In an historic decision, the High Court has struck down legislation which resulted in the early close of the electoral rolls and denied over 100,000 Australians the right to vote.

The decision is a landmark victory for representative democracy, political participation and accountable government.

The case was a constitutional challenge to the validity of changes to the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 made by the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Electoral Integrity and Other Measures) Act 2006. The Amendment Act resulted in in the electoral roll being closed on the day on which the electoral writ is issued for new or re-enrolling voters, and three days after the writ is issued for voters updating enrolment details.  Previously, the electoral roll remained open for a period of seven days after the issue of the writ.

According to the AEC, historically, the calling of an election has resulted in significant numbers of persons enrolling or changing enrolment during the 7 day period, particularly young Australians.  The 7 day period enabled the AEC to advertise and promote enrolment and target particular groups with information campaigns, including Indigenous Australians and people experiencing homelessness.  At the 2004 Federal Election, approximately 423,000 people enrolled, re-enrolled or updated enrolment during the 7 day period.

It is crucial to representative democracy and accountable government that all people have the right, and the practical opportunity, to vote.   The early close of the rolls, which occurred thanks to Howard-era amendments, denied over 100,000 people the opportunity and right to vote.   The legislation disproportionately disenfranchised Indigenous Australians, young people, people experiencing homelessness and people in remote communities. In so doing, the legislation diminished our democracy.

This decision, in ordering that the rolls stay open for at least 7 days to enable people to enrol or update their enrolment, restores and promotes the fundamental human rights to vote and, in so doing, enhances democracy and promotes representative government.

The challenge to the early close of the rolls was jointly conceived and coordinated by the Human Rights Law Resource Centre and GetUp!.  The Human Rights Law Resource Centre is a leading national human rights advocacy organization which, in 2007, established constitutional protection of the right to vote in the landmark High Court case of Roach v The Commonwealth.

The matter was run pro bono by an outstanding legal team comprising Ron Merkel QC, Kristen Walker, Fiona Forsyth and Neil McAteer of Counsel, together with Mallesons Stephen Jaques.

You can read the Court’s order here.

More Than Luck is a collection of ideas for citizens who want real change edited by Mark Davis and CPD Executive Director Miriam Lyons. A to-do list for politicians looking to base public policies on the kind of future Australians really want, More Than Luck shows what’s needed to share this country’s good luck amongst all Australians – now and in the future. Click here to find out more. Like what you’ve read? Donate to help make good ideas matter.

On 23 July 2010, the Human Rights Law Resource Centre and GetUp! announced a proposed action in the High Court of Australia to promote and protect voting rights for disadvantaged groups.

The case is a constitutional challenge to the validity of changes to the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 made by the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Electoral Integrity and Other Measures) Act 2006.

One of the results of the 2006 amendments is that the electoral rolls for new or re-enrolling voters close the day the electoral writ is issued, with an extra two days allowed for voters updating their enrolment details.  Previously, the electoral rolls remained open for seven days after the issue of the writ.

According to the AEC, when elections have been called in the past, significant numbers of enrolled or changed their enrolment during this seven day period — particularly young Australians.  The extra time enabled the AEC to advertise and promote enrolment and to target particular groups with information campaigns, including Indigenous Australians and people experiencing homelessness.

At the 2004 Federal Election, approximately 423,000 people enrolled, re-enrolled or updated enrolment during the 7 day period.

The stated purpose of the 2006 amendments was to enhance the integrity of the electoral roll.  According to the AEC, however, early close of the rolls does ‘not improve the accuracy of the rolls for an election’ but rather makes them ‘less accurate, because less time will be available for existing electors to correct their enrolments and for new enrolments to be received’.  An Australian National Audit Office performance audit of the roll in 2001/02 found that it was of ‘high integrity’ and that there was no evidence of widespread or organised fraud that needed to be addressed by closing the rolls early.

Both the Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Elections (2001, 2005) and the Senate Finance and Public Administration Committee (2006) have consistently found that the voters most adversely affected by the early close of the rolls are young Australians, and those with limited access to information, knowledge of the electoral system or means of enrolment, including people experiencing homelessness, Indigenous Australians, people with disability and Australians from non-English speaking backgrounds.

By contrast, Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights — which has been ratified by Australia — provides that every citizen has the right and should have the opportunity, without discrimination or any unreasonable restrictions, to vote.  Article 25 has been interpreted by the UN Human Rights Committee to provide that ‘States must take effective measures to ensure that all persons entitled to vote are able to exercise that right. Where registration of voters is required, it should be facilitated and obstacles to such registration should not be imposed.’ (HRC, General Comment No 25).

Pursuant to the principles established by the High Court in Roach v AEC in 2007, the plaintiffs, the Human Rights Law Resource Centre and GetUp!, will argue that the early close of the rolls is a limitation or impairment of the right to vote, that the purpose of the impairment is not demonstrably justified, and that the means of achieving that purpose are not reasonably appropriate and adapted, or proportionate, to the maintenance of the constitutionally prescribed system of representative government.

The plaintiffs will also argue that the early close of the roll and the consequent disenfranchisement of otherwise eligible voters, is incompatible with the constitutional requirement (ss 7 and 24) that the Houses of Parliament be ‘directly chosen by the people’.

More Than Luck is a collection of ideas for citizens who want real change edited by Mark Davis and CPD Executive Director Miriam Lyons. A to-do list for politicians looking to base public policies on the kind of future Australians really want, More Than Luck shows what’s needed to share this country’s good luck amongst all Australians – now and in the future. Click here to find out more. Like what you’ve read? Donate to help make good ideas matter.

