Australian public policy blog, Unleashed, published by our national broadcaster, the ABC, has a new piece by me entitled Government 2.0…it can be a reality on what it would take to transform government to really get Government 2.0 right.

At around 800 words, it doesn’t go deep. It’s just the first of several pieces I intend writing on this theme.

I’ve reproduced the article below should you wish to comment here, though I’d be glad for your comments and criticisms either at Unleashed or here.

Since coming to power in late 2007, the government has run a consistent agenda of public sector reform.

Beginning with the amendments to the Freedom of Information Act to encourage a pro-disclosure model for the release of public sector information (PSI), there has now also been the report of the Government 2.0 Taskforce, PM&C Secretary, Terry Moran’s blueprint for public sector reform and the Australian Public Service Management Advisory Committee report onpublic sector change. The government has made a strong and public show of accepting the vast majority of recommendations in these documents. The changes foreshadowed by the reform agenda are as relevant to state and local government as they are to the federal public sector.

In spite of all the apparent will for change in the public sector on the part of the government, with the intent of bringing into existence a brave new world of open, accountable, communicative Government 2.0, there remains an issue.

The will and capacity for change within the public sector itself.

The government’s reform agenda requires a profound tectonic shift of both technology and culture in parts of the public sector.

It will mean that the public sector is equipped with new, usable and useful tools that allow them to collaborate with each other on and intra- and inter-agency basis, with the legislature and with the public. The public sector must be given access to the tools of Government 2.0 – social tools and up-to-date IT environments.

For those of us in the public, hyper connectedness is, if we so choose, a given. Yet, for many agencies, even reading a blog that may be relevant to your work is impossible. Let alone watching a web video on iView of last night’s The 7:30 Report or Q&A that may have immediate relevance to your work today. Or alerting your management to a problem with your agency that has become apparent on Twitter.

For many public sector workers these things are just not allowed. Their IT security staff and often, their management, deem such things “unnecessary”. In such circumstances, how can the very many hard working, dedicated public servants out there (and they are out there in spades) be expected to do the vital work they must do with ever-decreasing budgets and massive pressure to increase productivity?

The practice of blocking public servant access to useful tools that can be utilised to do their jobs better must go.

The changes heralded by these reforms will require agencies and their staff to move from a model anchored in the past where closed, inscrutable decisions made by civil servants whose only communication to the public is outwards and formal was the norm to one where the public sector becomes a far more communicative, two-way organisation, engaging with and engaged by both the governments and publics they serve. Where Jürgen Habermas’ notion of The Public Sphere of discourse and legitimisation of policy and legislative change through open, public debate, is realised in full.

Alongside the tools and technology, public sector culture itself must change.

Despite many in the public sector keen to take up the many cultural challenges the reform agenda implies, there are significant hurdles that will need to be overcome in order to bring the reality of Government 2.0 to light. The nature of consultation will need to shift – one day, one week or one month consultations will have to become continuous with policy reform cycles shorter and more agile – responsive to public opinion. Openness and communication out from and back into agencies needs to be the norm.

In a particularly cringeworthy example of getting it badly wrong, last Friday’s AFR noted Defence Housing Australia’s CIO, Shane Nielsen, rejecting that agency’s engagement with a Facebook group disillusioned by DHA’s services. This is incredibly short-sighted. In the 21st Century public sector of Government 2.0, this should be seen as an opportunity to reform and improve service delivery through (probably difficult and complex) engagement, rather than turning a blind eye to bad news.

The aversion to and perception of risk as a thing that is only negative needs to switch to one where a little appropriate risk and some innovative ideas aren’t envisaged as something that’s inevitably going to get you hauled before the Secretary, Senate Estimates or the Minister. Rather, small innovations need to be welcomed, celebrated and encouraged.

That change has begun, but for very many agencies, the notion of trying something new or a little risky, or engaging in discourse with their public is anathema to them.

Having worked in and around the public sector for the past 20 years, I’m under no illusion that the reform to bring about real Government 2.0 in Australia, at any level of government, is going to be hard. However, I hope and dream that it can happen.

Many of the public servants I work and collaborate with look to their counterparts overseas, seeing what is being done in the UK, or the US and wishing it could be done here. The fact is, it can.

If the government allows the public sector to change in the way it says it wants it to, and if the public sector can change itself in this way, Australia promises to be a leader in Government 2.0. In many ways, we are already are.

Related posts

• The prosaic politics of the tweet (27)
• What a difference a week makes (30)
• Government 2.0 Camp Australia (6)
• Culture change for Government 2.0 (5)
• Public engagement. Public empowerment. (10)

Wearing my EFA Board Member hat, I spoke today at an event at Parliament House hosted by the Menzies Research Centre in a debate with Tony McLellan of the Australian Christian Lobby. The audience was primarily members of the Australian Liberal Students Federation; young Liberals destined for jobs as political staffers and politicians.

Below is the text of my part of the debate.

Let me begin with a short anecdote.

On Monday night as we watched Four Corners and Q&A, my not-quite-13 year old daughter, Hannah, made a particularly interesting observation. “Gee, Dad,” she said, “I think I’ve just seen more rude pictures in that story than I’ve ever seen on the Internet.”

Hannah has been using the Internet since she was four.

Certainly, much of that time it has been under our supervision, but increasingly it’s not. When Hannah uses the Internet, she uses a connection at home that is completely unfiltered, neither by the router we use nor by activating the fairly comprehensive parental controls that come as a standard part of modern operating systems. She has administrator access to the machine she uses and she also knows and understands how to access and manage the home network.

Knowing I was coming here today, I conducted something of a straw poll of that observation amongst friends and acquaintances with kids of a similar age. I deliberately avoided asking only “‘Net savvy” parents.

Universally, the experience was the same; none of our children had ever inadvertently encountered pornographic or other offensive material on the Internet, let alone material of the kind that falls under the umbrella that the National Classification Code defines as Refused Classification. None of the children had filtered or managed Internet connections. All of them used computers placed in public spaces in their homes and several had their own computers in their rooms.

The most recent research into public opinion on the filter, carried out by the Safer Internet Group consisting of Google, Internet Industry Association, iiNet, Australian Council of State School Organisations and the Australian Library and Information Association and others shows a marked increase in doubts about the filter amongst parents.

There is significant opposition to the government’s filter as proposed. Rather, parents first want greater education options and at-home filtering and as a next-best option, an opt-in filter. Mandatory filtering runs a long last.

So too, our friends internationally, including most notably the US Ambassador to Australia, Jeff Bleich, speaking on Q&A have come out publicly against the filter as it stands. Ambassador Bleich, an internationally recognised authority on human rights, was particularly clear, when he said:

“We have been able to accomplish the goals that Australia has described, which is to capture and prosecute child pornographers … without having to use internet filters. We have other means and we are willing to share our efforts with [the Australian government].”

The arguments of the government and its supporters in favor of the filter regularly hang on the matter of RC material. On this, I’d like to first highlight two matters of interest that seem to cause some real confusion.

First, is the myth that all RC material is illegal. This is simply not true.

