We want to know that a government’s actions reflect the wishes of the people it represents. Transparency is the mechanism for ensuring that the elected Government is accountable to the voters. The Hansard gives us access to the Parliamentary proceedings, but it is only one small part of transparency. Discussion about government transparency to date has largely centred on requirements that Parliamentarians disclose any financial interests or influences that might result in a conflict of interest or improper influence in the political process.[i]
There are a number of reporting requirements in the Australian parliamentary system that deal with electoral processes, campaign spending, donations, personal interests and gifts to government officials. The Register of Members’ Interests and Register of Senators’ Interests contain information of financial interests, stocks and shares held, gifts received over a certain value, and memberships of Clubs and Associations for Representatives and Senators.[ii] These are the things that are considered to have the potential to influence their behaviour in Parliament. Until OpenAustralia published both Registers online you could only view them if you visited the respective Registrars’ offices where the hard copies were held. While those documents have now been scanned and are available to view online, they are originally handwritten for the most part, not machine readable, and not always legible. The information might now be there to see, but it is not easy to reuse it or cross reference with other data. Would it be too hard to have Parliamentarians update the information straight onto a publicly accessible document online? To connect disparate information sources we need to make them open to more advanced scrutiny.
If we take transparency beyond this minimum level of accountability-focused reporting, things start to get much more interesting. Giving everyone access to all the information that Government decision makers use to make decisions would allow for much better-informed debate and increase the possibilities for collaboration. When you know how things work the barriers to participation are lowered and you can invite others in more easily. This approach to transparency also has the benefit of allowing government departments to collaborate more effectively with each other: it is much easier to share information with everyone than to go through the process of deciding what to share with whom.
Becoming transparent requires organisational change, but it is not as hard or scary as you might imagine. The key is not to view it as something that you tack on to the side as a reporting necessity, but of changing the process at the core of your normal activities.
Let’s see how a single everyday event in Parliament is currently made more complex by lack of a transparent process.
Recently, during a debate on climate change in the Federal Senate[iii], a chart was exhibited to Senators (having previously also been circulated to Senators out of session). There followed some discussion about how to include the document in the Hansard so it could be on the public record. There was some confusion about the procedure and about whether such a document could be reproduced in the Hansard. This confusion only occurred because the process of publishing the proceedings of Parliament in the form of the Hansard is a separate process from the day to day activities of Parliament.
Let’s imagine, for a moment, this alternative scenario. An MP wants to discuss a chart in Parliament. Before the sitting of the day starts, she uploads the image to a publicly accessible website which might be the official repository of all Parliamentary documents. From this website MP staffers download the documents, possibly print them out and circulate them further. In this case, the means of distribution of the chart is one and the same as the means of transparency. So, it is no more effort to make a document publicly accessible than it is to share it with other members of Parliament. In fact, it would require slightly more effort to distribute a document just to members of Parliament and not the general public.
This subtle but important shift in procedure could reinforce the idea that public accessibility is the default. Private communication would still be possible but requires a little more effort and in most cases would not be necessary.
No, Government 2.0 is not just about transparency. In other parts of this submission to the Taskforce, you will read that Government 2.0 is also about making government and citizen interaction more collaborative and interactive and making government services more focused on the needs of the citizen. However, transparency enables and underpins Government 2.0.
As you open up to the possibility of sharing some decision making responsibilities through Government 2.0 style collaboration, you also share some of the duty of transparency with others in the decision making process. As government becomes more transparent, organisations representing interest groups that have a legitimate claim to join in also need to become more transparent. We can start with those who already have legitimate involvement in the political process, lobbyists.
The public has a right to know who is lobbying the government and on whose behalf. As of July 2008 there is a Register of Lobbyists.[iv] However, at the moment, there are a number of exemptions.[v] Companies which do not hire an external lobbying firm to work for them (e.g. those that are big enough to have lobbyists on staff), religious organisations, charities and not-for-profit advocacy organisations who claim to represent their members, can all currently lobby the government without this information appearing on the public record in the register.
For the last 18 months, OpenAustralia.org[vi] has been bringing information from the Hansard and other federal Parliamentary documents together to create a more useful way to view the proceedings of federal Parliament. OpenAustralia.org is based on the extraordinary work of the UK charity mySociety[vii] that built TheyWorkForYou.com.[viii] We adapted their open-source web application software to Australia.
All of the development of OpenAustralia.org to date has been done by unpaid volunteers. The purpose of OpenAustralia Foundation, as a national digital online library, is to enable sustainable continued development of the website and also to develop new exciting projects that give citizens better access to information, improving engagement in the process.
All the software that drives our website is open-source[ix] including the parser code that takes data from the official Parliamentary website and repackages it into a much easier to use format, ready to be loaded into our database. We do this so that there is absolutely no question that the information on our website is impartial and non-partisan. You can be sure that we do not manipulate the data on OpenAustralia.org in any way that gives preference to one side of a political debate over another because you can scrutinise every step of the process yourself.