Government 2.0

We are using the term Government 2.0 to describe the new opportunities presented by online technologies and social methodologies to achieve a more open government.

There are many wonderful Web 2.0 and bleeding edge initiatives in government, often done under the radar and on a shoestring budget. A successful “Government 2.0″ initiative may leverage various Web 2.0 tools as well as online community and consultation processes, but ultimately must have an outcome that is tangible and beneficial to citizens. It ought to make people’s interaction with government a more satisfying and personally relevant experience.

Some practical Gov 2.0 examples may include:

• Using GeoSpatial data to display the most accessible government services available to a young mother in Cowra.
• Using social media tools for constituent consultation on a new government proposal or legislative draft.
• A government agency making some of its data publicly accessible, and then working collaboratively with the broader community and industry in preparation for/the midst of an emergency situation.

Open Government

Open Government policies and practices provide benefits in different ways to different people:

• Citizens – having open access to information and decision making helps build trust and confidence in their government. Communities can effectively become part of the process, rather than simply having decisions imposed upon them.

It’s important at this point to clarify the distinction between the work of elected members of Parliament, which includes politician’s interactions with their constituents – and the administrative aspects of government, which include the delivery of services such as health, education and social welfare. With that in mind:

• Politicians – Open Government sets a higher bench mark for accountability for politicians. It also provides opportunities for greater and more meaningful interaction and to garner a broad range of community and expert perspectives, in order to make well informed decisions about important issues.
• Government administration – Open Government policies and practices lead to more effective and efficient service delivery and decision making by directly engaging with citizens to accurately define their needs and tailor services accordingly.
• Industry – Taking an open approach to government can produce some exciting secondary outcomes such as innovative use of Public Sector Information (PSI) in the private and public sectors, creating new opportunities for economic growth.
• A good example is the value adding by the private sector to open geospatial information generated in the public sector.

The benefits of Open Government, and open approaches generally can be summed up by Cory Doctorow :

‘Historically, openness – in the widest sense of the word – has been an important contributor to economic success: Open societies experience faster economic growth and political stability than closed ones.’

How government administrations deliver services within the context of both Open Government and Gov 2.0 presents a real challenge and leads us to the first principle of Open Government: how you make services genuinely citizen-centric.

The 3 Pillars of Open Government

Due to the convergence of impending faster network access (NBN), mainstream use of the Internet and online tools, the resourcing and ICT up-skilling of school children (DER) and the global shift towards e-Government and better online engagement with citizens, there is an opportunity to construct what we see as the three pillars of Open Government. These three pillars are citizen-centric services, open and transparent government services and facilitating public and private innovation.

1. Citizen-centric service – governments have a responsibility to serve the needs of citizens as best they can, and in a way that is individually meaningful to each person. Information can be aggregated and presented in a way that is personalised to a specific person’s need, all with very little information from the citizen (such as a postcode or work status).
2. Open & transparent government processes – citizens have a right to participate in the democratic processes in an informed and empowered way. This means creating a genuine means of engagement between citizens and governments in policy development and decision making. This partnership will become increasingly important as we as a society face new social, economic and environmental challenges that require rapid and well-informed responses.
3. Facilitating public and private innovation – there is some government data that for either security or privacy reasons cannot be made publicly accessible. However, there is a lot of data that can be published, and through open access – particularly in open formats – can be aggregated and value-added. 80% of government data can also be linked to a location, which provides both opportunities for delivering citizen-centric services through mapping, and provides the opportunity for public and private innovators to aggregate and present data in new and useful ways.

The core responsibilities of government, in relation to this third pillar, lie in:

• opening up appropriate government datasets for public use and mashups
• using open standards, open formats and open APIs
• ensuring useful metadata is collected, maintained and published
• applying permissive copyright to data to simplify management and use of data

While considering what the principles of Open Government should achieve, the question for us became ‘What can we do to translate the theories into practice?’. We came up with several ideas, one of which was the Public Sphere initiative. Our Public Sphere initiative is a practical attempt to tap into the wisdom of the crowd, capture and record those insights, and then collaboratively organise and draft them in the form of advice to decision makers.

The Origins of Public Sphere

Although Pia has only been working in the office for 5 months, we have known each other for 5 years and have often exchanged notes on where technology and democracy converge. This led to us collaborating on running a local summit called ‘The Foundations of Openness: Technology and Digital Knowledge‘ inspired by the Prime Minister’s 2020 Summit. In retrospect this local summit was a very basic prototype for Public Sphere. This event was supposed to be streamed, however we had limited success at the time. We did however have an overwhelmingly positive response to this idea.

The next incarnation of this type of interactive policy development came in early 2009 in collaboration with Adjunct Professor Tom Worthington (ANU) on the topic of Green ICT. Tom’s innovative use of Moodle in both events meant that we were able to capture the content in a perpetually open environment.

The third incarnation combined the lessons from the earlier prototypes. In early planning, the Public Sphere was designed to be purely a virtual environment for policy collaboration. After our research and experimentation, we realised that the inherent strength of the new online social media tools were most effective when used to complement a physical get together – a focused, timely and facilitated presence – ideally with a specific goal that people can rally around. This is why each Public Sphere includes a short conference-style event as well as the open online submissions period for input to the blog or wiki. The discussions are encouraged to be online, whether through Twitter, comments on the Live Blogging (which doesn’t require an account) or other methods. This means there is a continual and distributed feedback loop on what is being said or discussed, which helps us understand community responses to ideas being put forward, as they are put forward, and in a way that can be easily analysed after the event. In the traditional sense, people can physically attend the conference and network. However the idea is that people can participate equally in the process and discussions, whether in person or online.

