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)

The transformation in our culture since the mass availability of the public Internet has occurred more rapidly than any previous change in society. Like all changes that bring about a transformation, this one has, and continues to take place in leaps and bounds rather than at a linear, more manageable pace. These leaps are uncomfortable. They bring about feelings in us all that are akin to that which we feel riding a roller-coaster — some nausea, an odd sensation in the pit of the stomach, and not a little disorientation. Get used to it. It’s still going on and we’re on the biggest trip ever. At least for now.

We live today in a world of rapidly increasing connectedness. We are connected to each other as individuals and in groups in a way that changes everything. And I do mean everything — education, families, business, government, causes, empowerment, culture, globalisation. Everything. This school, indeed any school, or any government, business, organisation or person that remains disconnected for much longer risks an ever-increasing marginalisation in the face of a hyperconnected world.

Set aside for a moment that large parts of the world remain not connected to the Internet. Those parts that are are visibly, measurably different to how they were 15 years ago. They are even markedly different to five years ago.

Of real significance amongst these changes, is the change in the way humans now learn. It is important to understand that the formal education I went through, and the vast majority of those teaching today went through, bears little or no resemblance to either the way we or our kids themselves learn when left to our own devices nor to the way the real world operates. The real education revolution that needs to occur is a transformation based on that understanding.

This connectedness, which began back in the mid-90′s with the introduction of the public to the World Wide Web has introduced us all to a network of people, places and possibilities we simply did not have access to before that time. And we now depend on that network. Deeply so. It’s about trust. About relationships. And about being something more than we are, intellectually and personally, that we can be without the network.

I remember my first hesitant steps into the online world, around 20 years ago. As an early adopter, they were at 14.4K per second and on the pre-public Web world of CompuServe. After 1998, CompuServe was swallowed up in the rapid expansion of AOL, becoming just a part of that behemoth. In the years I was online with CompuServe before that, I was a part of a much smaller, yet no less fascinating network of people, places and possibilities — interacting with people far and wide, as far away as remote northern Canada, Brasil and Scotland on things that we were collectively fascinated by; science fiction, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels and fitness.

I’m still fascinated by those and other things 15 years later. Though my community — the network I share those fascinations, and others, with — is now vastly larger and richer than I could ever have imagined in my early dabblings on CompuServe.

Size and richness are just two of the important measures of the hyperconnected world we now live in. When we go online and choose to participate in that global hyperconnected community, a third aspect takes form. We each become a cell in a great hybrid nervous system, electronic and human, that often is difficult to understand. But the core aspect of that nervous system. The very heart of it is collaboration. Sharing.

As nodes in this system, we are both sender and receiver, seeker and finder. And there is an expectation that we collaborate and share that which we both seek and find. And the very act of sharing, of collaboration, adds immense value to the network each time we participate. That value goes far beyond the simple, single act that takes place. The whole is very much greater than the sum of the parts. This sharing has been a part of what the Internet has been about since the first servers were switched on back in the late 1960′s. But now we’re in a position to do something rather more substantial.

When we first went online, none of us were quite sure what to do. I remember seeing the personal homepage of the person that introduced me to the web. It was a prototypical “About me” page. An early form of what we see today on any business web site and on the multitude of blogs and other profiles we create online. Who am I? What do I do? I like Vegemite, do you?

Well, now we know. We know who you are. We know what you do. We share your love of Vegemite and a cornucopia of other things through shared experience online. Through tweets, blog posts, Facebook status messages, pokes, likes, ratings, links.

This sharing, divorced from the tool by which it’s shared, but all borne on the same carrier wave, is where things begin to get profoundly interesting. It’s not the technology that’s the cool thing (though at times that’s cool enough), it’s what we do with it, together, that’s got legs.

Perhaps the crowning glory of the shared online experience is, rather than the color of your tractor on Farmville, the in excess of 100 million hours of effort taken to produce the English language version of Wikipedia. In the words of my colleague, friend and educator, Mark Pesce:

“…what is new about Wikipedia?  Simply this: the idea of sharing.  Wikipedia invites us all to share from our expertise, for the benefit of one another.  It is an agreement to share what we know to collectively improve our capability.  If you strip away all of the technology, and all of the hype – both positive and negative –from Wikipedia, what you’re left with is this agreement to share.”

This capability to share, and through sharing, transform culture, is the thing that has become the most powerful, most enticing, most terrifying part of what the online world offers us.

Interestingly, many schools and other educational institutions place so little value on the sharing, knowledge and effort that has gone into Wikipedia over its existence, that they ban its use as a research tool. How quaint.

Of course, as humans, we don’t always make the most of the power accorded to us. Some of the sharing done online is less than edifying — the excesses of public voyeurism through videos of bullying and the defacing of Facebook tribute pages set up by people mourning a loss and without the knowledge of how to curate that space to protect and preserve its cultural value show that sharing need not be an act that adds to the world.

Those that share negatively have learnt the skill of sharing, but not the human attributes that go alongside it of empathy, compassion, love, respect. They sometimes lack a certain maturity. Perhaps it is the case that the offline networks into which these people share — their families, friends and physical social networks also lack that maturity. Perhaps too, they are unskilled in the ways of the online world and are pushing its boundaries as a child does with parents and teachers. Or perhaps they are just getting their jollies.