The fact is that of all material classified RC, it is only material depicting the sexual abuse of children that is that is illegal to own. For good reason. No reasonable person in today’s society believes that such material is suitable for adults to access, let alone children.

Material that falls under the RC umbrella is unquestionably sometimes distasteful or controversial or contains or depicts concepts of an adult nature; drug abuse, explicit material about abortion, guides to assisted suicide, violence. Whether you personally approve of such things or not, none of this material is illegal to possess in this country; it’s perfectly legal for me or you to own a copy of Baise Moi or The Peaceful Pill, just not to make it available for sale.

Yet the filter seeks to change this. Our classification system in Australia is something that largely works and is designed to empower adults and minors alike to make appropriate, relevant choices. When implemented, and have no doubt, the government’s plans for the filter are far from abandoned, it will take away adults’ ability to decide for themselves whether or not to access material that is by-and-large, legal in this country.

Second, is the fantasy that stumbling across material that is RC on the public web is something that occurs with frightening regularity. It’s not even easy to stumble across R- or X-rated material, not all of which is pornographic in nature and none of which will be targeted by the filter. You have to go looking for these things very deliberately. Looking for material that is RC is even harder.

The material the government proposes to filter is, in some cases, completely appropriate to access. For that which is not, child sexual abuse material, it is well known that the criminals who trade in this matter do so using tools and protocols that will not be managed by this or any other filter. Rather criminals trade their materials in private networks.

Additional dollars and human resources for law enforcement by the Australian Federal Police ought to be supported. It is only through the diligent and successful efforts of the AFP and its overseas collaborators that those people purveying child sexual abuse material are apprehended and put in jail where they belong.

Let’s look in turn at a number of the other issues around the proposed filter.

First, the matters of cyber-safety, education, self-determination and digital citizenship.

There is no question that as adults and particularly as parents, we wish to protect our society and children from danger and from exposure to deeply offensive or inappropriate material. Certainly, as a father, this is paramount in my concerns.

In order to do this, I have a responsibility. As a parent as and a member of society, it is incumbent on me to educate myself, my child and those who I come into contact with about issues such as good digital citizenship and appropriate online behaviors. Doing so helps us, particularly, to protect ourselves from threats the filter will not even address such as cyber-bullying (and bullying in the flesh-and-blood world), from online predators, from identity theft.

These issues are certainly much higher in the minds of the parents, teachers and students I speak to regularly as a part of my work than are matters like RC.

Despite the marked increase in this country of policy that erodes our freedoms, pushing back against personal determination and our ability to make decisions for ourselves, the fact is that the vast majority of Australians are not complete dullards who need the Nanny State to tell them how to run their lives. Rather, they are perfectly normal, intelligent people who are capable of self-determination, of critical thinking and decision-making.

Australian parents are largely not irresponsible and incompetent at bringing up their kids. Most of them are entirely the opposite, doing a fine job of parenting and making appropriate decisions about child rearing. They are perfectly able, as parents and adults, to decide what is and isn’t appropriate for their children to see online and elsewhere. Equally, they are able to teach their children, with help from educators, law enforcement and others, how to behave as reasonable digital citizens.

The millions of dollars the government proposes to spend on the filter, a technology that will not actually work as advertised and will be easily circumventable, would be far better spent on law enforcement and on thorough programs for teachers and parents to educate themselves on risks, on teaching how to manage their own and their children’s access to the Internet, on appropriate online behavior and, where they wish to, how to filter their own computers directly and by choice; provably the most effective form of filtering and placing the power to conduct themselves firmly in the hands of individual people rather than in the hands of a government.

In more than one research study, both here and overseas, strong evidence exists that the risks to minors of exposure to unwanted, by which I do not mean only illegal, material, are considerably overblown. Children are not irreparably damaged by seeing things that may be distasteful or inappropriate online, particularly if they are surrounded by a framework of parents, mentors, educators and other support services that can help them make sense of these things.

Even if some form of filter is ultimately introduced, it would be far better if such a thing was opt-in rather than mandatory, as it was in Labor’s original pre-election policy. This leaves the decision-making in the hands of parents, where it belongs. Indeed, many opponents of the current filter scheme have stated that their objections would largely be mitigated of opt-in was the choice.

I don’t want to spend a great deal of time on the technology, as the concepts here have been argued at length and in detail by others. Suffice it to say that, in spite of Senator Conroy’s arguments to the contrary, there are major technical issues with the filter that remain unanswered or lacking in enough detail to be satisfying:

• secure web sites, such as we use for online banking and e-commerce cannot be filtered without making them less secure
• there remains a risk that if a popular and culturally valuable sites such as Wikipedia, the National Gallery of Australia or YouTube were subject to a filtered URL, overall access to those sites may be measurably degraded
• the introduction of the NBN and networks running at those speeds have not been tested under filter conditions at all
• only material published on the web will be subject to the filter, other distribution methods such as BitTorrent, email and instant messaging, often used by criminal networks to distribute offensive material, will not be subject to the filter
• bypassing the filter is, as admitted by Senator Conroy on more than one occasion, a trivial exercise, even for relatively non-expert users
• mandatory filtering is less flexible and customisable than home-based, on-router or on-computer filtering

All of these issues require evidence-based, thorough answers.

The blacklist itself is problematic on a number of fronts. These too have been discussed at length, but let’s look at them briefly.
The list is secret. In a world where open government in modern democracies is receiving significant attention, this is, at the very least, interesting. We hear arguments that a secret list protects us from exposure to the URLs that contain the offensive material. However, if the URLs are filtered, in what way do we risk exposure? The argument fails its own logic. Beyond that, it’s simply offensive to me to think that any government believes that I am incapable of enough independent thought to determine what URLs I do and do not visit.

By its very secrecy, if my website ends up on the blacklist, I am unable to know how and why it got there. It’s also unclear how I get off the list if I’m there unjustifiably. What happens if someone opposed to your political views or faith manages to get your site on the list?

Secret things have a tendency to leak through the cracks. The blacklist has already been leaked once. It’s not inconceivable that it will happen again. And again. And again.

The list is tiny. In a world where the public web is now in the trillions of pages, a list of something around 10,000 URLs barely scratches the surface of any pool of offensive, let alone illegal, content that may exist.

Which brings us to criminal networks distributing child sexual abuse material – I’ve already mentioned this, but it bears repeating – these networks do not use the public web to distribute their wares. The technologies they do use – private networks and peer-to-peer – will not be filtered.

The only effective way the distribution of this illegal material can be stopped is through active law enforcement. The AFP has a highly competent cybercrime unit that could be more effective if it was the beneficiary of additional funding and resources.

Last, to matters of filtering and free speech.

Senator Conroy, on Monday night’s Four Corners, stated clearly that for the purposes of the filter, his government’s policy was to filter RC content only and that he would be amongst the many voices raised in protest should some subsequent government decide to broaden the scope of the filter.

The filter covers material legal in other forms and media. It lacks accountability and appelability which are at odds with our open democracy and markedly different to equivalent decisions that are open to scrutiny when subject to other media.

