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.
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:
- healthcare records being openly accessible and wikified for the patient
- communication and information exchange in regards to our childrens’ education to be a fully accountable (parent-teacher-student-administration) open dialogue
- 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.
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Hi Steve,
I have to agree with nearly everything – except for the bit about the term client inferring a choice relationship.
And I need to find out more about Tara’s reference to healthcare records being open – they are one of the main privacy candidates in government information today (the others being security and commercial in confidence) – QLD government is going to open licensing for 85% of their information, but not healthcare records. Openly accessible by the patient alone? Sure. Openly accessible by the primary caregiver? Hmmm. Openly accessible by everyone? Nope
Cheers, Andrew
Andrew, you can watch video of Tara’s keynote at http://tinyurl.com/3xvm7t. Slides weren’t recorded, but you can watch along with the slides from SlideShare (link above).
Hi Steve,
didn’t work. Is the video available in a downloadable format anywhere?
Cheers, Andrew
Try going to http://richmedia.govis.org.nz/govis/viewer/ and searching for Tara’s talks. You get the bonus of seeing all the others as well.
…and streaming didn’t work from here either
That said, I followed one of the links in your post to Computerworld and it contained the following excerpt:
“It seems that a person’s record of their health belongs not to that person but to the health provider. In some cases, this could be a life and death matter. For example, if there were concerns about a drug’s side-effects, the patient concerned would probably know and be worried he or she had taken such a drug, but it might have escaped the health authorities’ attention.”
Now THIS is something that I have to agree with – that everyone should have access to their own medical records. When the Australia, oops I mean Access Card, comes into being, there will be no reason why people can’t access their own medical records – and this could be provided via the australia.gov.au portal along with other government services.
I think that my confusion grew from the programmatical usage of the word “and” in your sentance “healthcare records being openly accessible and wikified for the patient” – I read it incorrectly, sorry.
Cheers, Andrew
Hey Andrew,
Of course the ‘open’ health records wouldn’t be publicly available! OMG…the amount of discrimination that would happen – I think there was a case in California where a guy was fired because he was HIV positive and his doctor leaked his records to his employer. Yikes.
But I am so incredibly perplexed as to why I can’t get full access to my entire health history…or my son’s for that matter (although, he should be able to ‘disallow’ me when he turns 18 – with permissions going to whoever his living will specifies).
When I moved from Canada to the US, I lost my entire history. That scares me a great deal. No immunization records, no prescription records…my entire history, including giving birth. Gone. And it took a great deal of pain to get the immunization records for my son for his new schools down here (he couldn’t become registered without them).
I’d also love to be able to look into my family history of illnesses. I don’t know how that is done whilst keeping privacy, but knowing who died of what is pretty important with hereditary illnesses. Especially since high blood pressure and heart attacks run in my family. To be able to show that to my current physician would help them help me.