On the other side of the coin, those of us that share positively do so with an astounding variety. Some of us share inanities — our lunch, a new piece of clothing. Other share deep feelings — love, anger, amazement, joy. Still more act as creators, gatherers and gardeners of knowledge, whether that’s as profound as climate science, or as superficial as better ways to play World of Warcraft. It all adds value. It all makes us senders and receivers.

If we are to send and receive, to act as a node, we must shoulder a level of responsibility in the management and distribution of the signal we carry. We must learn to become good digital citizens.

As educators, the teaching of good digital citizenship is arguably one of the most important skills you can pass to those in your charge. You have a hand, as big or bigger often, in the development of those you teach than do their parents. Not only that, their parents are often lacking in the skills needed to teach digital citizenship. Few of us were brought up with the Web as kids are today. Even five or six years ago, few online social networks existed. You are in a position both enviable and unenviable; you get to be the first adults to teach the digital natives how to be a tribe of nobles rather than savages.

Good digital citizenship is a complex notion. It involves aspects of technical competence, familiarity with changed culture and emotional intelligence all at once. Wrapping these together, and dealing with them well in the context of a rapidly changing online environment is immensely complex. Yet, we’re all exposed to this environment, and from an increasingly young age.

There’s no way to examine these three aspects in isolation from each other. They are inexorably wrapped up in each other. In examining one, so many aspects of the others are apparent that the taks is futile.

Technology moves apace. The mobile phone I use today is barely that. Rather it’s a complex converged device providing telephony, messaging (in various forms), access to the Internet in familiar ways such as email, chat and the Web as well as less familiarly, with point solution tools such as Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and the emergent augmented reality applications I can use. There’s significantly more computing power in my hand than sent the Apollo missions to the Moon. And significantly more even than the first desktop PC I owned in 1991. Let alone raw functionality.

I’ve another point to make about mobile devices, but I’ll get to that a little later.

We’ve already discussed the cultural and technological revolution wrought by the Internet, but let’s remind ourselves. This thing that was originally created to ensure the persistence of United States’ defence information in the face of the outbreak of nuclear war and pass esoteric data between academics has utterly reshaped Western society and is having no less impact in Asia and Africa, though the tools being used there to conduct that impact are somewhat different.

The Pew Internet and American Life project reported last year that 46 per cent of US adults have used a social network on at least one occasion, with 27 per cent using one within a day of being surveyed. Here in Australia, the latest ComScore research indicates a massive 96 per cent social network membership of some sort amongst Internet using adults. With more than a quarter of Australians with an active Facebook profile, there is a massive community out there connecting and sharing. Granted, it’s not all deep, but it’s certainly meaningful.

But how meaningful? The answer is very.

Being connected to each other online, rather than being a large pool of unconnected points, has had a number of profound behavioral impacts. We now use social networks more than we use email and search. This has singular implications for society; the very way we interact, share, relate, trust and learn has been transformed and continues to undergo transformation, much of which we can’t yet begin to imagine. The very behaviors and changes we’re seeing are themselves emergent and unpredictable. And their implications are significant.

Let’s start early.

Today, children begin forming relationships of real substance in preschool. It’s at about the same time many of them are beginning to use the Internet. It’s not inconceivable that many children will establish loose ties with each other at this early stage that will persist through hyperconnectedness across the span of their lives. I can see this in my own daughter, Hannah, who has maintained a relationship with her best friend from child care, Shannon. They connect regularly from half a world away, and in just a few weeks, will see each other physically for the first time in seven years when we visit them on a trip to Washington DC.

As she matures, Hannah is adding more and more relationships to the network she exists within. They possess both physical and virtual elements, and will continue to do so over the coming years. She has the opportunity to foster and maintain a network on a scale that I simply could not at her age, and cannot now, no matter how many people I meet and enjoy the company of.

The value of that network, as it grows and is curated; as she cherry picks who to be close to and who to be loosely associated with, grows in value with each node added. Each new cell in the system provides value not only to its neighbors, but also to the distant, loose connections. It may be a connection several years and many steps away from the hub that is Hannah, that proves of special value at some point in the future.

But this also illustrates a problem. The sheer scale of the network that Hannah will exist in is orders of magnitude greater than that of her grandparents’ and still significantly larger than that of her adept, but still, digital immigrant, Dad. The only way this network will be able to be easily maintained will be through careful, ongoing curation and breaking of the network down into more granular chunks — these are Debating Club people, and overseas friends, and swimming friends, and people I know through Mum and Dad. That kind of curation is simple at small scales, but incredibly difficult on the scale that Hannah will need to manage.

On top of the vast number of relationships having to be managed, is an ever increasing volume of data that needs to be made sense of — email, links, web sites, news, video, audio, podcasts, and more. It’s simply not possible to store this in your head. The notion of our tools as “outboard brain” has real credence; whether we’re collecting information for a public speaking engagement as I did using Evernote, or storing easily forgotten phone numbers in our mobile phones, conveniently synced with our contacts online, or making lists of friends and where they fit into our lives on Facebook.

So, how does this fit into education?

My belief, as someone who is not an educator, but is passionately interested in both my own ongoing education and that of my daughter, is that hyperconnectedness has so fundamentally changed education that the model we’ve operated under to now is no longer relevant. We have little time left to change and it’s not going to come with the Education Revolution.