While the Senator’s and the government’s hearts may certainly be in the right place, we cannot be so certain about unknown future governments and their thoughts on the nature of what could and should be subject to filtering. It is entirely possible that over the long term not only material that is RC will be subject, but perhaps dissenting political voices, matters of taste or voices belonging to certain faiths may be censored.

So, here’s a summary of the issues as I see them:

• there’s no serious Internet content problem to solve – you just can’t inadvertently stumble on RC or child porn on the Internet
• even if there was, few want the government to solve it this way – there are better, more effective, more workable and more societally acceptable options
• the technology presents a real risk – we’ve seen the trial results and the extensive analysis which points out the flaws
• the blacklist itself is a problem – it’s secret, unappelable, deals with material that remains legal, it’s already been leaked and will again (you’ve heard of the Streisand Effect, right?)
• the filter will not address criminal distribution of illegal material – it’s far better to ensure funding and resources for law enforcement, who are the only people equipped to deal with this problem properly
• the filter impinges on the freedom of Australians to determine for themselves  – it represents a real shift in the ability for Australians to determine what is and isn’t appropriate for them to view online and significantly changes a fairly workable classification system in other media to cope with a medium that is changing rapidly
• the filter will be administered by governments ill-equipped to do so – the technology and policy are complicated and problematic. We’ve seen several policy and program stumbles lately, do we want one over this?
• there is no guarantee that future governments will not change the scope of what is filtered – the suppression of material based on moral or political grounds is anathema to what Australia is about

This is far from a simple issue.

I’d like to close with a few words from Will Briggs, an Anglican priest from my wife’s home town of Somerset, Tasmania. Will is a strong voice in the discourse on the filter. He said:

“[This issue] is best [addressed] through clear information, balanced argument, reasoned debate…[on the] multiplicity of issues… [it is] a debate which is not simply about sexual ethics but about freedom of speech, the reductionism of morality, and the role of government in society… by… simplifications in this case [we] look like simpletons.”

Related posts

• How we can win the #nocleanfeed argument (9)
• The Great Firewall of Canberra (14)
• Connect.ed – The story of a girl (7)
• Not the publicity you’re looking for – Stephen Conroy, the clean feed and TIME Magazine (1)
• No Clean Feed protest (0)

Today, the Federal Government responded to the report of the Government 2.0 Taskforce.

While this response has taken rather longer than I would have hoped, that the government has responded in what appears to be an emerging election period, with many policy changes currently in the public eye, means I am more than pleased that the response has taken place.

In the spirit of Senator Kate Lundy’s invitation to respond in her announcement today, my response is offered in a similar spirit; I am aware that working with and for the Federal Government is a significant part of the bread and butter that is acidlabs’ business, but nobody and no policy from the government ought be immune to criticism, whether positive or negative in nature. I hope that politicians involved in this process and the public servants working for them read this post and consider these views along with the inevitable others that will be published.

First, separate from the response itself, I am curious as to why it has been published only as RTF and PDF. Looking at the document, it would have been perfectly suitable for publication as XHTML and significantly easier to deal with for those with accessibility issues if that had been the case. I understand this is coming soon.

Second, congratulations to the government for publishing the response under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia license. This walks the talk of one of the Taskforce recommendations and is most welcome.

On to the specifics.

Central Recommendation: A declaration of open government by the Australian Government

That the government has agreed with the Taskforce’s central recommendation and committed to a declaration of open government is greatly welcomed. I hope that the declaration, when it comes, can somehow be enshrined in legislation so that future governments and the public sector are legally committed to maintaining this openness in the years to come.

Recommendation 2: Coordinate with leadership, guidance and support

I think that assigning the role of lead agency to the Department of Finance and Deregulation is largely workable and the remainder of the commitments in the response provide a good underpinning to this commitment. I would like to see, however, external citizen or Ombudsman-like involvement in this to provide a check against the inevitable bureaucracy. A little loosening of the metaphorical shirt-buttons would not go astray.

How that might be achieved is open to discussion and interpretation.

The commitment to engage COAG is also very welcome, though this engagement needs to extend to local government as well. It is at the local level that much of the promise of Government 2.0 can be realised. It is where the rubber hits the road, in communities that need delivery of government services, that most engagement with society can take place.

Recommendation 3: Improve guidance and require agencies to engage online

The Department of Finance and Deregulation is already leading the way by publishing their own social media guidelines. While I have minor differences of opinion with the Department on the policies in this document, I largely believe it’s a great piece of work that could form the basis of the guidance the Steering Group and APSC will develop.

Many agencies still lack the culture and expertise required to implement social components into their everyday business. It will be a critical, if not the most critical component of work that the Steering Group ensures agencies are provided with internal expertise from public sector workers and, where needed and appropriate, external help, in order to bring these skills and the culture needed into fruition.

Including progress reports into the State of the Service report is an admirable starting point. Over time, this should go further and be ongoing, live information open to constant comment and input from agencies, public servants and the public rather than an annual note in a report read little beyond the bounds of the public service.

Inclusion of open submission requirements should have been agreed rather than agreed in principle. The recommendation from the Taskforce already contained the necessary caveats to exclude highly sensitive material from the open submission process. Of course, it’s not appropriate to expose commercial secrets or national security material by this process. That was already covered.

With respect to an open submission requirement, the response, to my mind, would have been better if there was an absolute commitment to open submissions (as the Taskforce itself had during its existence) unless commercial or national security provisions applied.

Recommendation 4: Encourage public servants to engage online

Very many public servants already engage online. That they now have an imprimatur to do so should see a significant growth in such engagement. Obviously, appropriate rules linked to behaviors, good digital citizenship and the various Codes of Conduct rightly apply. I suspect, however, that many agencies will remain reluctant to engage openly while certain attitudes amongst some senior management, IT and agency security staff and DSD remain in place.

It would be beneficial, if as an addition to the response today, a directive was issued jointly by the Prime Minister, the APSC Commissioner and the Finance Minister directing agencies to engage online; development of necessary expertise amongst staff in those agencies notwithstanding.

The response to Recommendation 4.4 suggests incorporation of public-generated content as a part of many agencies’ Government 2.0 programs. I think this is a fantastic idea, but it will need some careful management when applied to contentious material.

Online forums already exist for agencies to share their lessons and initiatives. I am aware however that even Govdex is blocked in some agencies, or strong resistance to its use exists. It is not a panacea, but it is useful. Additionally, the Gov 2.0 Australia Google Group continues to grow as a place to discuss these issues across levels of government and internationally. Membership is becoming more obviously public servant-centric rather than consultants, and this is a good thing. Forums such as the Google Group, GovLoop and Ozloop should be equally endorsed for these kinds of discussions and sharing, where appropriate.

Recommendation 5: Awards

As uncontroversial as this is, well done for committing to include Government 2.0 initiatives in public sector awards for eGovernment.

Recommendation 6: Make public sector information open, accessible and reusable

Choosing to agree in principle and agree, with modification is a bit cagey to my mind. There’s little in the Taskforce recommendations that require either qualification, even considering the FoI reforms in train. Agreeing to use CC-BY as the default and other licenses on those occasions where necessary (which needs definition) would have been non-controversial and given the government a way to reform notions of matters such as Crown Copyright.

