Public engagement. Public empowerment.

My keynote from GOVIS 2009 — User Cen­tred Gov­ern­ment: More than meets the eye.

The GOVIS tag line is “Con­nect. Share. Learn.”

So my first ques­tion is where is the con­fer­ence wifi net­work for all of us to con­nect? It’s a must have for every con­fer­ence these days.

Why are we record­ing the con­fer­ence pro­ceed­ings for later dis­tri­b­u­tion? Why aren’t we stream­ing them live over the ‘Net and record­ing them?

Where are the tools for all of us to give direct input to the con­fer­ence ses­sions as they hap­pen? An inte­grated backchannel?

My ques­tion for all of  you is, how many of you are con­nected and shar­ing right now, so that your col­leagues who aren’t here can be learn­ing from your experience?

How many of you are learn­ing from each other?

How many of you know what your peers from other agen­cies think of what’s hap­pen­ing at this con­fer­ence? More specif­i­cally, do you know in real time?

I ask, because these are impor­tant and rel­e­vant ques­tions in the con­text of open gov­ern­ment. Par­tic­i­pa­tion on your part is a crit­i­cal com­po­nent of the big­ger picture.

I ask, because it’s com­pletely doable using free, pub­licly avail­able tools. In fact, the con­fer­ence web site points some of those tools out – Flickr, Deli­cious, Twit­ter, Slideshare. And that con­nect­ing, shar­ing and learn­ing is hap­pen­ing there. Only you don’t know about it because you’re not connected.

So, here are the rules I gen­er­ally give my pre­sen­ta­tions under. I fully expect you to fol­low them.

• every­thing and any­thing is pos­si­ble – ask why and why not and expect a real answer
• there are no bad ideas – just dif­fer­ent ones
• pas­sive con­sump­tion is point­less – do tweet, blog, com­ment, chal­lenge and ask — you get out of this what you put in

If you have the tools here to be par­tic­i­pat­ing in this keynote, get them out now and use them!

Con­nect. Share. Learn.

Where have we been?

Direct engage­ment in pol­i­tics has been the purview of an edu­cated and pow­er­ful few until recent times. Indeed, the role of the politi­cian, and the exec­u­tive that serves him or her has largely been to tell us, the sheep-​​like masses, what is good for us and to expect us to blithely fol­low along. We change our minds only in the face of cor­rup­tion and excess, and exer­cise our demo­c­ra­tic rights to switch to a lesser evil at times of election.

But oh, my! How the world has changed. The Beast of the hyper­con­nected masses slouches ever closer to the Beth­le­hem of polit­i­cal engage­ment. And the Beast wants to talk. With you. Yes, you. The politi­cian and the pub­lic ser­vant. Directly, or at least more directly. And to hear from you — prefer­ably a lot sooner than the next elec­tion or major pol­icy or pro­gram roll out.

Two years ago, at the last GOVIS, my friend and col­league, Tara Hunt, gave a keynote enti­tled Gov­ern­ment 2.0: Archi­tect­ing for Col­lab­o­ra­tion. In that keynote, Tara spoke of a struc­ture for open, engaged gov­ern­ment that riffed off Tim O’Reilly’s rules for Web 2.0. Not so ten­u­ous a link­age as you might think. Tara’s pro­posed archi­tec­ture cen­tered on a rich, col­lab­o­ra­tive ecosys­tem of link­ages between:

• a cit­i­zen and a ser­vice provider
• a researcher and the information
• a cit­i­zen and a pub­lic servant
• a cit­i­zen and her information
• a cit­i­zen and her expe­ri­ence with the government

Two years on, where are we? In this coun­try and in Aus­tralia, we seem to be tin­ker­ing around the edges at best. Yet, we’ve seen fun­da­men­tal shifts in the gov­ern­ments in both our coun­tries — gov­ern­ments that came to power at least in part on the basis of offer­ing a brighter future of con­sid­er­a­tion and under­stand­ing of the needs of the public.

We could be so much fur­ther on.

Hope

Pos­si­bly the biggest obvi­ous shift towards pub­lic engage­ment with gov­ern­ment occurred with the elec­tion of Pres­i­dent Obama in late 2008. The jury remains out, of course, as to whether the changes brought about by the new US admin­is­tra­tion will prove to be a real groundswell in the open­ing of gov­ern­ment and the engage­ment of the pub­lic. How­ever, the future looks bright. At least at the moment.

Let’s have a look at an announce­ment from the Obama Admin­is­tra­tion about the for­ma­tion of the Office of Pub­lic Engage­ment.