As hard as it is to keep up with technological changes, the emergence of new platforms and tools, and an understanding of the benefits and risks they may offer the networked teacher, student or parent, is a core skill for modern educators.

Equally, an understanding of the culture of the network is critical. Who connects to who. Why? How? To what end? Where is the value? What is my role in this new world where the value accorded expertise is decaying as access to factual material, and even rich interpretation and context is becoming a trivial task.

It’s simply not good enough to say “I don’t have the time” or “It’s too hard, I can’t keep up.” Others do, and are. And your students certainly are. If you can’t be their guide through the technological changes, you can no longer be the mentor they need in the networked age of education.

The model for the class room, from a child’s first day at child care right through to the very end of tertiary education is fundamentally broken. We still operate according to rules established in the 19th Century to train compliant workers for the factories of England’s Industrial Revolution. I’ve also seen it described more than once, so I don’t lay claim to the idea, as the “airplane model”; get in, sit down, face forward and be quiet.

In schools now, too often, technology is a part-utilised add-on. More often, it’s crippled. And the network of connections? Ill-used and piecemeal, even in the best schools.

When I talk with educators, many know what they should do, but have lacked the resources to do so. We now have those resources at hand, if we use them and share.

Education must become the place where the network is best utilised. Where use of tools is taught well and goes deep. We now have the resources to create an age where the boundaries of the classroom break down, where the exploratory learning we so value in giving small children is extended to the class for older children.

The hyperconnected world has created a new way of doing things that run strongly counter to the power relationship inherent in education before now. The conflict that this sets up will be the deciding factor. Can education change to cope with the open, shared, collaborative future of the hyperconnected world, or will it try to insist on maintaining its position of power and thus disengage from learners who will go about seeking their own learning?

Let’s then look at some real-world, practical examples, beginning with one of my personal bugbears, blocking and filtering the school network and providing students and teachers with crippled hardware.

It was back in February 2009 that I wrote a fairly short piece entitled Blocking never works. I absolutely stand by the core premise of that piece, which is that providing people with whom you work — in the context of schools that’s teachers, other staff and students — with a less than full access experience to their hardware, software and online access infantilises them. Imagining that this crippled experience is somehow better and provides you shiny, happy people who will compliantly obey your edicts is foolish at best and deeply damaging in many cases. Better to, as I said in that article:

“…make sure your [people] are empowered to use social tools at work but also understand with crystal clarity what is and isn’t acceptable.”

Now, of course, I have no problem with schools trying to block porn from their network. It’s a rare workplace that such access is ever necessary. But the sheer availability of such stuff and the ease with which it can be sought, and make no mistake, it must be sought, it cannot be “stumbled across” as the Communications Minister would have us believe, makes the task fairly pointless. Rather, I say teach proper behaviors. Make students and staff aware that their Internet use can and will be logged. Being watched is as good or better filter than a filter itself.

Further, and research bears this out in a multitude of cases, schools and workplaces that have filtered Internet access are more likely to have cases of attempts at inappropriate access than those that have unfiltered access accompanied by appropriate guides to behavioral expectations. They also tend to have students and staff with less rich understanding of what it takes to be a responsible and safe digital citizen with a well-managed and appropriately curated online identity.

Here in Australia, the NSW DET is notorious as a particularly stringent restricter of access to hardware, software and the Internet. The people at the Department have obviously not read the report from their British colleagues at the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills, whose report, The safe use of new technologies, released in February this year noted in particular that in respect to locked down systems such as those being released under the laptops for schools program here:

“this approach had disadvantages in the schools visited. As well as taking up time and detracting from learning, it did not encourage the pupils to take responsibility for their actions.”

Far better to teach some responsible behaviors and technical skills in order to manage the tools properly.

Additionally, the same report noted that with respect to managed, but not locked down systems, including hardware, software and Internet access, that an environment of collaboration and sharing, where responsibility was given and expected to be taken that it:

“…[provided] them with richer learning experiences; and [enabled them] to bridge the gap between systems at school and the more open systems outside school.”

In other words, blocking access to the Internet, and particularly to social tools — the parts that form the third places in the network — may ultimately prove more distracting — and potentially more dangerous — to students.

We hear, more often perhaps than we like, about how difficult it is to engage kids with technology. I don’t think we should be surprised at all. After all, the moment they enter class, we make it abundantly clear that the core piece of technology that connects them into the network, their mobile phones, is anathema to the learning experience. This too has been given the lie in several pieces of research. One particular case in the US, mobile phones, ubiquitous amongst students, are used as a teaching tool, providing access to teaching resources of various sorts and being used as a way to notify students of work due. This school finds they have less misuse of the technology than if they banned it.

And of course, this becomes progressively more difficult as students get older. You won’t find an adult educator who can successfully get a class to switch off their devices. Far better to have students use them productively in class than sneaking furtive use when your back is turned.

Next, let’s look at the way kids learn and the benefits available to teachers through the network of sharing.

For teachers, as much as students, the network or organisations and individuals available to them extends now well beyond the classroom, the school and even the city you live in. Failing to take advantage of this network, placing yourself both as the hub of your own network and as simply a point in the multitude of other connected networks, does you a great disservice.