Committing to full development of data.gov.au is a great step forward. Ensuring agencies are required to publish their data sets, subject to appropriate exclusions and de-identification would have been a step better.

Recommendation 7: Addressing issues in the operation of copyright

My comments to the response for Recommendation 6 apply equally here.

While I am certainly not a lawyer, I see no reason the matter could not have been passed to the Office of the Information Commissioner for management. To me, this looks like a bit of an out for the government, but we shall see. There may be entirely valid reasons for rejecting this recommendation.

Recommendation 8: Information publication scheme

Not much to comment on here. It would have been nice to see an agreed in this case, committing the OIC and the government to a reform agenda that enshrined Recommendation 8 in the operational framework of the OIC.

Recommendation 9: Accessibility

It is heartening to see a re-commitment to the earlier announcement from the Finance Minister and AGIMO with respect to having all agencies comply with WCAG 2.0. This will go a long way to ensuring equitable access to government information for disabled Australians.

While this may not have been considered previously, the notion of accessibility includes equitable access regardless of connectedness. This is an issue that remains unaddressed in this document.

Recommendation 10: Security and Web 2.0

Again, I think this could have been a simple agreed, rather than an agreed, with modification. Nothing in the Taskforce’s recommendation precludes sensitive material being appropriately secured.

Recommendation 11: Privacy and confidentiality

If this recommendation is already in operation, as the response states, why not an agreed?

Recommendation 12: Definition of Commonwealth Record

Activity in social spaces, where it forms a record, certainly needs to be retained by government. Moves such as the US Library of Congress indexing the entire public Twitter stream go to this issue and similar efforts in Australia will be welcome. However, a more real-time suite of efforts would be a  marvelous (if singularly complex) idea.

The response with respect to discovery and application of metadata to PSI is very welcome, and should see timely release of data to the public if agencies are tooled up to do so (this may present an issue in and of itself).

Recommendation 13: Encourage info-philanthropy

Deferring a response to this recommendation is a little bit of an out. There could have been an in-principle agree here, with a note that the Productivity Commission and others would be tasked to respond in detail.

Conclusions

Overall, I give the response as it stands a C+. As my friend and UK-based Government 2.0 authority, Justin Kerr-Stevens, said:

[I'll] defer judgement. Take the (few) referenced dates and judge on that. The grade will be in application – not ambition.

Progress is being made. The steps are in the right direction though I think it could have been stronger with much clearer commitments. With the past history and evidence coming out of the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand of the benefits of forward-looking Government 2.0 work, the government could have taken strong positive steps to leap forward in the provision of open, connected government engaged with its citizenry. It could be done in a way that is legislated rather than just sometimes qualified agreements. I want to see another statement with a legislative and policy reform agenda clearly laid out, though I doubt very much that this will occur before the election due this year.

Still missing is information on where and how the digitally disconnected are helped and connected with offline. Government 2.0, after all, isn’t just online and nor is only about tools; rather, it’s largely about people and culture.

Concrete commitments with timelines are missing throughout and they are needed to ensure we, the public, have a yardstick against which to measure progress.

Perhaps one of the most important factors, when and how public sector workers will be given the needed permission, skills and cultural change to engage with the public online is not explained. Many agencies still do not engage this way, and there needs to be a timeline to ensure they are required to take action.

The response is also missing anything on measurement of success and how this will be done.

I’d hope to see information on all these matters emerge in the very near future, hopefully by mid-year and definitely before the election in a clear strategy framework to come from the OIC, APSC and the Department of Finance and Deregulation. Without solid action of this sort, all the good work so far risks going astray with a new Labor government or a new Liberal government for whom open government and Government 2.0 progress isn’t as high on the policy agenda.

Related posts

• BarCamp Sydney #4 – Saturday, 15 November 2008 (0)
• Public engagement. Public empowerment. (10)
• Connect.ed – The story of a girl (7)
• What a difference a week makes (30)
• Much promise, many miles to travel – my thoughts on the Government 2.0 Taskforce draft report (7)

This afternoon, Jason Langenauer posted a well-argued piece with respect to the issues he sees in the national discussion we’re having over the imposition of the Labor government’s Internet filter. Initially, I thought it was a good piece. It’s clear, makes sense, sensible. But Jason is wrong on several points.

First, I should point out that this is my personal view, formed after lengthy discussion with well known anti-filter proponent, Mark Newton; someone whose view and ability to argue a point I respect a great deal. It’s not a view that represents my role as a board member of Electronic Frontiers Australia, though it is a view I’m trying to influence that group with. Given EFA is a democracy, I may get voted down.

The #nocleanfeed movement is killing itself. But it’s not confusion that’s doing it as Jason and others have said. Anyone with even passing familiarity with the campaign has no confusion whatsoever about what it means. None.

Asserting that we (the #nocleanfeed movement) have somehow dug ourselves an inescapable hole by using that term is false.

Sure, I wouldn’t use #nocleanfeed to try to explain it to someone unfamiliar with the arguments, but that’s Communications 101; you use the language and understandings of your audience to talk to them. You don’t confuse them and fail to engage with them by using your language.

On the other hand, as pointed out to me by Mark, using filter is probably a bad choice. Filters are good. They remove impurities so we can drink clean water and other such important things. At the very least we should use the term “filter” (air-quotes very intentional).

EFA have just launched the Open Internet campaign. As someone who participated in the discussions that brought it about, I strongly support it and the message it sends. But we’re using filter everywhere. Why not call a spade a bloody great bulldozer and use the term censorship? That’s what we’re talking about, after all.

So here’s my view.

We’re smart, and we have all the tools we need to make this a fait accompli. Yet we dance around, playing nice, wording statements carefully and not calling out fools strongly when we see them.

Over two years into this campaign and Senator Stephen Conroy has been utterly unable to successfully frame this issue the way he wants – as a battle against child pornography. Not only do even those casually familiar with the issue know that the filter will fail to stop child porn, but they also know that it’s the wrong fight altogether; child porn is distributed via methods that Internet censorship can’t ever handle, at least with current technology.

We know that the argument that being anti-censorship is ipso facto to be pro child porn is rubbish. Senator Conroy has been called on this often enough that he’s largely given up on it.

We all know that fighting child porn is far better fought by adequately funding the Australian Federal Police and their high-tech crime unit to do the job they know how to do very well. Give them more resources and they can likely do it better again. I’ve met some of them, they’re incredibly dedicated and they believe in what they do.

And this week, the mainstream media and the public got 100 per cent sucked in by the idiots at Anonymous and their ridiculous Project Titstorm. Anyone with half a brain will accept that this action was completely unacceptable. It stopped government delivering important services to the public and did the anti-censorship argument no favors whatsoever by risking re-framing the debate in anti-censorship = pro-porn terms. To that I say an unqualified NO WAY!