There’s a vitally impor­tant quote in that video that goes to the heart of what I’m talk­ing about:

Our com­mit­ment to open­ness means more than sim­ply inform­ing the Amer­i­can peo­ple about how deci­sions are made. It means rec­og­niz­ing that gov­ern­ment does not have all the answers, and that pub­lic offi­cials need to draw on what cit­i­zens know.

That announce­ment, and the pro­gram it speaks of, is some­thing that at present, I sim­ply can’t imag­ine in Australia.

A close friend of mine who hap­pens to work for the State Depart­ment at the US Embassy in Can­berra told me a story a few weeks back. We were at break­fast, with a group of peo­ple who meet every cou­ple of weeks. What do we have in com­mon? All of us do work that involves us using social media in one form or another.

This was my friend’s first time at this break­fast. On that day, he met peo­ple who work in state and fed­eral gov­ern­ment, who work for PR com­pa­nies and for non­prof­its like the RSPCA.

And he told us some­thing pretty amaz­ing. And frankly, pretty cool.

About six weeks before, all the staff at the State Depart­ment, he was assum­ing world wide, had received a direc­tive to engage with the pub­lic. To “… get out there on Twit­ter and Face­book and what­ever” and have a con­ver­sa­tion with peo­ple. They were actively encour­aged, and very nearly man­dated, to act as ambas­sadors and evan­ge­lists for their gov­ern­ment. Right down to the most junior staff. No more would media units and PR spin doc­tors be the sole inter­me­di­aries, strug­gling to con­trol a con­ver­sa­tion they had, in real­ity, lost con­trol of years before. Instead, the con­ver­sa­tion has been rad­i­cally dis­in­ter­me­di­ated with real peo­ple, doing real jobs, each now a part of the pub­lic and engag­ing face of the US government.

He was excited. He felt empow­ered. And it was the moti­vat­ing force behind him com­ing to his first Can­berra Social Media Breakfast.

In the UK, too, things are afoot. Just last week, the pub­lic announce­ment came of the appoint­ment of Andrew Stott as the Direc­tor of Dig­i­tal Engage­ment. The role is as the most senior pub­lic com­mu­ni­ca­tor in the UK Civil Ser­vice focused specif­i­cally on the dig­i­tal chan­nel. Of course, the media imme­di­ately labeled him the “Twit­ter Tsar”, but the job is far more than that.

In a role fraught with risk and oppor­tu­nity, Andrew Stott has the chance to bring the British gov­ern­ment and its engage­ment with its hyper­con­nected con­stituency rush­ing into the 21^st Cen­tury. There is much to be gained if he gets it right.

Noth­ing remotely like those exam­ples exists in my country.

Where are we now?

The peo­ple want to engage. They want to have a con­ver­sa­tion with a leg­is­la­ture and exec­u­tive that lis­ten to what they have to say. It’s not so impor­tant that they act on all our wishes — more, it’s impor­tant that peo­ple are heard, and can hear back from those in gov­ern­ment in a more human way.

Pro­nounce­ments of what is good for us and Nanny Stat­ing no longer cut it.

In his incred­i­bly impor­tant work, The Expe­ri­ence of Mid­dle Aus­tralia, inter­na­tion­ally recog­nised soci­ol­o­gist, Dr Michael Pusey of UNSW states:

…change has depleted the resources that were once pro­vided by… older, denser forms of association.

In a hyper­con­nected world, our abil­ity to read­opt these denser forms of asso­ci­a­tion, made sus­tain­able by tools such as social net­works, become real­ity. We become the true global vil­lage, as much the neigh­bor to the bloke next door as some geo­graph­i­cally remote but by asso­ci­a­tion, close, neigh­bor with whom we share an interest.

Our fam­i­lies and gov­ern­ing struc­tures no longer inhabit a nearby, day or two’s ride from our wat­tle and daub huts. Rather, we live in a 24×7×365, always-​​on world where our vil­lage truly is global. In a world where we can be and are increas­ingly on, we face the very real risk of polit­i­cal, social and cul­tural hyper­iso­la­tion if we fail to par­tic­i­pate as indi­vid­u­als and as part of society.

Already, we see this hap­pen­ing in our own lives as we increas­ingly turn to trusted sources for infor­ma­tion, turn­ing our back in grow­ing num­bers on the for­mal media which has yet to catch up with this engaged super-​​community. We empower our­selves to make bet­ter, more informed deci­sions and to take action on those decisions.