Imagine this network; you are connected to your peers through shared experience, knowledge and understanding, your students are connected to each other by the same network, you and the students are connected. And that network then extends out through a multitude of nodes, each providing a slightly difference perspective, or pool of knowledge or set of experiences. This network, which, given its scale, might as well be infinite, extends to parents, the community. The classroom stops being four walls, some desks and chairs. The physical construct becomes as irrelevant as the intellectual one. Neither hold any longer.

The class, no longer bound by a room, can observe itself from the outside, or observe and participate in any other event or happening. The potential richness of this experience is limitless. Equally, the outside can observe the class, in context, in real time or after. Parents can see the magic happen.

Today, Hannah’s learning environment is the entire world. Arguably it’s larger than that. More specifically, it’s this — Hannah’s learning environment is the hyperconnected world she finds herself a part of on a constant basis. She’s connected continually to experiences and groups from which she learns and contextualizes. Most of those are not mediated in a classroom environment, and many of them are amongst her peers. This will become more so as her ability to socialise and collaborate with her peers increases in complexity and becomes more refined.

As a group they, and others like them, are entirely collaborative, conversational and community focused. She’s connected into these learning experiences on a constant basis through mobile phones, her iPod, the tools she uses like wikis, blogs, online bookmarking and social networks, and any one of the several ‘Net-connected devices she encounters during the course of her day. Often, those experiences are massively parallel — IM and text, while reading or editing something online and listening to something else or conversing with the group in the room. Hannah and her peers are a part of an environment beyond the classroom that empowers them and puts them in control. That allows them to follow the white rabbit down the hole of connectedness until their curiosity is sated. This form of learning is also multi-directional. Hannah teaches as much as she learns. The network responds to her as much as she to it. They are, as Don Tapscott puts it, “the ‘Net Generation”.

Arguably, her learning experiences in the classroom are becoming progressively more irrelevant as the learning experiences she undertakes beyond the class — deliberately or coincidentally — more directly prepare her and equip her with the skills she will need to successfully tackle the 21st Century. She is more connected to, and more contextually so, to what digital ethnographer Kevin Kelly termed “The One” than any generation before her.

In generations to come, this will be seen as natural. Right now, it presents an enormous challenge to many educators and education bureaucrats and policymakers in the political arena as they struggle to keep up. Certainly the Prime Minister and Education Minister, as keenly interested as they are in education, by no means envisioned this as their Education Revolution.

This approach is as accessible to teachers as it is to students. You can and ought to participate in the richness the network affords. Your own literacy in the tools, the culture and the network itself is a critical component of your ability to mentor students through the emotional, social and technical maze that they are navigating. If you are left behind, you will, in short order, decrease in relevance to modern learning. That places you in an unenviable position; unable to adequately mentor your students and teach them not only the content of their class but what it means in the greater context of their existence as humans in the 21st Century, you may find yourself and your outdated skills consigned to the same scrapheap the Industrial Age classroom model finds itself.

To move to where I propose teaching and learning needs to go is no trivial task. It will require a singular will and no small amount of reimagining what the school experience looks like. But we’ve done this before, in so many parts of society, including schools when we transformed from the unstructured learning and one-to-one transfer of skills largely based around the family farm to industrialised society where we went off to work leaving our children in the charge of others to be taught. This will be no less a leap.

But now, we have the network not only to learn from, but to help us. Its value is manifold. We can use the network and the sharing we do on it to transform education as much as we use it as a tool of education.

Imagine the possibilities.

Related posts

• Connect.ed – The story of a girl (7)
• BarCamp Sydney #4 – Saturday, 15 November 2008 (0)
• Public engagement. Public empowerment. (10)
• Enterprise 2.0 – Enabling change or part of the problem? (7)
• Speaking at GOVIS 2009: User-centred government – More than meets the eye (2)

Only confirmed in the past few days, I can now reveal I’ll be keynoting the Webtrends Engage 2010 Australia Conference at the InterContinental Hotel in Sydney on 21 April.

While I’ve not yet really decided just how I’ll address my subject matter, loosely described by Webtrends as “his perspective on the digital world”, I promise not to deliver just another “social media is the new way and it is awesome and you can sell lots of stuff with it” talk.

You can hear as many of those as you want at ad:tech.

Rather, I intend to do a bit of crystal ball gazing, a bit of reflection on the past and present, and  a look at just how the existence of our hyperconnected world really has transformed business and society, for better and worse in every corner of the globe.

Related posts

• BarCamp Sydney #4 – Saturday, 15 November 2008 (0)
• What will the future of media look like? (15)
• Wake up! (3)
• The conversation has rules (0)
• Telstra’s guardrails – smart move (1)

When you’re given just 20 minutes to cover the notion of the more open business models the proliferation of social networks encourage, there’s not a great deal of time to waffle. Hopefully I didn’t the other day, when I gave this talk to close off the speaker sessions at the Technology to Drive Growth workshop at the National Growth Summit conference in Sydney.

Today’s business world suffers many problems, many of them seemingly intractable through their complexity and frequently changing scope. These problems now have a name, wicked problems.

A 2008 survey by Neutron Group and Stanford University asked 1500 executives to cite the most complex of the wicked problems they faced. Looking at just the third:

Innovating at the increasing speed of change

we can see that change is a big issue.

