Let’s start with my opin­ion… Oh, I truly hope so.

A few weeks back online mar­ket­ing guru and hero of mine, Tara Hunt, gave a keynote at the GOVIS con­fer­ence in New Zealand. Her talk, enti­tled Gov­ern­ment 2.0: Archi­tect­ing for Col­lab­o­ra­tion, is a clar­ion call to all pub­lic sec­tor agen­cies to adopt the prac­tices of Web 2.0 in a mean­ing­ful way and con­nect with their client base.

Now arguably, the peo­ple (cit­i­zens and oth­ers) aren’t clients of the gov­ern­ment. A client rela­tion­ship sug­gests choice and users of gov­ern­ment ser­vices often have no choice for access to those ser­vices. As such, it’s even more impor­tant that gov­ern­ment truly engage with these peo­ple and pro­vide mean­ing­ful, two-​​way, con­trib­u­tory ser­vices where the pop­u­lace is as much a con­trib­u­tor as the gov­ern­ment itself.

In Tara’s own words:

I spoke of the build­ing blocks we know and love: Cowork­ing, Bar­Camp, OpenID, Micro­for­mats, Cre­ative Com­mons, etc. as well as real, cru­cial exam­ples of how we should apply the idea of open data to the lives of our citizens:

  1. health­care records being openly acces­si­ble and wik­i­fied for the patient
  2. com­mu­ni­ca­tion and infor­ma­tion exchange in regards to our chil­drens’ edu­ca­tion to be a fully account­able (parent-​​teacher-​​student-​​administration) open dialogue
  3. the gov­ern­ment as an open, exten­si­ble, secure plat­form for local business.

These aren’t ‘nice to haves’, these are ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL.

I’m 100 per cent in agree­ment with Tara. In fact, I’ve spo­ken with her about her pre­sen­ta­tion and am work­ing on sim­i­lar papers for deliv­ery here in Aus­tralia. I’m excited to see that she’s been con­tacted by Aus­tralian gov­ern­ment rep­re­sen­ta­tives and that her pre­sen­ta­tion is gain­ing recog­ni­tion in the main­stream media.

I really hope that Tara’s pre­sen­ta­tion and the atten­tion it’s get­ting her­alds the begin­ning of a sea change for the deliv­ery of gov­ern­ment ser­vices and the pub­lic sector’s approach to deliv­ery of those ser­vices. There are so many oppor­tu­ni­ties for gov­ern­ment to recon­nect with the peo­ple here. For the Aus­tralian gov­ern­ment to fail to seize those oppor­tu­ni­ties would be a huge disappointment.