This gath­er­ing together to do as we need, when we need, with whom we need, learn­ing as we go, is the core premise of NYU pro­fes­sor, Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Every­body.

It is also the foun­da­tion of many of the lec­tures of my friend, Mark Pesce, as he dis­cusses the grow­ing power of the con­nected com­mu­nity. In his talk, Hyper­pol­i­tics (Amer­i­can Style), given at last year’s Per­sonal Democ­racy Forum in New York, Mark con­nected the dots for us when he said:

Hyper­con­nec­tiv­ity begets hyper­mime­sis begets hyperempowerment.

Today, quite lit­er­ally, the notion of power to the peo­ple is more true than ever.

And it’s true because gov­ern­ment by its very nature is not built to oper­ate in a con­nected 21^st Cen­tury — it is often too slow, too risk averse, too monolithic.

In many ways, the pub­lic has more or less invoked Gilmore’s Law on the exec­u­tive and in places, is not far off doing the same to the leg­is­la­ture. We will “route around the dam­age” and do for our­selves what gov­ern­ment seems inca­pable or unwill­ing to do for us.

Some­times, it’s just about get­ting a pot­hole filled, as FixMyS­treet allows you to do in the UK and Canada .

Or per­haps it’s about mak­ing sure you under­stand, and can hold to account, your local mem­ber for their level of con­tri­bu­tion to their elected office. They­Work­ForYou in the UK, and its local equiv­a­lents in Canada, Aus­tralia and here in New Zealand, are pow­er­ful tools to keep a check on the activ­i­ties of politi­cians, their par­ties and the organ­i­sa­tions they are asso­ci­ated with.

You have to won­der why these ser­vices, ser­vices of unar­guable impor­tance, needed to be built bythe pople at mySo­ci­ety. Why weren’t they built by gov­ern­ment? Why did they need to be built at all? If we had the open, engaged con­ver­sa­tion we’re talk­ing about today with gov­ern­ment, per­haps we wouldn’t feel the need to watch the watchers.

Quis cus­todiet ipsos custodes?

Of course, it’s not just about keep­ing tabs on our politi­cians. More impor­tantly, it’s about giv­ing the pub­lic more direct access to and input into pol­icy mak­ing and leg­isla­tive activity.

In Aus­tralia, the right noises are begin­ning to be made. Less than a fort­night ago, Fed­eral Finance Min­is­ter, Lind­say Tan­ner had this to say:

I’m a great believer in these col­lab­o­ra­tive tech­nolo­gies open­ing up some tremen­dous pos­si­bil­i­ties for bet­ter government.

Trou­ble is, this mes­sage doesn’t seem to be mak­ing its way down to the doers, the pub­lic ser­vants on the ground who want to engage in com­mu­ni­ties of prac­tice and shared knowl­edge, or are keen to help out where they can with a client hav­ing a prob­lem. Whether or not it’s actu­ally their job.

In fact, despite more than one offi­cial doc­u­ment declar­ing quite clearly that pub­lic ser­vants are not only enti­tled to engage online, but encour­aged to do so should they wish, most gov­ern­ment depart­ments in Aus­tralia have tightly restricted net­works with near-​​draconian rules about what web sites are per­mit­ted to be seen. And woe betide any pub­lic ser­vant seen online in a social net­work. Demon­stra­bly, it’s slack­ing off.

Here in New Zealand, too, the gov­ern­ment recog­nises the value of social media and its part in the con­ver­sa­tion that the pub­lic sec­tor and the gov­ern­ments it serves need to have with the pub­lic in order to pro­vide the best advice to gov­ern­ment and imple­ment the best informed, most widely con­sulted pro­grams and policies.

I won­der though, for this coun­try and my own, just how many of the doers are engaged in those con­ver­sa­tions? How many of their man­agers and lead­ers are accept­ing this groundswell? How many are embrac­ing the cul­tural shift and encour­ag­ing their peo­ple to be out there con­nect­ing, live and in color, with the public?

Just imag­ine in this coun­try if your polit­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tives and pol­icy mak­ers were really lis­ten­ing and engaged in the unar­guably heated con­ver­sa­tion over the Sec­tion 92A amend­ments to the Copy­right Act. Per­haps the New Zealand Inter­net Black­out cam­paign would never have hap­pened and the embar­rass­ing back-​​down that took place need never have occurred.

In Aus­tralia, too, we have an active online voice with respect to our government’s pro­posed impo­si­tion of a manda­tory “clean feed”, fil­ter­ing out the nas­ties we no doubt need to be pro­tected from as we “think of the children”.