The increasing pervasiveness of access to the Internet and the empowerment that access places in the hands of the stakeholders of a business – staff, executives, stakeholders and especially customers – makes business innovation a key differentiator today. If we go online to look for a new fridge, or computer, or flowers for Valentine’s Day, or a holiday, there’s so much on offer that we need a better way of making a choice. Often, we’ll choose the most innovative provider of that service or product.

But what do I mean by innovative? A few year back, everyone was defining this in terms of Seth Godin’s Purple Cow. I think that’s a good starting point. We do want remarkable products. But flowers are flowers, right? A fridge is a fridge? A book from Amazon is the same as the book from Borders. So it’s rarely the product itself that’s the differentiating point.

The differentiation point is, in part, reputation and customer focus. Which provider do my trusted, expert friends recommend. What is it about the provider that they recommend? Is it incredible customer service? Is it the little touches like chocolate mints in amongst my hardware orders (like one online store I shop at does)? Is it that they put a human face on an otherwise faceless company?

Let’s focus on the last of those points, because it goes very directly to the point of one of my favorite books, The Cluetrain Manifesto, and to the heart of what I’m talking about.

While Cluetrain presents us with a comprehensively argued 95 theses for better, more human business, I want to focus on just the first. Markets are conversations.

Anyone whose ever been to a fresh produce market in Australia, or open air markets anywhere in the world will understand this completely. Things get done in business in these situations because people talk to each other and act in a human way.

Market segmentation, one of the favorite tools of businesses over a certain size, divides their potential customer base into demographics they can then target their sales and marketing efforts at. I’d argue that while you might want to do this to understand what your market consists of, it gives you no insight into who your market consists of. And, in today’s connected, ever-changing world, we need to know who we’re providing our product or service to because they are so empowered by the hyperconnected world they live in that the market segments break down.

Every customer is now a market segment of one.

And you better know them. Personally. And treat them like a human being.

Because, it’s a demonstrated fact that if you don’t, it’s going to backfire on you in a big way. You could suffer irreparable brand and business damage if you fail to treat your customers like humans.

So you do you behave like a human business and treat your customers the way they frankly deserve to be treated; as humans?

Start by listening. Listen online and off. Make sure you know what people are saying about you, about your products and about your competitors.

And, when you hear something, reach out. Ask “how can we make this better?” or “how can we improve?” or, perhaps unusually, point out someone saying bad about a competitor to that competitor and let them know they need to fix it. If they don’t, then it’s your chance to get that customer. After you’ve been the good guy first.

It’s not that hard. It’s just a case of ensuring that in all things, you continue to act like a human, instead of that inhuman construct we’ve managed to create for ourselves, the business. Sometimes, that acting like a human leads to good that you can’t immediately measure in dollars but that has a profound impact (BTW, great job on this Telstra. You won a lot of friends for this).

At the core of behaving like a human in business is the notion of trust. Particularly trusting your staff, every one of them, to be a face for the business and empowering them to take action on behalf of the business to do good, to solve problems and to make sure that issues go to the person in the business who knows how to solve them.

And trust your customers. They know better than you what they want from your offering. So ask them. Not as you’re about to take something to market, but all through the process from concept to delivery. It’s like having a 24x7x365 focus group on hand. And you know what? Do something nice for the customers that helped, something human, if they made the product better by their ideas.

Business has always been about keeping secrets. About hiding your ideas. But what happens when you switch that on its head. You don’t necessarily have to go the whole radical transparency route, but what about exposing your ideas, your thinking, and the humans that work for you? Make these things your point of differentiation. Make them the things that keep you innovative as you adopt an approach that keeps you agile and razor focussed on delivering the best products and services you can.

When you hide, and keep unnecessary secrets from your customers (of course there will always be things you don’t reveal – but think about what they should be), your failures can, and will go global as disgruntled customers, some of them with mighty big soapboxes, point out your failings. You get what you deserve.

It is far better to be out there, being human, being trusting and trustworthy, being open. Wouldn’t you rather be a part of the conversation than the subject of it?

I believe by combining these factors into a formula, we can have a little fun with this, and also make some sense. So here it is.

Conversation + Trust + Openness = Delight, or more simply C + T + O =

Focus on that. Imagine.

Related posts

• Why are we even arguing about this? (8)
• BarCamp Sydney #4 – Saturday, 15 November 2008 (0)
• What will the future of media look like? (15)
• Wake up! (3)
• The conversation has rules (0)

The presentation below is the slide deck from my opening keynote at yesterday’s AIS NSW ICT Integration Conference 2009: eConsumers or eProducers?

It went over very well. The teachers and other educators seemed enthused by my contribution to their event. A sound file, that I will sync with the slides, is coming.

The title, from the dedication in E.M. Forster‘s Howard’s End urges that we “live in fragments no longer“. Pretty amazing for something from 100 years ago. In education, that we teach and educate in fragments no longer is a key success factor to my mind.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

If you’d like a copy of my speaker notes, that can be arranged if you ask nicely

Related posts

• BarCamp Sydney #4 – Saturday, 15 November 2008 (0)
• What a difference a week makes (30)
• Enterprise 2.0 Conference – Implementing Enterprise 2.0: Exploring the Tools and Techniques of Emergent Change (7)
• acidlabs on The Scoop – Generation Virtual (1)
• Why are we even arguing about this? (8)

This short talk is to be delivered to the IBM Smarter Workforce – Government Leadership Forum on 9 September 2009.