On Monday evening on the ABC’s Q&A, Melinda Tankard-Reist managed to unequivocally demonstrate that she had zero understanding of this issue when she sought to conflate Anon’s attacks with child porn. She looked less informed on the Internet and censorship issues than did Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce, who, in a moment of infrequent clarity noted that kiddie porn perpetrators ought to be locked up. Yes, Senator! Though this may be the one and only time I ever agree with you.

The #nocleanfeed movement, its meaning and its ability to creep (hopefully pretty quickly, it’s an election year after all) into the greater public consciousness couldn’t be in a better position. And here’s why.

Those who understand the argument are eloquent. Let’s help others understand by explaining to every person we know just what a damn fool idea the whole thing is and why. It’s not that hard. I’ve written about it enough, and others more eloquent than me have too. Use their words, and mine, to help you.

The government, overall, is in something of an unclear mess over a great deal of its Communications portfolio, not least because there’s at least one Senator, in Kate Lundy, whose public opposition to the Internet censorship policy must be having an effect by now.

Every time Senator Conroy speaks about the issue, he makes less sense and dances around more than last time. He is rapidly losing authority because he can’t argue cogently about the censorship policy. I suspect he just wishes it would go away, but he’s argued so long and hard for it, that he has no face saving way out.

And, should Anon ever decide to play with the big kids rather than confining themselves to the sandpit where they can fling mud pies, they have the potential to be a powerful force. They are certainly smart enough, if misguided. Any blacklist will get leaked almost weekly. The update frequency on Wikileaks (currently not publishing as they try to fund raise – maybe you could donate?) will go through the roof!

The only real problem we face in the #nocleanfeed argument is our good manners. When we’ve couched something badly, we take the beating. When we argue well, we let the opposing forces argue against us and take the beating. It leaves us without a strong position and no driving story. Nobody really knows what we stand for. As Mr Newtown eloquently pointed out to me, “[like the US] everyone knows exactly what the American right wing claims to stand for, but nobody knows jack about what the
lefties represent.” Same with the #nocleanfeed lobby and to a relatively significant extent, the EFA.

We need to switch our approach. Argue hard. Point out the fault in the opposition argument. In public. In strong terms. Cut their legs out from under them.

Jason thinks there’s no strong, consistent framework for couching #nocleanfeed arguments. He’s wrong. Here it is, and it’s so simple your Luddite family members can understand:

• there’s no serious Internet content problem to solve – you just can’t inadvertently stumble on RC or child porn on the Internet
• even if it was, nobody wants the government to solve it – if they did, free filtering software would be incredibly popular
• even if they did, this solution won’t work – we’ve seen the trial results and the extensive analysis which points out the flaws
• even if it did, it’s too expensive, unreliable, performance-sapping,
  scope-creeping – ouch, ouch, ouch and no way
• even if it was perfect, it’ll be administered by governments ill-equipped to do so – we’ve seen several policy and program stumbles lately, do we want one over this?
• even if it was administered perfectly, the blacklist will leak – and leak, and leak, and leak, giving infinite publicity to exactly the content the government wants to suppress (you’ve heard of the Streisand Effect, right?)
• there is no possibility that the blacklist won’t leak – it already has and it will again

There’s your framework. Work those arguments. Expand them. Point out the risks of Nanny Stating. The disconnect between the government and the electorate.

Sounds like a strong movement with a great argument to present to me.

Related posts

• On folly, freedom and filters (8)
• The Great Firewall of Canberra (14)
• Not the publicity you’re looking for – Stephen Conroy, the clean feed and TIME Magazine (1)
• No Clean Feed protest (0)
• Hubris, Open Internet and Clean feeds (4)

When we’re designing products, applications and services, we always bang on about how important it is to consider the customer, or user (I’m going to use those terms interchangeably in this post). But just how much do we really consider them? And how often do we compromise in favor of some product or business limitation?

While I realise (abundantly so) that we can probably never create the perfect product or service, I’d like to argue in this post that the primary consideration we need to focus on as user experience designers, service designers, marketers or whatever, is the voice and view of the customer.

I don’t think it happens nearly enough, nor well enough. And, truth be told, I’m as guilty as anyone of this.

Let me set the scene.

You’re designing, or redesigning your product or service or your web site or your bricks and mortar store (or doing it for a client). You’ve been given the imprimatur to “focus on the customer” and you start sketching out what you believe is the ideal experience.

You focus on flow. On creating delight in the user’s mind. On achieving the desired outcome with the least inconvenience, fastest path and fewest number of hurdles you can. You ensure any limitations of the business or technology or infrastructure are hidden with helpful smoke and mirrors so the customer gets the job done.

Then you present your design to the project team, or key stakeholders, or someone else with a vested interest and it all goes to crap. You hear things like:

• the legacy systems don’t work that way
• the price is wrong because you haven’t factored in the development costs or costs imposed by some other factor
• the order of fields in the form is wrong because the way the code will be written is easier if it’s this other way
• you haven’t considered factor X which is the primary business concern of a particular stakeholder business unit

And there are any number of others.

But where’s the voice of the customer in all of this?

Of course, in any project you need to balance the business requirements against what’s actually deliverable to the customer or user. But I’d argue that at no point in the project should business requirements outweigh or force a compromise in the experience you deliver to the customer.  You should never expose your problems, limitations or issues with the business to the user or customer. If you do, you’ve failed in delivering the best experience.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that those issues don’t exist and that you don’t consider them very carefully. But you don’t expose them to customers. You use whatever smoke and mirrors you can. You do clever things under the hood. Or you even change the business to remove the problem so it’s no longer a problem at all.

Here are a few real and virtual world examples I’ve come across lately to show what I’m talking about:

• banks increasing interest rates outside or in excess of official increases because the GFC has made their part of the business (trading and moving money around) more expensive
• justification for a higher-priced product than competitors because the R&D, innovation and rollout costs had to be offset somewhere
• a request to change the order of fields of a web form because it would be a hassle to code and pass messages to legacy systems in the order that was best for customers
• an inability to deliver a new web-based product to customer expectations because of an unwillingness in the business to adapt or change old practices

While these are all valid business concerns, and absolutely need to be addressed, they need to be addressed and resolved on the business side of a project. They are issues that should never be exposed to the customer. Not least because as customers, we just don’t care what your business issues are.

So, here’s a quick list of voice of the customer concerns you should ask yourself every time you encounter an objection to delivering to customer expectations:

• am I exposing a business concern to the customer?
• am I delivering the product, service, whatever at the best possible price that’s competitive with the alternatives?
• am I making it as easy as possible for the customer?
• if there’s a barrier or process I’m exposing, does passing it offer the customer a tangible benefit?

Your thoughts?

Related posts

• Workshops (0)
• Why are we even arguing about this? (8)
• Wake up! (3)
• Transitions (4)
• Three thoughts on social media for 2010 (4)

This afternoon, Senator Stephen Conroy, the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy made the announcement so many of us had been dreading – that the Federal government would be going ahead with its plans to filter Australian Internet access and unnecessarily protect us from nasties we neither want nor need to be protected from.