We then wanted to capture everything in a meaningful way, whether it be a thoughtful treatise or a reflective tweet. We needed to do justice to people’s time, effort and expertise. Our task was to come up with a method that was collaborative and transparent, but resulted in a document presented in a digestible format for government decision makers. A wiki was the obvious tool.

In designing the Public Spheres, we’ve tried to combine the best aspects of a highly accessible conference that doesn’t disadvantage virtual participants; has a strong peer review process and applies the most collaborative possible process of government consultation.

The outcome from this process is a briefing paper which identifies all the ideas put forward, the community responses to the ideas and specific policy recommendations on the topic. This paper is then formally presented to the most appropriate channels in government. For instance the issues paper can be delivered to the appropriate Minister to assist with their decision making, as we have done with all of our Public Sphere briefing papers to date. In the immediate future, we hope that government agencies and departments could use a similar methodology to help them develop a well informed view which in turn becomes frank and fearless advice to their Minister.

Public Sphere is part of an ongoing experiment and we understand it is only part of the solution. We look to the exemplary Smithsonian example, where the actual policy itself was developed through a publicly editable wiki. Through our successes we hope to encourage similar innovations throughout government in crowdsourcing policy development to improve democratic participation in Australia and to work towards an even more open government through Gov 2.0.

Useful references

Writings and references by Senator Kate Lundy

The Three Pillars of Open Government
http://www.katelundy.com.au/2009/06/20/three-pillars-of-open-government/

Metadata conference opening address
http://www.katelundy.com.au/2009/05/28/metadata-seminar-opening-address/

Copyright Future: Copyright Freedom – dinner address
http://www.katelundy.com.au/2009/05/28/copyright-future-dinner-address/

Podcast interview with Professor Larry Lessig of Creative Commons fame
http://www.katelundy.com.au/2009/06/02/conversations-at-copyright-futures/

GLAM WIKI: Finding common ground – speech on access to PSI, current government initiatives and the importance of digitising and making available cultural assets
http://www.katelundy.com.au/2009/08/07/glam-wiki-finding-common-ground/

Spatial information: New Zealand steps up – speech
http://www.katelundy.com.au/2009/08/26/spatial-information-new-zealand-steps-up/

The Gov 2.0 Public Sphere briefing paper is a comprehensive list of resources, case studies and other useful information on this topic. It is compiled from the input of over 300 individuals
http://www.katelundy.com.au/2009/07/29/briefing-paper-and-recommendation-endorsements-from-public-sphere-2-government-2-0/

Writings by Pia Waugh

Gov 2.0 – Where to Begin (Parts 1 to 3)
http://pipka.org/blog/2009/07/08/gov-2-0-where-to-begin-part-1-of-3/

The Foundations of Openness – a paper on practical implications of closed and open approaches to technology. Meant as a guide
http://pipka.org/blog/2008/07/23/the-foundations-of-openness/

The Government 2.0 agenda is a way of thinking, through a technological frame,
about how to adapt our government in light of these trends. It is a way of thinking about how to make government smarter, cheaper, and more informed, responsive and engaged. It is a way of thinking about reorganising government organisations and people to be more focussed on citizens and on public value.

It is an ambitious reform project because it touches on big and disparate agendas - the efficiency, transparency and innovation agendas – and thinks about how to connect them in meaningful ways.

The issues involved here are subtle and often not amenable to ‘top down’ direction. Indeed, as the Government 2.0 Taskforce’s Issues Paper made clear, at a high level we already know what many of the answers are.

Government information is currently secret unless a specific decision has been taken to be open. We need to reverse that presumption so that openness is the norm unless there is a compelling reason to remain closed.

But the devil is in the detail. While the Australian government co-authored and signed OECD principles which endorse this approach towards openness, we are still a long way from working through all the institutional issues that must be addressed to realise it.

For that reason the Government 2.0 Taskforce has been set up to filter the government 2.0 agenda into a practical set of demonstration projects, tools, advice and actions for the Commonwealth.

The Taskforce has an investment fund to support projects which demonstrate the value of the two sides of the government 2.0 coin – online engagement and opening up access to public sector information. This is important because for those who doubt the benefits of government 2.0 a good example is often more persuasive than theoretical explanation of potential benefits.

The Taskforce has been engaging vigorously with Australia’s government 2.0 community. As a natural consequence of its brief the Taskforce has sought to conduct much of this engagement online, including through charting the development of its thinking through regular blog posts by members, and making a number of its key discussion papers open to early ‘beta’ review by the community. I both hope and suspect that this will become the norm for government inquiries.

As you read the submissions in this thoughtful compilation I’d like to you to keep in mind the following thought. For government, embracing the 2.0 agenda is a little bit like embracing a new language. Even strong enthusiasm for learning must be tempered with the realisation that the language cannot be mastered overnight. Inevitably there will be early errors of understanding and expression – errors that can seem almost inexplicable to those who can speak the language fluently!

The Government 2.0 Taskforce is the translator and language instructor for government on the 2.0 agenda. Its job is to sweep across government, highlighting the star performers, cajoling the laggards, and improving the fluency of government on the suite of issues which carry the 2.0 badge.

Contributions like those found in the following pages are crucial to this effort. They
demonstrate the government 2.0 truism that the community is served better when the insights and efforts of citizens can be used to broaden what we mean by the public service.