“Every dystopia is a utopia turned inside out… The problem isn’t in the basic idea, it’s in the arrogance of implementation. It’s in the idea that we will get it right the first time.”
- Steven Lloyd Wilson #

Government 2.0 is more than just eGovernment with a new name. eGovernment in Australia has largely focused on delivery of services and programs via online or connected means – an admirable agenda that has in large part been successful in the 10 or so years it has been a priority. But online delivery is just a part of what Government 2.0 offers.

My personal view is that Government 2.0 is an unhelpful term. As with Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 before it, it somewhat unintentionally puts technology in people’s minds and creates visions of something large, expensive and complex that will be done to government rather than by government and misses the point about the groundswell culture and practice change supported by technology that is arguably the more substantial and world-changing aspect of the thing.

Tim O’Reilly, one of the co-creators of the term Web 2.0, and now passionate Government 2.0 advocate, describes Government 2.0 as requiring a shift to platform thinking, where government provides the platform for amazing things to happen – think highways, the Internet, GPS (all originally created by government) – and builds services on it, but also opens it up in order for citizens and business to build their own applications, products and services. Ones not considered or even dreamed of by government, but using the infrastructure and data provided by government.

Still, this description focuses on the tools and technology. I think the end game Tim is moving towards is systems thinking – considering government and all the things it does as a part of much larger, contextual puzzle. If we focus on the tools and technology, we risk becoming obsessed with minutiae that hide the real possibilities.

To my mind, the tools and technology are the scaffolding upon which Government 2.0 can be built – a critical part of the whole, but not the answer in and of itself. Rather, for Government 2.0 to succeed, we should focus on the models delivered by 2.0 thinking – lightweight, agile, responsive over reactive, prepared to make small mistakes, open, collaborative – and the fact that at its heart, it’s about people.

So, let’s begin with a useful definition, the definition used by the very active Australian Government 2.0 community that has gathered on Google Groups to discuss the subject. I’ve chosen this definition not just because I had a hand in making it, but also because I think it’s one of the most balanced out there:

Government 2.0 is not specifically about social networking or technology based approaches to anything. It represents a fundamental shift in the implementation of government – toward an open, collaborative, cooperative arrangement where there is (wherever possible) open consultation, open data, shared knowledge, mutual acknowledgment of expertise, mutual respect for shared values and an understanding of how to agree to disagree. Technology and social tools are an important part of this change but are essentially an enabler in this process.

You’ll see from the definition that there’s a significantly larger picture that needs to be understood, explored, experimented with and ultimately implemented to make Government 2.0 the reality it can be.

Government 2.0 makes a deliberate effort to break down what can seem impenetrable barriers of bureaucracy and introduce a more human face to the executive arm of government. Public servants are encouraged to engage with each other and with the public where possible, within their own spheres of expertise. Rather than outbound communication from agencies to the public, the discourse becomes conversation – amongst the public sector, between the public sector and the community, and amongst the various parts of the community itself. This conversational approach offers many benefits – the public sector is kept constantly attuned to the needs and wants of the public, the public is less baffled by bureaucracy as they are in more frequent touch.

Borrowing heavily from the culture of Open Source, Government 2.0 assumes that publicly open, multiple and rapid iterations of policy, of programs, of ideas is a good thing. Not necessarily for everything government does, but as and where appropriate. Adopting this practice allows for a more agile approach to policy development and program delivery. The big bang approaches of the past where services delivered by the public sector are found to not be suitable for some reason but are unchangeable and therefore an expensive waste of funds and effort due to the implementation model, can be replaced with an approach that sees things tested in public and subject to change as shifting priorities and needs are identified.

The Government 2.0 Taskforce itself is using this model to help identify the priorities the public want to see returned to the government in its report. So too are events such as Senator Kate Lundy’s Public Sphere, which have proved measurably successful and have cast the net wide for input and expertise. Efforts in other jurisdictions too, have seen significant success in prioritising policy, funding and human resource needs. Just last week several announcements here and overseas moved the conversation along.

New Zealand’s State Services Commission has announced NZGOAL, an experiment in licensing Public Sector Information with an appropriate license in order to adopt, as they say in the announcement, “principles which embrace, among other things, the notions of open access, open licensing, creativity, authenticity, non-discrimination and open formats”. They very deliberately state it is an experiment, designed to be iterated and improved over time through input from many sources. This announcement and what it means has been noticed here and as far away as the UK by senior members of the Parliament, as well as by advocates of more open licensing of PSI.

In Australia, we have moves in this direction too. The FoI reform agenda will necessarily see a change in licensing for some material, it’s a change that has already been adopted by some organisations and there is help available from the Government Information Licensing Framework for agencies unsure how they should more permissively license their data for reuse

Just last Friday, NSW Premier, Nathan Rees announced at the first NSW Sphere event that not only would the NSW Government be sponsoring a $100,000 competition for development of applications that made innovative use of public sector data, but also that “Governments have to overcome old habits of secrecy and control. We’ve got to be interactive. The old one-way street style of politics has to go.”