The gov­ern­ment appears deaf to the intel­li­gent and informed argu­ment against this ill-​​considered pol­icy and the poten­tially hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars it could cost to imple­ment if it comes to be. The clean feed is not only tech­ni­cally imprac­ti­cal — poten­tially slow­ing Australia’s Inter­net speed by a sub­stan­tial fac­tor — it is a pol­icy that is largely sim­ply not wanted by Aus­tralians. Fur­ther, the risky legal frame­work around the black­list that will under­pin the clean feed, lacks trans­parency and pos­si­bil­ity for review.

These are just two exam­ples. If gov­ern­ment and the pub­lic sec­tor were engaged in a con­ver­sa­tion in a more open way with the pub­lic, things might be different.

Per­haps, with the ben­e­fit of hind­sight, there will be a lit­tle more lis­ten­ing to the informed pub­lic view when both the leg­is­la­ture and the exec­u­tive are more engaged online in a fash­ion that meets the expec­ta­tions of the grow­ing online com­mu­nity. A com­mu­nity who expect to be heard. A com­mu­nity des­per­ately keen to engage with gov­ern­ment and the pub­lic sec­tor at every level.

My own local Sen­a­tor, Kate Lundy, in a con­jur­ing of the the­o­ries of the Ger­man philoso­pher and soci­ol­o­gist, Jür­gen Haber­mas, has insti­tuted a series of events she is terming The Pub­lic Sphere. Open to all com­ers, the events are run in par­al­lel — online and off — along a theme with the aim of gath­er­ing views, opin­ions and expe­ri­ence that would oth­er­wise not get a hear­ing in the halls of power. The out­comes from these events will form brief­ing papers to be taken back to the party room in an effort to influ­ence pol­icy and leg­isla­tive agendas.

This is a real effort to engage in the idea of Gov­ern­ment 2.0 — mak­ing gov­ern­ment more acces­si­ble to the pub­lic, encour­ag­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion and idea shar­ing, look­ing for the best think­ing and build­ing trust in a group — politi­cians and pub­lic ser­vants — who often strug­gle for trust from the pub­lic. The trust and social cap­i­tal built on both sides acts to make access to gov­ern­ment eas­ier, trans­parency greater and the can­vass­ing of opin­ion much, much faster.

What needs to hap­pen, and hap­pen soon, is a rad­i­cal reimag­in­ing of the way in which gov­ern­ments engage and con­verse with the pub­lic. It’s no longer nec­es­sary nor suf­fi­cient, to make procla­ma­tions from on high. The con­stituency wants, and parts of it are demand­ing, an engaged, two-​​way and ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tion with both politi­cians and the pub­lic sec­tor. In places, this is already hap­pen­ing. In the UK, a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of local gov­ern­ment bod­ies and an increas­ing num­ber of national bod­ies are engag­ing one on one with the pub­lic. In the US, too, gov­ern­ment bod­ies are increas­ingly engaged with the pub­lic they serve.

How else do you account for an over­sub­scribed event, capped at 500 atten­dees, that took place in Wash­ing­ton DC just a few weeks ago? The Gov­ern­ment 2.0 Camp was a resound­ing suc­cess in attract­ing politi­cians, pub­lic sec­tor work­ers and a wide range of informed and engaged oth­ers to open up the con­ver­sa­tion that must occur, tak­ing input and par­tic­i­pa­tion from any inter­ested party, and not just those who can afford lobbyists.

Beyond con­ver­sa­tion across the wall — between the gov­ern­ment and its con­stituency — there is another oppor­tu­nity. It’s an oppor­tu­nity that many might be more will­ing to try. That oppor­tu­nity is to do all this amongst your­selves — intra– and inter-​​agency con­ver­sa­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion; a com­mu­nity of peers who can share and build on knowl­edge you might oth­er­wise not have the chance to discuss.

An effort along these lines has begun with Gov­Dex in Aus­tralia, but adop­tion remains low, with largely exper­i­men­tal com­mu­ni­ties and con­tin­ued resis­tance from many agen­cies. Yet there are so many oppor­tu­ni­ties offered by a whole-​​of-​​government approach such as this.

Sup­ported by social net­work­ing tools within and between agen­cies, there are count­less oppor­tu­ni­ties to engage in more open con­ver­sa­tion, to mea­sur­ably increase access to exper­tise, to pro­mote inno­v­a­tive and forward-​​thinking prob­lem solv­ing and pol­icy for­ma­tion. This isn’t pie in the sky stuff. There are mea­sured and well-​​researched ben­e­fits to break­ing down the silos within and between your organ­i­sa­tions and reboot­ing work prac­tices to a more open and col­lab­o­ra­tive model.