The term Government 2.0 means many things to many people – how would you define it?

“The aim of Government 2.0 is to make government information more accessible and useable, to make government more consultative, participatory and transparent, to build a culture of online innovation, and to promote collaboration across agencies in online and information initiatives.” Towards Government 2.0: An issues paper, issued by the Government 2.0 Taskforce, 23 July 2009.

“Government 2.0 is the adoption of Web 2.0 social platforms and tools inside government to help improve citizen engagement and collaboration between government and citizens.” http://localgov2.wordpress.com/2009/01/14/how-would-you-define-government-20/, 22 August 2009

“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.” http://groups.google.com.au/group/gov20canberra, 22 August 2009

“Authoritarian imposition of top-down policy has had its day. Citizens know more about their own communities than bureaucrats, and more about society than politicians. This age of ever-increasing connectivity obliges the Government to interact constructively with the community before and during policy development, rather than continuing the practice of dreaming policies up behind closed doors and only releasing them for public comment after the decision to implement them has already been made.” ( Mark Newton, New Matilda, 25 June 2009: http://newmatilda.com/2009/06/25/lessons-censorship-china-and-iran)

“I rather liked the [definition] a colleague of mine, Bill Gaylor (Public Sector Architect at Microsoft) spotted on GovLoop – Next Generation Government: Mobile, Measurable, Malleable

• Mobile: the idea that work is no longer a place, but a set of tasks that can be performed anywhere – whether that’s in a government-owned building in a major metropolitan center or a privately-owned family farm in the middle of Minnesota. In the private sector, this type of flexible work environment is already commonplace
• Measurable: But now you wonder: How will we know if anyone is really getting any work done in this brave, new, mobile environment? Well, I have a ready answer for you! We make sure that every aspect of our work is measurable. What better builds trust between manager and employee than a clear set of tasks with target dates and appropriate metrics? If I know what needs to get done and by when, why does the how and where matter?
• Malleable: Finally, when I heard words like inclusive, responsive, open, efficient, transparent, and innovative, I needed another “m” word…and malleable came to mind. Dictionary.com tells us this word means “capable of being shaped or formed; able to adjust to changing circumstances; adaptable.” As collaborative technologies make our democracy even more participatory, enabling citizens to become more actively engaged in decision-making processes through projects like the Open Government Initiative or the Recovery Dialogue on IT Solutions“

http://blogs.msdn.com/james_brown/archive/2009/06/23/do-we-have-to-define-gov-2-0.aspx, 22 August 2009

See also Kate Lundy’s three pillars of Open Government: Citizen-centric services; Open and transparent government; and Innovation facilitation  http://www.katelundy.com.au/2009/06/20/three-pillars-of-open-government

The relevant features of the open-source software development community in this context are as follows:

• transparency: the code is published, so you can see how it does and doesn’t work
• participation: you can submit suggestions for changes to the code easily, and permission to tinker with it yourself is preemptively granted via open source licencing)
• collaboration: a distributed community collaborates on continuous improvement of the code

In order to open-source policy development we need many of the same features:

• transparency: open-access government, in which the information behind decisions is readily available
• participation: the barriers for contributing to policy development are lowered by improving the opportunities to participate both online and offline, and creative commons licenses for government data free up citizens to tinker with it
• collaboration: cultures and communities of collaborative policy development emerge

A number of obstacles are stifling the potential for open-sourcing policy development. Two ideas on how to overcome these obstacles are briefly flagged below.

Obstacle to open access: lost revenue

The Taskforce (Issues Paper p.8) has taken the OECD principles on access to public sector information as its starting point, which includes the recommendation that costs for accessing information ‘should not exceed marginal costs of maintenance and distribution’. Some agencies have charges well above that level built into their business plans. Additional, Australia-focused evidence of the benefits of reducing or eliminating fees for access to data may be helpful, for example:

• Detailed research into the public value of ABS data and usage patterns of that data over time
• Analysis of options for opening up access to the HILDA data[i]
• An Australian equivalent of the UK study[ii] on Public Sector Information models commissioned by the UK Treasury and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform including costing of
  lost revenue if the most affected departments and agencies (for example ASIC[iii]) were to cut cost-recovery charges.

Obstacle to participation & collaboration: poor inquiry websites

The Taskforce Issues Paper quotes a comment from Andy Williamson that ‘failing to integrate online engagement fully into the policy cycle means that people see little point in being engaged’ (p.6). The point in the policy cycle at which better online engagement would result in the most immediate and fruitful improvements to policy development is the public inquiry phase. It’s time to find out what Inquiry 2.0 would look like.

The Gov 2.0 Taskforce has itself acted as a demonstration of the potential to advance from the conventional approach to public inquiries, with active engagement on twitter, a well-functioning blog, and nice use of the comment press tool to enable paragraph-by-paragraph commenting on its issues paper. A simple step for the Taskforce to take might be to develop or commission a basic checklist for the managers of government inquiries and their websites. In the long run, inquiry websites might include some of the following
features:

• Collection and publication of metadata about each (non-anonymous) submission, including the postcode of the author, whether the author is an organisation or an individual, which of the terms of reference or which paragraph numbers the submission refers to, keywords/tags for the submission, etc.
• Web submission forms that automatically search the database of existing ideas as the author types to alert authors to other similar submissions that have already been published (similar to the function currently provided by the http://uservoice.com/ user feedback service).
• Where submissions contain the results of quantitative research, authors could be strongly encouraged to upload the datasets on which their research is based along with their submissions.
• A ‘Policy Sandbox’ (the term is based on Wikipedia’s sandbox, which allows users to try out edits before submitting them), which allows registered users to create their own wiki version of a green paper and invite others to help them edit it. A text comparison tool (standard with most wiki software) could then highlight the changed sections, making it easy for individuals and groups to prepare submissions to the next round of the inquiry.
• A ‘citizen profile’ (this idea may possibly become easier once the existing plan for introducing a single sign-on for all federal government websites has been implemented), which allows people making submissions to track their submissions to multiple inquiries.

