one could be forgiven for thinking, at the end of an episode, ‘it was ever thus’.
Twenty years on, as the moral dilemmas piled up in the stage-play, the governors conspired against the governed.
What’s with all the apologising?
We are all in Tom Watson’s debt for pursuing the corruption of the Murdoch press as vigorously as he has – and continues to. I have had some dealings with Tom arising from my involvement in the Government 2.0 Taskforce. In any event, in addition to continuing his pursuit of the Murdoch press he has just been caught up in a strange set of events. His intern, it seems took to his Twitter account when he was in a meeting and tweeted something which mentioned rape. If you mention rape this stirs up trouble. And what the hell was she doing on his Twitter account? Who knows, but it was a very stupid thing to do, which she very quickly admitted on Twitter.
This caused the predictable avalanche of nonsense in the media. Tom acted pretty kindly, didn’t sack the silly idiot who had tweeted on his account, and then published this account. It ends in these propositions.
8. The intern has not been sacked nor was she ever going to be. She’s young. We all make mistakes.
9. I know her well enough to know she’ll never do this sort of thing again.
10. And yes, I know I should have logged out. I really do. Thank you to the people who pointed that out.
11. For those that have asked – all my tweets, other than the two this morning, are my own.
12. Though my account wasn’t technically ‘hacked’, yes, I do understand the irony of what happened.
13. Once again, I am sorry.
Now the British are different to us. They’re more sticklers for form. So if Tom wants to apologise, then technically yes, the buck stops with him. He runs the office and ‘takes responsibility’ for what happens.
But beyond that? He’s in his own office and I don’t agree that he ‘really should’ have assumed that one of his staff would hijack his online ID, even for a joke, just as he shouldn’t assume that she would forge his signature, or (for that matter) video a visiting guest on the dunny. As for ‘irony’ – Tom’s role as a minister in the Blair Government was to promote these online tools and train others in them. Well OK, admit the irony, but strictly speaking there’s not much irony. Someone stuffed up.
I can’t help thinking that a right leaning politician wouldn’t be bowing and scraping. Enough of the apologies Tom. Leave them to Rupert Murdoch – even if he doesn’t mean them.
Scary . . . Amazing . . . Exhilarating
Bicycle cam
One thing I think about whenever I sit in a tram waiting for cars that shouldn’t be holding up the tram to stop holding up the tram is that trams should have a video cam on them and drivers could have a button that either activates the cam or marks the spot at which it is running and if the car was breaking the road rules it gets a ticket. Improves efficiency and brings in a bit of revenue. What’s there not to like. Anyway, the same idea has been proposed various times in the past but has never managed to be implemented. I don’t know why. But as is so often the case, technology’s capacity to decentralise these decisions is leading the way – with bicycle cams as illustrated above. Handy in court cases.
You lose some, you win some
I’ve been counting those I know who are highly energetic, positive people and who are naturally excited by the possibilities of the web, who have been leaving government employ. I can think of Darren Whitelaw in Victoria, Mia Garlick in the Commonwealth service (though based in Sydney) and Craig Thomler (Cth, Canberra) who have all pulled or are pulling the plug on Government.
But it’s not all one way. There’s at least one person who’s heading into the bureaucracy – the great Pia Waugh who has been the great Kate Lundy’s staffer for three years.
A bundle of optimism, positivity, equanimity, creativity and capability.
So public sector, I hope you know how lucky you are.
The GLAM Sector bytes a hand that tried to feed it: Or how really terrific organisations can do really silly things
Tim O’Reilly proposed the slogan “Government as a platform” for his Government 2.0 activities which he’s heavily scaled back in favour of more lucrative opportunities. But there was always a problem. That problem was that it wasn’t so much that no-one had ever had the idea that government might be an enabling resource – a platform in the lingo of Web 2.0. The real problem is that government has no culture of this. Departments are proprietorial and secretive and that’s a tenacious culture which is prevented from evaporating by lots of expectations and structures.
But there is one part of government that has cultivated the culture of ‘Government as a platform’ since its inception around a century and a half or so ago: The GLAM sector – that’s galleries, libraries, archives and museums. I couldn’t help noticing when doing the Government 2.0 Taskforce that the GLAM sector were up and at it long before anyone else. The National Library had its newspaper digitisation program and Seb Chan from the Sydney Powerhouse Museum was on our Taskforce and instrumental in getting us to run a mashup competition – and likely instrumental in getting the Powerhouse to become the first museum anywhere in the world to post its historic photos on Flikr and licence them Creative Commons. Seb’s unit built the mashup of baby names in NSW which is fascinating to play with.
I also learned about all the problems the national and state libraries were having getting rights to archive web content that were analogous to their rights as libraries of record to receive a copy of all publications in their jurisdiction from publishers. If they had such rights all they would need would be a robot to go and collect the material and Bob’s your uncle. In fact without this, much of their efforts involve sending people letters to ask their permission to archive their sites. I discussed with various people in libraries of record having such rights which certainly made sense to me.
Anyway, they still don’t have such rights.
Meanwhile . . . they are certainly keen on their rights to printed material as you will observe from this letter I received from the Victorian State Library this week (I might add that The Victorian State Library is a terrific organisation, which I am very fond of, but even terrific organisations do really silly things):
The State Library of Victoria tries to collect a copy of all books, videos, CD’s, CD-ROMs, pamphlets, periodicals, newspapers and any other items published in Victoria for permanent preservation in the Library.
To help us in this endeavour, legislation was passed in 1869 requiring publishers to deposit free of charge with the library a copy of every item published in Victoria. Current legislation is contained in section 49 of the Libraries Act 1988 (see enclosed leaflet).
Recently the following publication came to our notice.
The economic value of Australia’s investment in health and medical research: reinforcing the evidence for exceptional returns.
We look forward to receiving a copy of this publications (sic), as well as any other publications you might not have previously sent us for legal deposit. Please follow the enclosed legal deposit instructions when forwarding publications. Continue reading