It represents imposition of Nanny State government of the worst sort. Arguably, it places us alongside extreme and totalitarian states such as Iran, China and North Korea in the level of control placed upon Australians’ Internet access.

It would appear that vested interests, dominated by appeasement of fringe Senators such as Steve Fielding and their constituencies in the moral and religious right have wielded their increasing power and brought about the policy position they have been pushing for, as on first reading, the report doesn’t provide compelling enough numbers to justify moving forward and, as we’ve seen many times in the media, community support for this policy is not widespread.

The reaction on Twitter, a place that politicians are now listening to, is singularly passionate. As I write, WhatTheHashtag has recorded in excess of 6000 tweets in just a few hours and the tag is the #4 trending topic overall. It’ll be swamped when the Americans wake, unless we all tell our American friends who can then laugh at the stupidity of the entire exercise.

This issue is the #1 reason I stood for and am now on the Board of Electronic Frontiers Australia. I am passionately against the foolish policy position that this represents and am keen to hear from any reader who wishes to email me or comment here. I’ll make sure your views are taken to Parliament House in Canberra and given to the right people.

There are any number or already well-discussed reasons why this plan is folly – expense, ease of circumvention, lack of widespread public support, lack of transparency and adequate governance in the blocking process. There are any number of far less controversial measures the government could undertake that would satisfy both sides of the argument on ‘Net filtering. Let’s start with opt-in filtering for both homes and ISP’s as noted by Internode tech and outspoken anti-filter campaigner Mark Newton. There’d be little outcry if this was the policy executed. People could choose to filter on their PCs at home, or if that was too challenging, choose to use an ISP that offered a filtered feed. Everyone ends up happy as those who don’t want filtering get to have unfiltered connections too.

The arguments that are pro the filter are incredibly spurious and usually couched in “it’s for the children” terms. We’re supposedly going to protect them from ‘Net nasties and the burgeoning ranks of pedophiles waiting to pounce on them online.

Bollocks.

My 12 year old daughter uses a completely unfiltered Internet connection. She also has root access to the network at home and to the computer she uses. Yet she’s never encountered any of the problems Senator Conroy and the likes of Senator Fielding seem to believe are rampant – no nasties, viruses, stalkers or any other undesirable in several years of using the Internet unfiltered and mostly unsupervised. And you know why? Good rules and decent parenting (well, certainly the first and hopefully the second).

Yes, there are risks to being online, They’re remarkably similar to the risks you face in meatspace. Here’s a handy list of things to try to effectively protect your kids online in case you’re confused at this point:

1. Make sure the computer your kids use is in a public, well-trafficked part of the house
2. Educate yourself as a parent so that you have as much knowledge or more than your kids about the risks of being online
3. Establish reasonable expectations for their Internet use in terms of time online, acceptable standards of behavior in terms of online activity and what the real risks are (they’re much smaller in my view than the government, Federal Police and parts of the media would have you believe)
4. Teach them strategies to deal with undesirable content encountered online
5. Live up to the expectations you set for your kids in terms of your own Internet use
6. Impose penalties for breaches of the rules you set and stick to them

It’s my desperate hope that this foolish policy and the legislation necessary to make it happen are defeated in Caucus. If not, it’ll be one of the few times I’ll support a vote the Liberals take in the Senate when they vote against it.

Others have written their own thoughts over this important matter:

• Téa Brennan, who makes an impassioned pleas for sense and proper parenting
• Craig Wilson, who speculates the intelligent folk of the Australian blogosphere might just bring the government down
• Crikey’s Possum Comitatus, who examines the possible electoral fallout
• Will Briggs, a pastor in Tasmania whose faith-based views contrast strongly with others such as Senator Fielding
• Gary Sauer-Thompson, on his well-regarded blog, Public Opinion
• Jeff Waugh, well known Open Source and Software Freedom proponent
• technology educator, Dean Groom
• Chris Chesher from the Digital Cultures program at University of Sydney

If you’d like to do something effective, email and write (on paper) to your member and Senators and let them know how unhappy you are about this decision. If you’d like some guidance, EFA’s No Clean Feed campaign is a good place to start. You should also take a look at EFA’s response to today’s announcement.

Related posts

• On folly, freedom and filters (8)
• How we can win the #nocleanfeed argument (9)
• What a difference a week makes (30)
• The Great Firewall of Canberra (14)
• The 2020 Summit (3)

The release earlier this week of the draft report of the Government 2.0 Taskforce has the potential to be a watershed moment in the management and delivery of government and its services to the people of Australia.

I find it more than a little interesting that after not much more than passing interest in the Taskforce’s work from anything except the Australian technology media, the mainstream media has now picked up the story and seems fascinated. It’s also more than a touch humorous that the report from Australia’s leading financial newspaper, the Australian Financial Review, had to be copy-pasted into a post at the Taskforce blog because of the AFR’s ridiculous and reader-unfriendly paywall.

Others, both in the public sector and external to it have voiced the view that the report is well written, addresses all the right issues and suggests a number of well-considered approaches to the problems of reforming government and the work it does. I couldn’t agree more. While there are the odd overly bureaucratic turn of phrase or suggestion in the report, they are forgiveable. This is after all, a report for government about government business – it must speak to its target in language it understands and is comfortable with. How else can encouragement of needed change occur if not in the language of those you seek to change?

I’ve engaged several times with members of the Taskforce and at event they’ve run as a part of their work. I’ve been more than impressed overall with the way the majority of the members have gone about their business and particularly in the way they have sought to walk the talk on the types of practices, behaviors and business they are working on.

But as of December 31, everything changes. The Taskforce disappears and in some way, shape or form, the work of the Taskforce becomes business as usual in some part of the byzantine machine that is the federal government. All that enthusiasm, interest, and modeling of the way things could and should be potentially goes dead in the water on 1 January.

I think this is an incredible risk. If the momentum that has been created becomes a part of some busy (albeit probably enthusiastic) bureaucrat’s work, handed to them to manage in addition to the mountain of work they already have, what happens? Does the work continue? Who remains to prod and poke, generating action, when people like Nicholas Gruen, who has been an outspoken agitator throughout the lifetime of the Taskforce, are no longer there?

Without a determined agitator and without rapid and decisive action on the part of the government, any outcomes from the Taskforce’s report risk being implemented by committee in some yet to be determined time frame. We risk ending up with a camel rather than the sleek, agile quarterhorse we have should the report be actioned in the way it recommends.

Should that happen, the greatest risk becomes inaction and apathy. If that occurs it will be a terrible waste and a great shame. I hope it is very much not the case.

What remains to be seen, and will undoubtedly be the most complex hurdle for all of this will be the hobby horse I’ve been riding throughout this journey – cultural change. Without a willingness to and action on cultural change in the public sector and at the legislative level, many of the recommendations will come to naught. Without explicit and powerful support from above (all the way to the Prime Minister) and all through APS management from Secretaries and agency heads down to EL1s (and equivalent), and the necessary support and education throughout the ranks, change will be terribly hard.

