Ear­lier this week, I attended the Future­Gov Forum Aus­tralia.

It was an inter­est­ing event, not least because the talk­ing head com­po­nent was kept to a rea­son­able min­i­mum, with the model focussed on rotat­ing tables with each new table host­ing a dis­cus­sion with atten­dees on a par­tic­u­lar topic asso­ci­ated with the future of gov­ern­ment. It worked well, although a few less top­ics (or some refine­ment) so we could spend longer with each group would have been a bonus. I spent the two days of the event mostly seated at the Gov­ern­ment 2.0 table (thanks to Mar­tin Stewart-​​Weeks of Cisco And the Gov­ern­ment 2.0 Task­force who gen­er­ously let me horn in on his sub­ject of exper­tise), but also paid vis­its to the Open Data and Cit­i­zen Engage­ment tables.

Much has been made in sub­se­quent days of AGIMO’s Ann Steward’s com­ments that pub­lic ser­vants need to be “Gov 2.0 activists”, dri­ving change in their own agen­cies toward the Taskforce’s vision of Gov­ern­ment 2.0. I agree with her, wholeheartedly.

That said, as I spoke at the forum with a range of pub­lic ser­vants from all three lev­els of gov­ern­ment and a wide range of agen­cies, one telling fact was appar­ent — in spite of all the scaf­fold­ing being in place for agen­cies to take real, sub­stan­tial steps towards Gov­ern­ment 2.0 in their agen­cies, many blocks, pre­dom­i­nantly cul­tural ones, con­tinue to persist.

Let’s be abun­dantly clear here, every­thing that needs to be done to make Gov­ern­ment 2.0 a real­ity from the per­spec­tive of the leg­isla­tive and exec­u­tive arms of gov­ern­ment has been done:

  • the gov­ern­ment has accepted the Gov­ern­ment 2.0 Taskforce’s rec­om­men­da­tions
  • the gov­ern­ment has also accepted all of the rec­om­men­da­tions of the Moran Review, which sup­ports and expands on the work of the Taskforce
  • the APSC has issued crys­tal clear guid­ance for pub­lic ser­vants on using social tools
  • sev­eral agen­cies have issued their own poli­cies and guid­ance that could be adopted by other agencies

Yet, the ret­i­cence to engage per­sists. The pre­dom­i­nant use of social tools by gov­ern­ment remains out­ward bound, trans­mit­ting old style mes­sages via new tools. Rarely, if at all, do pub­lic ser­vants at any level in this coun­try actively and openly par­tic­i­pate in pub­lic social spaces with respect to their work and the work of their agen­cies. As Task­force Chair­man, Nicholas Gruen notes, “…can’t we just take some baby steps. Pleeeesse?”

That post by Nick Gruen is worth read­ing, actu­ally. It makes abun­dantly clear that the bar­ri­ers are down, but that the pub­lic ser­vants seem not to be dar­ing to step over. To my mind, it’s that next step that needs to take place. Now, or sooner.

So, to hark back to the peo­ple I spoke with this week at the Future­Gov Forum, the same old chest­nuts kept com­ing up:

  • their IT secu­rity peo­ple wouldn’t approve access to these tools — frankly, IT secu­rity peo­ple need to get the hell out of the way, and to read this
  • their senior exec­u­tive see no rea­son to grant access — what, an explicit impri­matur from the gov­ern­ment isn’t enough?
  • they don’t under­stand the tools — just have a go, it’s not that hard
  • they are afraid of what peo­ple will do with their open data — erm, who’s doing evil with their data now and if there are unpleas­ant mes­sages in the data, maybe the pol­icy or pro­gram the data is related to needs fixing

All these (the list isn’t lim­ited to those things, but they are the obvi­ous ones) are mat­ters of cul­ture. They are things that could, with the right cat­a­lyst and nur­tur­ing, be changed over the rel­a­tively short term.

It’s time that a senior min­is­ter (yes, yes, we’re in an elec­tion — but we won’t be soon) and some very senior pub­lic ser­vants — say the APSC Com­mis­sioner and the Sec­re­tary of PM&C — had a quiet sit down with the Sec­re­taries and other agency heads and told them to make this hap­pen. Now. We need an active cat­a­lyst or cat­a­lysts on the inside — an Aus­tralian equiv­a­lent to Tim Berners-​​Lee, Vivek Kun­dra or Andrew Stott. An ongo­ing irri­tant for the slow-​​movers.

Beyond mak­ing it hap­pen, politi­cians and pub­lic ser­vants need to explic­itly move to a place where par­tic­i­pa­tion by pub­lic ser­vants in the dis­course about their work isn’t seen as a neg­a­tive behav­ior laden with career risk. No won­der peo­ple are ret­i­cent when they think their actions will see them hauled before man­age­ment or a Sen­ate Esti­mates hear­ing. This must change.

We also need an active, high pro­file and nec­es­sar­ily noisy cat­a­lyst out­side the gov­ern­ment mak­ing things hap­pen and being an irri­tant to those hold­ing things up. In the US, Tim O’Reilly and Craig New­mark are ably fill­ing that role. As pas­sion­ate as Nicholas Gruen is here in Aus­tralia, I think he’s not pub­licly vis­i­ble enough beyond the politico-​​tragic-​​media-​​wonk-​​o-​​sphere™ (I’m delighted, by the way, that I got to use that phrase twice today) — Newmark and O’Reilly appear reg­u­larly front-​​and-​​center in the US media.

I don’t have the answers, but have a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of ideas. They seem doable to me and they seem to align with the ideas of peo­ple like Ann Stew­ard and Nicholas Gruen.

So what’s the problem?