You need only look to the British doc­u­men­tary, Us Now, recently released for free on the Inter­net, to see the wealth of oppor­tu­ni­ties afforded by this shift. Let’s take a quick look.

Fur­ther, by reor­gan­is­ing this way  cul­tur­ally, tech­ni­cally and in terms of the skills you give your peo­ple, you quite inten­tion­ally and directly build com­pe­tency and exper­tise in the very busi­ness mod­els and tools the pub­lic expects you to be using to engage with them. Gov­ern­ment 2.0 is as much about the way the pub­lic sec­tor and the leg­is­la­ture organ­ises itself as it is about the con­ver­sa­tion and inter­ac­tion with the pub­lic. By approach­ing this from a posi­tion of build­ing exper­tise, you reap the rewards of increased pro­duc­tiv­ity and the abil­ity to deliver bet­ter ser­vices to the public.

To quote Jason Ryan, of the State Ser­vices Commission:

…in the hyper­con­nected world, engage­ment is pred­i­cated on under­stand­ing and util­is­ing social media.

With that under­stand­ing — that use and the needed exper­tise amongst your peo­ple — you place your organ­i­sa­tions in the box seat to deliver on the promise of Gov­ern­ment 2.0. You become that which Gov­ern­ment 2.0 most aspires to — an engaged and engag­ing pub­lic sec­tor giv­ing top qual­ity advice to Min­is­ters thanks to an ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tion with the pub­lic that involves receiv­ing expert input and breadth of opin­ion from a diverse and informed base.

I hardly think that’s a bad thing.

In Aus­tralia and New Zealand we are now in a des­per­ate race to catch up. If only we can change the way gov­ern­ment oper­ates. The con­nected cit­i­zenry already know what’s going on else­where and are keen to make their contribution.

Open data

One of the most impor­tant fac­tors in engag­ing and empow­er­ing the pub­lic in the busi­ness of gov­ern­ment is open data. In Aus­tralia, the Bureau of Sta­tis­tics has licensed the vast major­ity of its data under a Cre­ative Com­mons license. This allows the ABS to dis­trib­ute its data to any­one that can make use of it. The data is avail­able for use by any indi­vid­ual or organ­i­sa­tion that needs it — ready to mash with any other data. But they are one of few.

The newly appointed US Chief Infor­ma­tion Offi­cer, Vivek Kun­dra had this to say on the mat­ter of open data just weeks ago at the 2009 Gov­ern­ment Web Man­agers con­fer­ence held in Washington:

Gov­ern­ment data pre­pared for pub­lic reuse should be offered in multiple-​​formats, be machine-​​readable and adhere as closely as pos­si­ble to light­weight standards.

The open­ing of data col­lected by gov­ern­ments, com­bined with other pub­licly avail­able data has incred­i­ble poten­tial to drive inno­va­tion and trans­form parts of the econ­omy. And the engage­ment of gov­ern­ment in a con­ver­sa­tion with its con­stituency boosts greatly the power of that data freedom.

There are already sig­nif­i­cant move­ments, such as the Data Porta­bil­ity Project, who aim to help define a data stan­dard that would allow indi­vid­u­als like you and me con­trol and autho­ri­sa­tion rights over the use of data gath­ered about us as well as assist gov­ern­ments and pri­vate enter­prise make informed deci­sions about in what form they should offer their pub­licly avail­able data.

An agreed-​​to, truly portable data stan­dard would allow infor­ma­tion to be passed between bod­ies such as gov­ern­ment agen­cies, ser­vice providers such as the med­ical pro­fes­sion and edu­ca­tion sec­tor and indi­vid­u­als, based on a set of autho­ri­sa­tion and authen­ti­ca­tion rules attached to the standard.

At the TED con­fer­ence this year, Sir Tim Berners-​​Lee, inven­tor of the World Wide Web, had those of us in the crowd chant­ing a very impor­tant mantra:

Raw data now!

What Sir Tim wants is for gov­ern­ments and busi­ness every­where to release for use the unfil­tered, unchanged data they col­lect in our names and allow us to use it. To mash it up and to add value to it.

And what value we could add!

Projects like Google’s efforts to index pub­lic data around labor sta­tis­tics and cen­sus find­ings has impli­ca­tions and presents pos­si­bil­i­ties that could spread globally.