This announcement bore more than a passing resemblance to the Prime Minister’s words in last week’s John Paterson Oration at the Australia New Zealand School of Government Annual Conference, where he emphasised the need for an innovative, open, outward-looking APS and a culture within the APS that supports these things. It also echoed the words of outgoing Commissioner Lynelle Briggs who has more than once stated the need for a citizen-centric public sector and the need to look outside the boundaries of agencies to academia, to business and to the public themselves by using systems thinking to solve “wicked problems“.

The solving of wicked problems and a truly citizen-centric approach to government will mean that the ability for the public sector and the legislature to connect closely and collaborate with those outside government must be enhanced. Amongst other things, approaches like this support and enhance the government’s Social Inclusion agenda.

Moving our public sector to a culture, set of practices and technologies that actively embraces Government 2.0 is high on the agenda of the current government with the Taskforce due to report on its findings at the end of December, the Prime Minister expressing his desire to see these types of changes and Minister Lindsay Tanner strong in his support for culture, practice and technological change that will support this agenda. I have no doubt that it presents a significant challenge for public servants of every generation, but the promise it holds can deliver better evidence-based policy, more targeted programs and an open environment where the public sector is no longer an inscrutable mystery to large parts of the community but is something made up of real, approachable human beings with names and who really care about us – it’s not that these things aren’t already the case, but by adoption of Government 2.0 they become a given.

Government 2.0 is so much more than just eGovernment with a new name.

In closing, I’d like to quote the position on Government 2.0 from the Obama campaign.

“We need to connect citizens with each other to engage them more fully and directly in solving the problems that face us. We must use all available technologies and methods to open up the federal government, creating a new level of transparency to change the way business is conducted … giving [people] the chance to participate in government deliberations and decision-making in ways that were not possible only a few years ago.”
- Obama campaign policy statement #

Related posts

• Public engagement. Public empowerment. (10)
• BarCamp Sydney #4 – Saturday, 15 November 2008 (0)
• Connect.ed – The story of a girl (7)
• Culture in the New Order (1)
• What a difference a week makes (30)

UXDers often rely on personas to build a more complete understanding of the types of users that will interact with the applications they are working on. Writing the stories for those personas used to be hard for me until I started using other stories as inspiration for them.

This is a completely unscientific, highly incomplete and deliberately light-hearted look at some of the personality types you find in communities, online and off. Think about how these and other stories might be used as the basis for your persona development.

This was a 5-minute lightning talk for Webstock Mini and updated to a 10-minute talk for UX Australia 2009.

Related posts

• Conferences, inspiration, value (6)
• The Rules… Or not so much (2)
• IA and UX jobs – what makes the cut? (0)
• TakingMaking it easy (3)
• Work (0)

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.

In 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.

Related posts

• Public Sphere Camp (1)
• Inform. Engage. Empower. Enact. (3)
• Culture change for Government 2.0 (5)
• YourHealth – clever consultation, minor issues (0)
• What a difference a week makes (30)

The text and slides below are for my session at Public Sphere #2 – Government 2.0: Policy and Practice which is being held at Parliament House tomorrow. The talk is just 10 minutes long, so I don’t go into any real depth – but it is a nice, quick overview.

For something organised quickly and on the enthusiasm of volunteers and the power of whuffie, it’s going to be quite the event! Make sure you watch the twitter stream for #publicsphere, the live blog and the video stream (all details at the link above).

UPDATE: Video now available.

Public Sphere: Government 2.0 – Stephen Collins from Kate Lundy on Vimeo.

In our modern democracy, the ability for members of society to participate in some way is a fundamental and accepted right. Indeed, we use the term participatory democracy to describe one in which constituents are empowered to engage in the political decision-making process.

There has until recent times, been a burden of activity and wherewithal required that has meant only those with a singular desire to engage with the process of democracy – either at the legislative or executive level – have truly been empowered to do so. Whether that has meant by lobbying, protest or civil unrest, letter-writing or even the burdensome process of being elected to some form of legislature, it has been a task that took real effort.

How things have changed.

In the 21st Century the old, largely broadcast model has been broken. The ability for people, anywhere, to participate has shifted thanks to a medium, the Internet, that is ever more ubiquitous, more social, and relatively cheap. We really are all a part of a huge melting pot posessed of the capability to participate. One-to-one and one-to-many communications are no longer the optimum modalities. We are now the inhabitants of a many-to-many world.

In recent times, as we have seen in the near-instant distribution of news in China after the Sichuan earthquake and in the coordination of political action in Moldova, Egypt and most recently, Iran, the capability for production and participation has been bolstered by the easy availability of networks where each participant is both broadcaster and receiver. A desire to participate, an increase in real or sought-after freedoms, relative ease and low cost of connectedness and the ever-accelerating power of tools that connect people online now means that there is a massive supply-side surplus to the ability of people everywhere to engage actively and meaningfully in the political process.

The power of networks is such that for every new node – each new person – the power of the network increases exponentially. We are hyperconnected and there is no going back. In fact, we are leaping ahead at pace.

It is more than time for our social institutions – for government – to join in. They are no longer the broadcasters, apart from the conversation. They, and we, are of the conversation.

But there is a problem.

Governments are largely used to mostly talking at the constituency rather than with the constituency. It’s not their fault. It’s simply the way things have always been.

So why is it a problem?