[i] http://www.melbourneinstitute.com/hilda/data

[ii] http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file45136.pdf

[iii] http://www.asic.gov.au/asic/asic.nsf/byheadline/Finding+out+about+other+companies?openDocument

Engaging with people online is not difficult. The tools are available and affordable and there is certainly no need to invest in building bespoke platforms. However the wide range of options and choices can, at times, be bewildering. The spaces where most people already congregate are optimised for commercial, personal and social outcomes, not for political discussion. Yet these spaces are often at the cutting edge of interaction, web design, privacy control and social expectations. How do we make use of these sites without abusing them, or losing track of the purpose for using them in the first place?

The following review of Web2.0 tools focuses on one unique feature of Gov2.0 – the ability for governments to shift from orators to conversationalists. We’ll therefore look at the potential of Web2.0 tools to improve the quality and reach of conversation between governments and citizens.

Tracking (finding the conversation)

Before we venture out into web2.0 to talk to people, we need to listen. Let’s say we want
to gauge interest in the National Broadband Network (NBN). We need to figure out what people are talking about first – so we’re not just barging into the conversation. Let’s come up with some search terms (‘NBN’, ‘National Broadband Network’, ‘Nbnco’, ‘Conroy’) and use some free tracking tools to find out what people are saying and to whom. Some good ones are Google Alerts (google.com/alerts), Social Mention (socialmention.com) and Twitter Search (Search.Twitter.com).

Now we can go out into those spaces with some preparedness.

Chatting (starting the conversation)

There are a number of web2.0 services that can fulfill some discussion and collaboration
functions. We’ll look at what sort of use you can make of the different services.

Twitter

The Benefits: Twitter is a great way of quickly gauging interest in an issue, and a call for responses put out on Twitter will gain a lot of interest. Twitter has also proven to be a powerful tool for the coverage of events and public hearings. Attendees can publicise and discuss the hearing in real time and engage with people who are unable to attend in person.  Twitter is definitely low-hanging fruit and a very fertile area for relatively little effort. The lesson: any public consultation should tweet at an early stage.

The Limitations: The biggest drawback is it’s hard to have substantive debate in the 140 character limit. Many Twitter users are fairly passive and tend be self-selected insiders and broadcasters. They are more likely to be interested in internet politics, telecommunications issues, civil liberties and the like. For more specialist issues we will need to target other spaces.

Examples: Senator Kate Lundy has done a great job using Twitter to discuss government consultation reform at http://twitter.com/katelundy. Conversations are tagged with the #publicsphere hashtag, and you can search for them here: http://search.twitter.com

Facebook

The Benefits: Facebook has far more people subscribed than Twitter, and there is more space for conversation to flow. You can also reach people who are not into the public performance element of Twitter. The privacy controls allow for a far more personal space and people only share the information they’re comfortable with. Another advantage is that there are more ’average’ (i.e. non-geek) users on Facebook.

The Limitations: You have to add people as ‘friends’ before you can engage substantively with them. Facebook also has quite onerous terms of use that may conflict with how government departments wish to use their information.

Examples: One way that Facebook can be useful in public consultation is through the use of surveys. Don’t let the simplistic (or annoying!) survey applications you’ve seen on Facebook put you off - the functionality exists to create more sophisticated and detailed ones. CNN’s Political Ticker shows one way a survey application can be used to host debate.

Obama’s first Facebook application successfully used the tool to promote his campaign and educate people around issues related to the election, as well as bringing like minded people into the election campaign. 

MySpace

The Benefits: While users are moving away from MySpace there’s still value in using it. It has a large youth demographic, often overlooked in government engagement. MySpace is a good place to begin the process of combined education and engagement – if the uncoolness factor associated with government can be overcome.

The Limitations: A MySpace campaign would have to be targeted to the site’s smaller, mostly youthful demographic and as such may not translate well to other age groups.

Example:http://www.myspace.com/impactau presents social issues in a youth-friendly way and promotes discussion.

Youtube

The Benefits: Youtube is great for promotion, particularly as its viewers increase and people move away from watching prime-time news. It also allows longer-form videos. Most accounts are limited to 10 minutes but this is still a lot longer than the average TV grab. As such, a video post can explain a policy in greater detail and in a more relaxed style. Youtube allows for comments and people can even post their response in video format.

The Limitations: While Youtube is useful for promotion and explaining issues in a personalised manner, the commenting function of Youtube is poor and overrun with trolls (users who post malicious comments to antagonize others). This can severely degrade the user experience, and requires effective and close moderation.

Example: Barack Obama is a pioneer of using Youtube to win over a deeply partisan public. Obama develops support for his political initiatives through bypassing the mainstream media/elected representative nexus to engage people directly. 

Blogs

A ‘blog’ can simply refer to a platform that allows for regular publication, user comments and easy syndication. This kind of platform can obviously be useful for gov2.0 projects – as demonstrated by the Government 2.0 Taskforce itself (http://gov2.net.au/). But the blogs we’ve all heard about are more usually self-published websites run for reasons of passion, interest, self-development or (in rare cases) money.