We’ve learned an enormous amount from the open source software community.[x] We’re committed to opening up our own data and sharing it. To make this as easy as possible for ourselves we’re doing as much as we can electronically and online. It is usable now, but there’s room for improvement as we mature as an organisation. We look for tools that make it easier for us to work openly as much as possible too.
We have our calendar on the web. We have an open ticketing system[xi] for bugs and technical queries. Initially, the bug database just contained software fixes additions and improvements, but then I wanted to be able to put in the organisational tasks as an experiment to see if that worked for me as a workflow, and for others to easily see what we were doing aside from writing software. In this case it has involved some extra work, but I love that I can point immediately to anything I’ve been up to online. So when someone asks for an update, I can just send them a link which they can bookmark or sign up to for updates. I am currently looking for a better way to do this.
We encourage users of OpenAustralia.org to tell us what’s wrong. If you send in a query to the website that goes to contact [at] openaustralia.org, this is received privately by a few core volunteers. Whether those queries show us there’s a technical problem, or a chink in our website’s usability, or a suggestion for a new feature, we’ll create a public ticket in our bug database. This wouldn’t have any reference to the individual but we’ll usually let people know that if they’re comfortable using that system, they can follow it themselves. So far its technical appearance seems offputting for most of our users, so we’re looking for way better way to do that. Projects we’re intending to do[xii] and our constitution[xiii] are all online.
We have been developing and fostering a community of civic-minded software developers. We run an open mailing list[xiv] for anyone interested in the development of OpenAustralia or similar projects in Australia. Beyond initial private contact, we try to steer communication to these publicly accessible forums so that it’s out in the open.
When we have meetings, we haven’t recorded live conversation so far, but the text based side goes through Internet Relay Chat (IRC)[xv] and, when we use it, is logged, and minutes posted online too.
Connecting our online community back out in the world, we recently held our first Hackfest in June 2009 which was kindly hosted by Google at their Sydney offices.[xvi] Over 40 people gave up their Saturday to work with others on cool civic-minded projects. We are currently planning two more Hackfests for the coming months, one in Sydney and one in Melbourne, and are encouraging others to hold similar events in their region.
While some of our data are still more accessible than others, as we make improvements and find better ways of bringing it all out in the open, we hope collectively it can serve to demonstrate the possibilities of a truly transparent organisation.
We’re committed to full financial transparency, as we have made clear on our website.[xvii] On that basis we took a few small donations early on, totalling around $700. However, we did not specifically say that we would make donors’ identities known, so we’ll discuss that with those benefactors and make that wording clearer in future. We haven’t spent any of those donations yet, but we know that in future we want to make it easy to follow any money we receive and where it goes too – follow this ticket[xviii] if you want to keep tabs on this issue.
Government and non government transparency is an enabler of government 2.0 and citizen 2.0. Transparency should not make the work of governments and citizens more difficult, rather it should have practical benefits that make our shared work easier. For this to be the case it is essential that transparency is not tacked on to existing processes but becomes an integral part of working life. It should be built into our work from the outset if possible. We can all learn a lot from the open source community about how to collaborate across time and space, online and in the open.
If we make financial and other processes transparent by opening up information to public scrutiny, we can not only see how we are being influenced by financial and other forces, but also learn about our own behaviour and that of others. In doing this we can strengthen the trust in our public institutions and public commitment to the decisions made by them. In the longer term that will make it easier to improve decision making processes collaboratively, by working across departments, institutions, and communities. We open up all these possibilities by changing the way we work.
Open Australia is not asking anyone to do anything we’re not exploring ourselves. By incorporating transparency into our own work we hope to strike up more conversations and connections with those of you who are doing the same.
OpenAustralia.org is the first project of the OpenAustralia Foundation. OpenAustralia Foundation is a not-for-profit charity, recently granted deductible gift recipient status as a national online library. Our aim is to support a nationwide open access public digital reference library for the purpose of making information relating to public bodies accessible and useful for all Australians.
[i] http://www.transparency.org.au/; http://www.democracy4sale.org/
[ii] Registers of Senators’ and Members’ Interests entries listed under each senator and representative e.g. http://www.openaustralia.org/mp/bob_debus/macquarie#register & http://www.openaustralia.org/senator/helen_coonan/nsw#register
[iii] http://www.openaustralia.org/senate/?id=2009-08-13.21.2&s=chart#g23.1
[iv] http://lobbyists.pmc.gov.au/
[v][v] http://lobbyists.pmc.gov.au/lobbyistsregister/index.cfm?event=faq#4
[vi] http://www.openaustralia.org
[vii] http://www.mysociety.org/
[viii] http://www.theyworkforyou.com/
[ix] http://software.openaustralia.org/
[x] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open_source_software_community
[xi] http://tickets.openaustralia.org
[xii] http://software.openaustralia.org/towards-the-future.html
[xiii] http://blog.openaustralia.org/foundation/
[xiv] http://groups.google.com/group/openaustralia-dev
[xv] irc: irc.freenode.net/openaustralia
[xvi] http://blog.openaustralia.org/2009/06/15/inaugural-openaustralia-hackfest-was-terrific/
[xvii] http://blog.openaustralia.org/join-us/
[xviii] http://tickets.openaustralia.org/browse/OA-329
