The Government 2.0 taskforce, headed by the blogosphere’s Nick Gruen, has made its public appearance. According to Nick:
The Taskforce is made up of policy and technical experts and entrepreneurs from government, business, academia, and cultural institutions.
Its work falls into two streams. The first relates to increasing the openness of government through making public sector information more widely available to promote transparency, innovation and value adding to government information.
The second stream is concerned with encouraging online engagement with the aim of drawing in the information, knowledge, perspectives, resources and even, where possible, the active collaboration of anyone wishing to contribute to public life.
As noted in Nick’s introduction, the Rudd government has already dipped its toe in the waters of online consultation, with the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy’s blog trial. That was not entirely successful, to be honest, with the hostility towards the government’s ridiculous net censorship policy overwhelming discussions on any other topic.
To be honest, I’m more hopeful of real progress on the first topic than the second. There’s a lot of fairly uncontroversial information laying around government departments that is a lot less useful than it might otherwise be because of over-tight restrictions on its use. A classic example is the National Toilet Map, which can’t be incorporated into commercial mapping services.
But it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on.
This is further evidence that state and local governmeents and their committment to secrecy and essentially being support groups for business interests need to be challenged. In NSW food hygiene inspection information is public information, but everywhere else in Australia is far behind in terms of transparency. The federal government could make a start by forcing all state and local governments to publish this important public health information.
I’d like to see the situation where data collected and generated by the government by default is open and available for commercial and non commercial use unless it can be justified that there is a good reason not to (for example privacy concerns), rather than the reverse situation at the moment.
Fair’s fair: You might not be able to incorporate the National Toilet Map into commercial mapping services, but you can “download your favourite toilets for use on your GPS device”, (quaint linguistic construction, non?) ie google earth, majellan, nokia, tom tom, gpx, garmin, navman, iToilet.
I guess you just press an “I’m busting” button, and the devices talk you through the trip to the nearest convenience.
Fair’s fair: You might not be able to incorporate the National Toilet Map into commercial mapping services, but you can “download your favourite toilets for use on your GPS device”, (quaint linguistic construction, non?) ie google earth, majellan, nokia, tom tom, gpx, garmin, navman, iToilet.
I guess you just press an “I’m busting” button, and the devices talk you through the trip to the nearest convenience.
I have to agree with your assessment of the announcement of the taskforce. Like you I found the blog trial a waste of time, with it being a contrived experience and not really an experience encouraging a dialogue with the ministers about the issues covered in the portfolios.
I’m certainly hoping the taskforce is able to make the great deal of government information more accessible; and in a manner that is functional and useful for the user. However, with the talented people that are getting involved at a more functional level, gov2.0 could be given a really solid push and platform from which other developments can grow. Perhaps I’m being a little too optimist.
The challenge is, as noted, whether there is enough political will to follow through.