Even with the changes to the APSC guidance on public servant involvement online, FOI reform, and the dropping of control and filtering I am beginning to hear about, all of these things and the recommendations of the Taskforce will be incredibly hard to make happen without the cultural change, support and education that will lead to good execution of the recommendations and the attendant policy and practice reform.

I believe the willingness and capacity to make this all happen in the best possible way is there, I just hope that it all doesn’t get swallowed up by bureaucracy and people so busy they can’t make things happen. Making sure this is the case will be the hardest thing the government and public sector has to do on 1 January.

Related posts

• All those who stand and wait (2)
• Government response to the Government 2.0 Taskforce Report – my thoughts (8)
• Gov 2.0 culture needs nurture (and a catalyst) – and we’re not there yet (19)
• What a difference a week makes (30)
• Welcome, Prime Minister. Now, please engage. (8)

This post is being published in Marketing Magazine‘s 2009 Media Guide. I’m not sure when or if MM are publishing it online.

Over the years, I’ve probably dedicated somewhere in the low-mid six figures in words to the subjects that interest me:

• user experience
• social media
• web strategy
• knowledge work and the people that do it

Most of that writing has pointed to or discussed aspects of these things and how I believe they can work together to increase the potential for any business to be more successful. As I’ve done so, it seems a number of people have chosen to take notice, even when I’ve railed against the apparent obsession in the marketing industry with using social media, in particular, to try to sell stuff. I stand by my words, even in the face of some well-argued counter opinion.

So, what am I talking about then?

What I’m talking about, is really caring about an investment in your strategic approach to all of those factors – user experience, social media, web strategy and knowledge work – over at least 12 months, and preferably longer, anything up to five years (and occasionally more). I’m talking about embedding these things into your business culture and taking a long bet on their value as a success factor over time.

Too often, and increasingly, I’m seeing those new (where new is less than several years) to the game get all hot and bothered over the “faster, faster, faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death” approach many, including much of the marketing industry, are taking to social media. It’s all about selling, and Twitter Boot Camps, and short term, non-strategic approaches.

Breathe in… And out… Pause for a moment and look out to the horizon. Try to (metaphorically speaking) peer over it. There. Doesn’t that feel better?

If this, do it now, do it fast approach is your model for getting clients involved in social media it is doomed to failure. Sure, it might work for this campaign, or that one. But over time? Not a hope.

Sure, the world moves fast these days. We all know that. But businesses still require strategy over time, and measurement of the inputs and outcomes of that strategy. You can’t measure that success based on three month campaigns.

So, what do I propose? Here’s a short list to start chewing on. Some of it consists of things to do, others are about my view of the world.

1. Social media isn’t new, but you’re probably new to social media – Make an effort to understand some history. Learn about how the things you’re doing now on social networks have existed in society, and inside the walls of organisations long before you ever knew about them – knowledge work, collaboration, communities, sharing, mentoring, nurturing.
2. Strategy is a multi-part thing combining business, technology and community – All of these things must be in balance before they will work together properly. An imbalance will hurt your business, your client, your technology or your community.
3. Don’t try to sell as the first thing you do – That community part of your strategy, the people you used to be able to call users, or customers? They don’t like it. And they will let others know. As much as we slam the door on salesmen on the street, we will slam the door in your online face too if what you bring to the table is pressure to sell to us.
4. What happens to your campaign and its community in a year? – If the campaign you’re about to launch is successful, someone (perhaps many someones) are going to get emotionally invested in it. What plans do you have for them? How are you going to support that emotional investment over time?
5. Users aren’t – Nor are they customers, or eyeballs, or click throughs, or viewers, or whatever other term you choose to try to tack onto them. They are human beings. They are excitable, fallible, ingenious, dumb, clever, and everything else all at once. Treat them like humans and they’ll respect you for it. Treat them like a demographic or a metric and they won’t.
6. Who else might benefit from your strategy? – Have a think about this. What if another business unit, or another business altogether, or a friend, or someone on the other side of the world could benefit from what you’re building? What additional benefit in terms of social capital, in whuffie, might you get if you shared your ideas rather than sticking them like Rapunzel in some impenetrable tower?
7. It’s not about you – As much as you, your employer and your mates might consider you a genius, you’re probably not. Somebody has in all likelihood pitched your idea to their boss or client already. If you’re putting together a strategy, take a look around to see who’s succeeded and failed before you. Pick over the bones, gather the best ideas and mash them up to build something of real value for your client or business, not something to highlight your CV (if the idea is good, it’ll end up there anyway).

But how is this about long bets?

Well, it’s this. While I’ve misappropriated the term, “long bet” for this piece (long bets are actually about much longer term thinking and outcomes than one to five years – they’re worth reading about), I want you to consider the possibilities if you took the four things I mentioned at the start of this piece – user experience, social media, web strategy and knowledge work – and built your strategy for the work you’re doing, whether it’s for a client or your own business, with them in mind, over at least a year. What benefits could you realise? Who could get involved? What additional opportunities for innovation or ideation (is that really a word?) might arise?

Caring about the people who are going to experience your campaign, or strategy, or product, or whatever, counts for a lot. It wins you points. People will talk about you. Treat them well and that will talk about you more. Treat them well over a long time and they will talk about you a lot more.

Everyone reading this is probably a member of a social network of some description. It’s in social networks, whether they are real life at the football or the pub or online on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or the internal social network in your business, that they’ll do that talking. And those places are their turf. You need to play by their rules. Page takeovers, intrusive ads and shouty salesmen just annoy people. And sooner or later, they’ll shut you out or invoke Gilmore’s Law on you.

Karma can be great, or it can suck. Depends on the flavor. Share some of the knowledge you build and the things you’ve learned around and you’ll get less of the sucky kind.

And please, whatever you do, think strategically. Think about the long view.

Related posts

• Work (0)
• Why are we even arguing about this? (8)
• What will the future of media look like? (15)
• Oops… Another big brand slips up on social media (10)
• Money lenders, temple, door (14)

NOTE: The article below is my contribution to the Centre for Policy Development’s Insight: Upgrading Democracy, which consists of several pieces from well-known thinkers and doers in the Government 2.0 sector and was CPD’s submission to the Government 2.0 Taskforce. It is republished here because I like to keep everything in one place.

‘There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.’

— Niccolo Machiavelli,The Prince (1532)

One of the biggest hurdles for the public sector and legislators tasked with fulfilling the promise of Government 2.0 will be the cultural change involved.

Culture change is tough in any organisation, let alone in huge, distributed, diverse and largely conservative organisations such as federal and state public services. Yet it is this change that will be the -or-break factor in the transformation that the Government 2.0 Taskforce will advise the Federal government on and that other levels of government (and other governments across the world) are also seeking to .

Change is an uncertain thing. How do we convince others of the need for the change? How will we be successful? How do we define success? How do we measure that success when we don’t even know where the journey of change might take us? And how do we go about making change happen despite this uncertainty?

