Today’s Pub­lic Sphere 2 at Par­lia­ment House in Can­berra has the poten­tial to reset the whole frame for Gov­ern­ment 2.0 in Aus­tralia. 30-​​odd inspir­ing and well-​​informed speak­ers with real expe­ri­ence both within and in help­ing the pub­lic sec­tor really showed the poten­tial for a more open and col­lab­o­ra­tive model for gov­ern­ment in this country.

Lindsay TannerIn par­tic­u­lar, the announce­ment from Finance Min­is­ter Lind­say Tan­ner and Spe­cial Min­is­ter of State Joe Lud­wig, of the launch of the Gov­ern­ment 2.0 Task­force is of major impor­tance — I’m sur­prised it’s not all across tech sec­tor news (but then again, the fra­cas in the Par­lia­ment over other issues is kind of dom­i­nat­ing polit­i­cal news). I’m more than impressed by the makeup of the Task­force. If they’re lis­ten­ing, and I believe they are, here are my con­cerns and suggestions:

  • please keep us up to date often on your delib­er­a­tions and what you’re think­ing about — release early, release often
  • please don’t just lis­ten to ven­dors and “indus­try” as they actu­ally aren’t your best source of infor­ma­tion — talk to those doing and those who want to do but are con­strained by the cul­ture of their organisations
  • given your abil­ity to pro­vide grants for related work, please make them diverse and not just focussed on those with the time and resources to make detailed sub­mis­sions — make the bar­rier very low
  • there may be too many peo­ple on the Task­force that feel like insid­ers and to few that are pas­sion­ate doers — where are the peo­ple like Ope­nAus­tralia or CPD on the Task­force? Where too are the pas­sion­ate peo­ple — not agen­cies, but peo­ple involved in Open Source, par­tic­i­pa­tory democ­racy, etc.? Please reach out to these peo­ple and get them deeply involved as soon as you can — many hands make light work
  • this move means that the Clean Feed should be dead in the water — where was that announcement?
  • many agen­cies still lack skills or cul­tural require­ments to make the most of the work of the Task­force — please ensure some­thing hap­pens to ensure both cul­ture change and skill build­ing takes place

I hope the Task­force really does a great job.

I had just one con­cern on the day, that I raised with a cou­ple of the other organ­is­ers — they agreed.

There were too few ques­tions from those atten­dees who were not already a part of the open gov­ern­ment com­mu­nity. That could quite legit­i­mately have been because they felt over­whelmed with the vol­ume of mate­r­ial pre­sented today. But sev­eral pre­sen­ters, includ­ing me, made explicit offers to talk to any­one who had ques­tions. There were too few… I imag­ine the rea­son is a com­bi­na­tion of cul­ture present in the APS, amount of infor­ma­tion and a lit­tle shy­ness amongst the attendees.

If you were an attendee, please do reach out and ask any ques­tions you have to me or on the event wiki in a few days.