The Benefits: Blogs can be a powerful way of engaging with interested people, and the boundaries of a discussion can be mapped by monitoring the blogs of those already talking about the issue. This information can form the seed material for later debates and can help governments refine policy.  One option is for a department or agency to partner with major political blogs to generate public debate. Online Opinion, Vibewire, Larvatus Prodeo, Open Forum and the like have active communities of politically minded participants who would contribute greatly to policy development.

It is easy to track multiple blogs using aggregators such as Regator.

Limitations: blogs are a low risk and simple element for any engagement but are not the most interactive of platforms so are best augmented with other tools. Blogs can be difficult to track because there isn’t a single website where you can easily follow the conversations. However, by using tools such as RSS (a live feed of content), Google Alerts and possibly proprietary tools such as ViralHeat or Radeon6 you can keep on top of blogs you’ve opted to monitor.[1]

Examples:
Larvatus Prodeo has regular long running debates around issues of political importance. Open Forum successfully hosted a blog-style conversation on behalf of the National Human Rights Inquiry at http://www.openforum.com.au/NHROC

Petitions

Petitions are an age-old method of interacting with government. More recently organisations like MySociety have created simple tools to email your representative or to
directly petition the PM. Basic tools like http://www.petitiononline.com/ and http://www.gopetition.com.au/ still exist, but more targeted options tend to be more effective. http://act.ly/ provide a petition tool that works via Twitter, and GetUp does highly targeted petition-based campaigns after getting feedback from membership.

The Benefits: As an established form of interaction with government, petitions have a long history and are accepted as indicative of community sentiment. Highly targeted and researched petitions campaigns such as those run by GetUp have proven very effective.

Limitations: Many petition systems are poorly designed. Without management by moderators, the demands may be impossible, undesirable, directed at the wrong people or simply incomprehensible.

Examples: Supporters of a change to abortion law in Queensland have created a petition here[i] and used Twitter, Facebook and email to spread it to interested parties.

Ideas capture & prioritisation tools

There is a growing genre of tools designed specifically to capture and prioritise ideas and feedback from customers and website users, and some of these tools are now being put to work in the service of consultation and policy development projects.

The Benefits: Because these tools have proved extremely valuable for companies seeking feedback and ideas from their customers, their functions are improving quite rapidly. For example when a user submits a new idea through http://uservoice.com it automatically searches for similar ideas in its database, helping to prevent duplication of effort. Most tools in this genre put a lot of effort into good user interface design, possibly making them more appealing to citizens with limited online experience.

The Limitations: These tools may require heavy moderation if used in pursuit of detailed policy discussions. With the strong emphasis that most such tools place on voting favoured ideas to the top (combined with less support for collaborative editing than wikis), they may turn conversations into populary contests rather than steering them towards the collaboration, cooperation and compromise required for good policy development.

Example: Obama CTO is an independent site run to demonstrate user feedback software. It allows users to create discussion topics, and to comment and vote on initiatives put forward. This enables users to iteratively develop policy initiatives. The site has a nice user management system, with elements of web2.0 forum software (the interface is very similar to Digg). Another Obama initiative used the ‘ideascale‘ platform to seek ideas on his administrations’s open goverment agenda.

Wikis

The Benefits: Wikis are a type of collaborative software where all participants have add/edit/delete rights to a shared pool of content. Wikis extend the reach of traditional policy development by leveraging the knowledge and creativity of a global community of participants beyond the elite few usually involved in the policy development process. This expanded collaborative engagement can lead to more participatory and representative policy outcomes while increasing shared ownership, buy-in and voluntary compliance to the policy outcome. Wikis enable increased scope in the types of participation possible, by allowing people to self-select the types of activities most appealing to them (providing supporting research, drafting original work, engaging in discussions, correcting spelling & grammar). This tends to lead to an increase in the quality of individual contributions as each participant is focused on their interests. Wikis also store every revision participants contribute, providing a significant advance over traditional document collaboration in that the changes between every version (from origin to completion) can be reviewed and sorted by date or contributor.

The Limitations: Wikis can be overwhelming to new comers. Additionally, wikis do not inherently come with a structure, indicating a need for moderators to guide participation by demonstrating pathways. Wikis present a new way of working, and as such, may require associated change management support for implementation in more traditional workplaces.

Examples: FutureMelbourne.com.au, an open source wiki-based collaboration environment that enabled collaboration amongst the many City officers and stakeholders, as well as members of the general public during the public participation period. Parks Victoria’s wePlan.parks.vic.gov.au is drafting a large park management plan in a wiki which is open to contribution from anyone in the world with web access. The NZ government placed the NZ Police Act on a wiki to allow people to participate in writing the new version. This wiki was open to public comments for 5 business days during business hours.

Forums

The Benefits: A forum is unlikely to win awards for fancy technology but, along with blogs remains an effective method of engaging the community online. Forums are simple to use and allow freeflow discussion (especially if structured to allow indented responses which encourage discussion). The conversation can be easily moderated and the results reported on. While forums or message boards are arguably web1.0, they draw engaged readerships and are good at publicising news and discussions. Some of the new news-aggregator sites such as Reddit and Digg also function as forums and have long, engaging conversations about political issues[ii] (or cute cats). A front page mention on Digg can draw a large number of visitors and discussion will happen on their site and yours.