The Government 2.0 Taskforce is moving ahead fairly well in defining the issue for its audience and incorporating input from the Gov 2.0 community of interest. There are some significant issues that the Taskforce will need to address when it delivers its report:

• a lack of a cohesive ‘whole of government’ approach at any level of government
• a view of accountability that inadequately rewards those responsible for success and innovation
• inadequate trust and permission models across public sector management
• a need to shift to openness as a default, including removing the reticence to participate and obstruction of participation
• a negatively-coloured perception of risk

Of course, these issues are not problems for all individuals, nor even their agencies, in the Australian public sector. They are, however, representative of the public sector generally, based on my experience as a public servant and my time working with the public sector as an outsider.

In New Zealand, the US and the UK, the public sector has been equipped with well-publicised rules of engagement for workers that permit them to actively engage with the public in online communities. These rules are ably backed up by existing codes of behavior that govern overall public sector employee conduct. In Australia, such rules exist, but the weight attached to them, their currency, the level of publicity and explicit, high-profile support for them from either Ministers or the most senior levels of the public service is largely missing or unclear.

No wonder both individuals and agencies are largely confused or indeed, oblivious, to what the position is on the engagement of public servants online.

Other nations have appointed both Ministers for Digital Engagement and, in the case of both the US and the UK, senior public servants whose ambits include digital engagement. In the US, we have seen the young, vibrant and demonstrably engaged, Vivek Kundra, the United States Chief Information Officer, driving change from the top. In the UK, Andrew Stott is the Director of Digital Engagement, and is also leading the way, connecting directly with the public and public servants. These people understand the online environment and its importance to the advancement of the Government 2.0 agenda, and also visibly live and breathe the culture it requires.

In this country, we have neither a Minister nor a senior public servant with carriage of digital engagement as a specific responsibility. Some Ministers even seem at cross-purposes. The Internet censorship agenda being advanced by Senator Stephen Conroy, is in fact anathema to the Government 2.0 model. Yet Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner is strong in his support for a reform agenda that can hardly be enhanced by a filtered and potentially slower Internet.

In my time as a public servant, and in my experience since, the model of accountability that we see in the public sector is largely tied to responsibility for action and carriage of blame should something go wrong. Again, this is not true of the entire public sector, but it does represent the perception you get from the whole.

Taskforce member, Martin Stewart-Weeks of Cisco noted recently that, ‘We need a theory of “accountability 2.0″ to match the instincts and values of gov2. Any ideas?’

My response to Martin argued that it was not just accountability that was needed, but also new models of authorship, trust and permission. In order to achieve the cultural change needed with the least possible resistance, several things must happen.

First, I believe a mandate to implement these reforms and to behave and implement in the required way is needed from the highest levels. The Prime Minister and the Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet should be the ones that deliver this mandate to the Australian Public Service (APS), to remove any possible doubt about whether agencies and individual public servants are acting in accordance with the wishes of the elected government. They should be supported by the APS Commissioner, the Finance Minister in his capacity as the Minister responsible for the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) and the Special Minister of State.

And, second, the sometimes closed culture of the public sector must be shifted to one in which:

• the creators of innovative programs and thinking are identified for their good work, publicly and often
• openness and publication of material is the default (it should be noted that the FOI reform agenda of the current government is moving this way)
• all public servants are explicitly and implicitly permitted to engage with the public online (and offline) where they have the necessary expertise to do so, and
• public servants are trusted by their senior executive and Ministers to not just do their job but to do it in the public eye and in concert with an engaged, contributing public.

An example of the need for this is alive and kicking now in the work of the Government 2.0 Taskforce. As noted by Matthew Landauer of OpenAustralia, just one of the public servant members of the Taskforce has seen fit to engage via the online channels the Taskforce is using, whereas almost all of the non-public servant members of the same have engaged in some way. This is unfortunate.

There is an active Australian Government 2.0 community on Google Groups. Yet, very few of the many public servants who participate there do so officially. Many of them have explicitly stated that they are unsure or afraid of the consequences of doing so. They use personal email addresses and are sometimes reticent to discuss not only what agencies they work for but what projects they are involved in. That this approach is viewed as necessary by so many is disappointing.

Third, and finally, there needs to be a change in the negative perception of risk in the public sector.

It is not often that you encounter a public servant whose perception of risk encompasses risk as an opportunity to innovate. You more often encounter a fearful perception of risk that imagines how an adverse outcome might be difficult to explain for the member of the Senior Executive who will be questioned in Senate Estimates. You can hardly blame public servants for being risk-averse in these circumstances – so the circumstances must change.

All these changes must be supported by relevant and ongoing education and mentoring to ensure that the public sector is equipped with the skills to manage this transformation with the greatest opportunity for success.

I’m under no illusion that the change needed in the public sector at all levels of government will be easy. So, what to do? I do not have all or even many of the answers. But I have many ideas. As do others. It is when these ideas are allowed to come forward, treated seriously and acted on equally seriously that we will have the most opportunity to bring about this much needed change.

So, public sector, let’s act. Let’s “take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things”.

Related posts

• Public engagement. Public empowerment. (10)
• Connect.ed – The story of a girl (7)
• Government 2.0 – reinventing eGovernment or something different? (16)
• BarCamp Sydney #4 – Saturday, 15 November 2008 (0)
• What a difference a week makes (30)

Just this weekend, a major event took place in Washington DC – Government 2.0 Camp. It brought together 500 thinkers and doers who seek to engage and transform government in such a way as to make the executive and legislature more open and responsive, more engaged with the public and to ensure that the public, public servants and politicians at all levels are more able to collaborate and engage with each other to make the business of government better in every way.

At the same time, in Canberra, we held our second ever BarCamp. We even had a Federal Senator along in the form of Kate Lundy! More than one talk was about the need to transform government in this way.

BarCamp, the US event and our discussions were the catalyst for the creation of Government 2.0 Camp Australia. At the moment, it’s nothing more than (an already active) Google Group, but we’ll have a web site up this week some time.

So what’s it all about? Well, let’s start with a definition adapted from Government 2.0: Using Technology to Improve Education, Cut Red Tape, Reduce Gridlock, and Enhance Democracy by William Eggers:

“Unhyped and therefore unnoticed, a cultural and technological change is altering the behavior and mission of city halls, statehouses, schools, and federal agencies across the world. From transportation to education to elections to law enforcement (or, as we’re now referring to it, “homeland security”), this cultural revolution, aided by technology is transforming government and politics, slashing bureaucracies; improving services; producing innovative solutions to some of our world’s thorniest problems; changing the terms of the Left/Right political debate; and offering ordinary people access to a degree of information and individual influence until recently accessible only to the most powerful citizens, finally redeeming the original vision for our democracies, and transforming life and society in the process.”

Government 2.0 Camp Australia, to be held in Canberra, the national capital (soon, but we don’t yet know when or where), will be a BarCamp-styled unconference welcoming ideas and opinions from across society at all levels – the public, the executive and our politicians.

Join the Google Group to ensure you keep up to date on progress of Government 2.0 Camp Australia. And tell anyone you think might be interested – point them here or the group.

Related posts

• What a difference a week makes (30)
• The prosaic politics of the tweet (27)
• Government 2.0…it can be a reality (16)
• The opportunity of Government 2.0 (with little MarComms) (1)
• The 2020 Summit (3)