Other works, like Nation Mas­ter and the recently released Wol­fram Alpha , present so many pos­si­bil­i­ties that the true impli­ca­tions for global policy-​​making are dif­fi­cult to grasp.

In recent months, through the use of open data and an open com­mu­ni­ca­tions model (some­times forced upon the agen­cies), we’ve seen amaz­ing things hap­pen with data on the Vic­to­rian bush­fires thanks to a joint effort between Google and the Premier’s office

It’s just one exam­ple of data being used to increase pub­lic safety and inform the pop­u­la­tion. There are many more.

With the recent H1N1 break­out, through the use of open com­mu­ni­ca­tion mod­els lever­ag­ing social media, the US Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion have been able to more actively engage in a con­ver­sa­tion around the dis­ease break­out and dis­trib­ute accu­rate infor­ma­tion in a far more imme­di­ate and timely way than the twice daily stand-​​ups of the past.

So too, the World Health organ­i­sa­tion is using Twit­ter and other chan­nels online to con­verse with and engage the pub­lic in an effort to clearly get their mes­sage out.

Along­side offi­cial efforts, work by inter­ested and engaged third par­ties, empow­ered by the avail­abil­ity of open data, is sup­port­ing the work of those in gov­ern­ment. HealthMap is a graph­i­cal work map­ping infec­tious dis­ease report­ing across the globe. Work of the impor­tance of HealthMap, and have no doubt about how impor­tant it is, can only be empow­ered by pub­lic offi­cials and their organ­i­sa­tions who have over­come the fear of shar­ing and engage­ment that per­me­ates much of gov­ern­ment in the West.

Efforts like this are increas­ingly com­mon in the US and the UK, yet they are scarcer than hen’s teeth in Australia.

So, I ask you today, are your organ­i­sa­tions shar­ing all the data they could? If not, why not?

Of course, to have an appro­pri­ate level of gov­er­nance to all this data inter­change, we prob­a­bly need gov­ern­ment involved somewhere.

In Aus­tralia we have seen the gov­ern­ment data inter­change space best illus­trated by the deba­cle that is NEHTA, the National E-​​Health Tran­si­tional Author­ity. Infight­ing and a series of changes in man­age­ment have seen NEHTA get effec­tively nowhere in more than five years with a lack of open­ness, cost blowouts and dis­agree­ments, even in the face of an accepted de facto world standard.

Instead, pro­grams such Google Health are mov­ing for­ward in leaps and bounds. Not that they won’t have prob­lems, but with a will and a delib­er­ate intent to avoid point­less bureau­cracy, they are well ahead of gov­ern­ment activ­i­ties, which to date have to be marked “Not good enough.”

You say you want a revolution

This is where we come in. As mem­bers of the pub­lic and as pub­lic ser­vants and politi­cians, we must engage.

In our remote cor­ner of the world — New Zealand and Aus­tralia — we need to engage as cit­i­zens and as pub­lic ser­vants with the pub­lic we serve far more than we have ever before. We need to embrace a more open model of gov­ern­ment that val­ues an ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tion with the pub­lic around pol­icy, cul­ture, secu­rity, trust, trans­parency and the shar­ing of infor­ma­tion and data.

The largest part of e-​​Government and e-​​politics is still see­ing the world as just another place to make procla­ma­tions and tell peo­ple what is good for them and at which Coun­try Women’s Asso­ci­a­tion meet­ing a politi­cian is turn­ing up at next. We must be the cat­a­lyst to change that.

When politi­cians and pub­lic ser­vants truly seek to engage in an ongo­ing, per­sonal con­ver­sa­tion with the pub­lic they serve, I believe we will have the oppor­tu­nity to see a mas­sive increase in pub­lic under­stand­ing of gov­ern­ment. Along­side that, I believe we will see an atten­dant increase in an abil­ity to get things done, with the pub­lic sec­tor and the leg­is­la­ture work­ing hand in hand with an informed, engaged and empow­ered community.

In a hyper­con­nected world, we can be more informed than ever before, by more sources and from a broader opin­ion base than ever pre­vi­ously possible.

We can be engaged in our com­mu­ni­ties; local, national or global.

We can empower our­selves and oth­ers to know and to understand.

And we can act on infor­ma­tion avail­able to us in an informed, engaged way.

This is a rev­o­lu­tion whose time has come. To some­what mis­quote Pres­i­dent Obama, not only “Yes we can” but “Yes we must.”

Imag­ine your pub­lic sec­tor, your engage­ment, your gov­ern­ment if this was just what you did.

Con­nect. Share. Learn.