The Limitations: Forums can tend towards the snarky if they are not carefully moderated. However, there is no evidence that the trolls who try to dominate can do so more effectively in an online forum than they do at a face to face event and there is some evidence that in an anonymous forum the Trolls actually incite others to comment and
contribute to the discussion.

Examples:
There are free forums available on the web and also specialist products aimed at community engagement such as Bang the Table and Open Forum. The Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations used an online forum as part of its development of a new Early Years Learning Framework.

Discussing (having the conversation)

While the issue of people forming echo-chambers online may be somewhat overstated,
there’s no denying that people self-select towards those they already substantively agree with. Social media does amplify this effect, which is a problem when we want people to engage with those they disagree with as well.

This is why the creation of a ‘third space’ can be especially valuable. One that is independently operated, free to take risks and experiment, and that utilises the best aspects of social media, while providing the necessary education, management and dispute resolution that any policy discussion requires.

The reality of e-democracy is that democratic engagement in the policy process requires a
concurrent commitment to education.

The ideal community engagement site would contain all the necessary information for
people to educate themselves on the issue before engaging in the debate. The site would also need to provide plenty of help to teach people how (in the technical sense) to make their contributions.

Moderators who are well versed in the issues and well versed in online community
management should run the site itself.  The site should use RSS or email alerts so participants and moderators can track conversations.

Reflecting (understanding the conversation)

There are many tools for understanding the conversation. High-end data-mining applications used for advertising, like Leximancer, are probably overkill for this kind of thing. Human understanding and discussion are of far more value for the purposes of this review.

The two issues that are most important are searchability (a technical issue) and
moderation (a people issue).

The moderators’ role should include summing up conversation in conjunction with participants. Search systems and a permanent archiving creation within the discussion site will allow moderators to annotate summaries with links back to primary source material. The site should be built in consultation with organisations like OpenAustralia (http://openaustralia.org/) to ensure searchability.

A combination of easy access to original discussion, engaged feedback and facilitation by moderators will ensure that participants’ perspectives are accurately communicated.

To make e-democracy truly collaborative the final thing to remember is that neither government nor activists control it.

[1] Go to  http://wiki.kenburbary.com/ for a longer list

[i] http://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/view/EPetitions_QLD/CurrentEPetition.aspx?PetNum=1281&lIndex=-1

[ii]http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/9bp8t/by_denying_the_poorest_americans_affordable/

Why do some people hate voting?
Election days should be national holidays. The weather bureau should set the
date for the first hot day of Summer. Water restrictions would be eased for that
one day of the year, so the kids can run through the sprinklers at the local
school or town hall while their parents head in to vote, and maybe catch up for
a coffee with that nice couple they met at the neighbourhood demo last week.
AEC officials could run free refresher classes open to new and aspiring
citizens and anyone who wagged ‘applied civics’ at school. And of course,
everyone would be given the rest of the day and a fair slice of the following
morning off work so they can follow the election results in style.

All in all, elections should be a
knees-up celebration of the fact that people no longer have to be the
playthings of any bloodthirsty slave-monger who decides to slap some bent metal
on his head and call himself a king. In the era of the welfare state it’s easy
to forget that governments didn’t start out as tools of the people, but as
bureaucracies designed to help the powerful to serve themselves more
efficiently. Our franchise was wrested from unwilling hands, and the public
service – government as the public’s servant – was also born from that
struggle. The strongest protection for that historic achievement is a
population of well-informed citizens who enthusiastically defend their right to
have a say.

Despite the appeal of re-engineering
election day, the best way to inspire more democratic enthusiasm has nothing to
do with elections but with what happens in the intervening years. The following
articles look at the second major step towards Government 2.0: opening up the
doors of government and inviting citizens inside to take a more active role in
the decisions that affect their lives.

It’s often said that decisions get made
by those who show up. Whether or not people ‘show up’ is influenced by how much
time they have, how interested they are, how qualified they feel to
participate, and whether they think that their contribution will make a
difference. Obviously not everyone will want or need to participate in every
decision. But we can certainly expand the pool of people who are actively
involved in decision making if we’re willing to open up the process and make it
easier, more appealing, and more rewarding.

While they should not be a replacement
for face-to-face public meetings and hard-copy publications, online tools have
a number of unique advantages for increasing public participation in
decision-making, many of which are outlined in the following articles:

Accessibility: Online forums are often more accessible to people
in remote areas or less mobile people who rarely get a chance to participate in
public meetings

Engagement: Some tools, such as consultation blogs, can be
more informal and inviting than formal inquiries. This can inspire a wider
group of people to be confident enough to contribute

Collaboration: Most consultation processes focus on the
communication of groups and individuals’ ideas to a central committee, with
little opportunity for horizontal communication between those being consulted.
There is enormous potential to use online tools to increase the quality and depth
of ideas that emerge from a consultation process (see the Future Melbourne case
study below for an
example of how this can work).

Cost: It’s cheaper to run a website than a series of public meetings.
Again, this should not be an excuse for holding fewer public meetings but for
having their ‘virtual’ counterparts more frequently.

Ease: GetUp! has demonstrated the enormous untapped energy of busy people
who find it difficult to make time for traditional forms of community
involvement but love having a say through a quick and simple online form. 

Why is this important?

If Government 2.0 was just about making
the same decisions in the same way using a different medium, none of this would
be particularly exciting. What makes it exciting is that we are starting to see
a much-needed upgrade of democracy’s operating system – one that might be more
capable of handling the increasingly complex problems we need it to solve.