It’s a problem because in today’s hyperconnected world, a legislature and an executive that isn’t engaged in a close, many-way conversation with the public it serves is no longer fit for purpose. Both risk rapidly increasing irrelevance if they fail to adapt to the new world; one in which the public can, will and has done for itself where bureaucracies are too slow to respond to emergent needs and changes in opinion. In a hyperconnected world, to invoke Gilmore’s Law is easy – the connected community will route around the damage and do what needs to be done without the help of government.

There are attendees here today whose organisations are living, breathing examples of this very action – OpenAustralia, the Centre for Policy Development, TweetMP. We’re all empowered to do more than we could be in the past by our communities and our connectedness.

Today’s event is called The Public Sphere. The term, coined by German philosopher and sociologist, Jürgen Habermas, defines a place, physical or virtual, where open discussion of issues prevalent in society can take place and political action to remedy those issues can be formed. A strong, civil public sphere is a fundamental underpinning for a functional and successful liberal democracy.

Members of governments here, in the UK, in New Zealand and most particularly and publicly in the US, say many of the right things about participatory government underpinned by a connected and engaged society. This is a much needed first move. But it is only the first. It is far from the end game.

In a society as connected as Australia, where according to recent research from Forrester, 3/4 of Australian adults online use social tools, 1/4 create their own content, around half are members of social networks, government needs to be present in online communities, listening and responding and sometimes talking. A public service that is disconnected from the public it serves through the government of the day is no public service at all. Rather, it is a bureaucracy. Impenetrable. Byzantine. Inscrutable.

The legislature and the public service need to take action to participate online in a more sophisticated way than previously. This will require a fundamental shift in views on openness, risk, conversation, community, collaboration. A shift in the who, the what and the where. This will be a difficult task. But it is one that we must do soon if Australia is to be truly the clever country we have claimed to be for so long. There are well-evidenced benefits to innovation and creativity from collaboration of all kinds.

It is a misquotation to use it here, Churchill will no doubt spin in his grave, but it seems apt. A public service not engaged in active, ongoing conversation with the public “is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key.”

That key is a change in culture.

Australia is arguably a few steps off the pace with respect to the public sector being comfortable, and often, even prepared to engage with the community in a conversation aimed at collaborating on making our democracy better.

In this case, one of two things happen, and occasionally both. First, the public sector risks being inadequately informed of the needs and wants of the public and risks giving bad advice to government resulting in bad policy, programs and legislation. And second, the public may grow increasingly frustrated with the public sector, and through it, the government, for not heeding their mood.

I doubt anyone here today considers either of those outcomes desirable.

The right moves are being made at high level. But too slowly and not publicly enough.

The APSC has had a document in draft, Circular 2008/8, since December last year that lays out a largely workable set of guidelines for online engagement of public servants. But why is it still a draft seven months on? The APS Commissioner who is speaking here later today, recently gave a speech to the John Curtin Institute of Public Policy that laid a framework for a much richer engagement with the public that squarely places the citizen at the center of government. And the most recent State of the Service Report makes specific mention of the need for government and the public to engage more closely.

When I speak with public servants as I often do, too few of them at any level, are aware of these documents, the policies they embody, and the strong push for this new openness and engagement. In conversation, I hear many arguments against open engagement between government and the public. Too hard. No skills. Management resistance. Not allowed. It’s not the way we do things.

We need to take action to remove whatever it is that causes these blocks.

There are many public servants at all levels of government who stand ready, willing and able to engage directly with the public if only you will let them. They are knowledgeable and capable and proud of their work. They will help you govern and help you develop and deliver better government by being deeply connected into the communities they serve. By being a trusted, real and human part of those communities. If only you will let them.

We need to actively encourage change within our parliaments and our public sector that removes the resistance to this engagement. It is far easier to point out the size of the chasm than to start building a bridge over it.

As politicians and public servants we should be ensuring our colleagues and our staff at all levels are empowered to participate and provided with the skills they need to engage with the public openly and on an as-needed basis within their spheres of expertise.

And we need to do it urgently. Urgency does not imply haste, it simply implies rapidity.

And this culture change is urgent. Of this have no doubt.

As a former public servant, as someone who works with the public service today and as a member of the public, I, and others like me, believe this is a matter of national importance and that we must act soon and decisively.

And, as people who understand how both the public sector and the online world work, we want to help.

Together, we must reboot the model for engagement between government and the public to make it more open, more human, more frequent, more of a regular conversation focused on listening. And we must empower public servants at all levels and not just official communicators to be those that engage.

If we make that change, our governments and our public sector can be more relevant to the people; enacting policy and programs and delivering services that really matter and working hand-in-hand with an engaged, informed public participating in government.

Not only Yes We Can, but Yes We Must.

Related posts

• What a difference a week makes (30)
• Wake up! (3)
• The prosaic politics of the tweet (27)
• Public engagement. Public empowerment. (10)
• Government 2.0…it can be a reality (16)

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 21st 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 24x7x365, 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 21st 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.

Related posts

• Government 2.0 – reinventing eGovernment or something different? (16)
• BarCamp Sydney #4 – Saturday, 15 November 2008 (0)
• Speaking at GOVIS 2009: User-centred government – More than meets the eye (2)
• Culture in the New Order (1)
• Connect.ed – The story of a girl (7)