On the bus home the next day, reflecting on the inspiring ideas of
the #publicsphere presenters and on Lindsay Tanner and Joe Ludwig’s encouraging
words on the role of the new Taskforce, one of my fellow noodle-eaters tweeted
to ask the name of the inquiry I’d been complaining about. He then proceeded to
scrape the PDFs from the url I sent him, and turned them into a searchable
database at http://ray.haleblian.com/taxreview/index.html.[ii]
It’s a pretty basic site, but overnight, purely for the hell of it, Ray
Haleblian transformed an obscure, inaccessible mountain of data into something
that is just that little bit easier for an interested citizen to use.

Beyond FOI: why open access is important

The federal government’s proposed
Freedom of Information (FOI) reforms will narrow the ‘Cabinet in Confidence’
exemption so that it only applies to documents actually prepared for Cabinet
and not, for example, documents piled on a trolley and wheeled through the
cabinet room. This is just one example of the importance of stronger FOI laws
to protect citizens’ right to know what their governments are doing. However,
in the long run, we may find that it is not the Freedom of Information bill
itself that has the strongest impact, but the publication scheme that goes with
it.

Describing the new publication scheme,
then Special Minister of State John Faulkner said that it would: ‘not only
encourage, but mandate, agencies to publish what they can lawfully
publish…the publication scheme aim(s) to change the emphasis – from agencies
defining their publication of information by what is required, to a culture of
openness where information is made available unless it is against the public
interest to do so.’[iii]
There are some flaws in the draft FOI bill[iv]
that is to establish the scheme, but if these flaws can be fixed, it will
represent a giant leap forward in what is becoming known as ‘open access
government’.

When I raved about the need for open
access government in the ‘open government and media’ group of last year’s 2020
summit, I found myself getting a lot of blank looks from FOI advocates. So it’s
probably worth spelling out the difference between FOI and open access. 

Think of FOI as the ability to knock on
the front doors of parliament house and demand access to documents that you’ve
guessed are contained inside. Now think of open access as a parliament house
that leaves its windows open so you don’t need to knock, and you don’t need to
guess – all the information on which governments base their decisions, or that
they gather in the course of doing their job, is there to be seen. There will
still be some locked and curtained windows labelled ‘private’, but openness
will be the default.

The work of people like Ray Haleblian
demonstrates one important principle of open access.[v]
It is not enough for data to be released – it should also be released in a way
that is accessible, useful and re-usable. He also demonstrated the fact that
when data is available, there are many people who are willing and able to
transform it in ways that are helpful for other citizens. The following
articles explore the challenge of making use of this energy by building
open-access principles into the heart of government.

[i] http://taxreview.treasury.gov.au/content/Content.aspx?doc=html/submissions.htm

[ii] http://ray.haleblian.com/taxreview/index.html

[iii] http://www.smos.gov.au/speeches/2009/sp_20090505.html

[iv] http://cpd.org.au/article/beyond-foi

[v] http://resource.org/8_principles.html

It’s easy, given its origins in the world of technical and social
networking, to get the impression that the ideas and potential changes with
which it is associated are (a) largely the domain of super geeks and (b)
ephemeral, easily dismissed as niche or even perhaps a passing fad.

As the essays in this collection demonstrate, nothing could be
further from the truth. 

The ideas, examples and advice they present are increasingly the
engine for a larger endeavour that is creating new ways to govern, lifting our
chances of solving the big dilemmas, and making the most of the big
opportunities, with which we are faced. We will find ourselves, in the process,
‘rebooting’ government and ‘upgrading’ democracy and, as a consequence,
refreshing our public culture with new sources of trust and legitimacy.  

The essays here touch on pretty much every dimension of this
venture. 

There are technologies to learn and infrastructure to build. There
are new behaviours to absorb and some old behaviours to discard. There are
large and demanding agendas of institutional, organisational and administrative
change to be conceived, to be designed and then patiently to be lead and
sustained, often in turbulent and unpredictable conditions. It’s a project that
has to be prosecuted at every level – political, intellectual, moral,
technological, professional, administrative and organisational – pretty much at
the same time. 

But at its heart, the Government 2.0 venture is a project whose
success is going to depend on changes that will be, in many cases, emotionally
confronting. They will challenge much of the received wisdom about what it is
to be a good public servant, how to be a successful and effective politician
and Minister and, just as importantly, how to be an engaged and effective
citizen. They will ask interesting questions about civil society and about our
collective capacity to accelerate the velocity of innovation in our policy and
governance processes. And they will pose demanding questions too about the
definition and distribution of power, authority and control, offering some
exciting but unsettling answers at times. They will introduce new dilemmas
about accountability and performance.

Embarking on these changes is an imperative about which we don’t
seem to have much choice. 

The range and complexity of the tangled challenges that crowd the
policy agenda are putting existing institutions and aspects of their associated
culture and business processes under severe stress. We’re beginning to learn
that we can’t afford to leave any source of insight, innovation and invention
out of the mix, either within or outside government. Social technologies of
communication and collaboration will increasingly create new tools and
platforms that will render our public governance and policy models both more
expert and more democratic. They will be enabled and often accelerated by
renewed instincts, and a range of new practical methods, for openness,
participation and transparency.

But perhaps the most exciting dimension of these remarkable and
sometimes uncomfortable challenges is the opportunity they offer for Australia
to reinforce and, in some cases to recapture its reputation as a world leader
in public innovation. A bit of leadership and imagination coupled with the kind
of invention and solid, practical advice captured in the essays presented here,
will give us a good chance to turn that ambition to reality.