Kate Lundy (ACT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tonight I would like to take about an issue that I think is growing in its importance in Australia, particularly in politics and also within the community. It relates to the use of Web 2.0 applications and websites to better communicate with the people we represent. The concept of Government 2.0 is a rising topic of debate across the world. Trends in technology, media and public opinion have made it both more possible and more necessary for governments of all persuasions to look at what and how information is made freely available to the public. Creating an even more participatory form of government in Australia, I believe, will improve the effectiveness of public administration. It will enable communities to better help themselves and promote new and invigorated engagement in the democratic processes that we are all involved in. It will also help us in our capacity to respond to the emerging complex social, geopolitical and environmental challenges that our generation faces.

To really understand the area and the opportunities of Web 2.0 we need to engage with and bring together government practitioners, decision makers across industry and interest groups, and citizens to try and build a new and inclusive approach to citizen engagement and a citizen-centric form of delivering government services. I think we need to consider how we can truly engage with people who would otherwise not be involved in the political process. As I think we all know, it is not about talking at them but about making it a real interaction—getting feedback, responding to their questions and having a conversation.

One of the most exciting things about what I am trying to achieve in my own office using social networking is hosting conversations and facilitating citizen engagement in the political process. The example I have built and that we are experimenting with is called Public Sphere, and the Public Sphere event that I am organising for 22 June revolves around the issue of Government 2.0. We have asked the community to put forward talks and provide feedback on my website, and the event itself will be video streamed, with the opportunity to both tweet and blog as the presentations are being made and streamed live on the internet. This will help make the process of gathering feedback and input on the policy ideas suggested highly transparent and very participatory, because the whole stream that is collected around that discussion will form part of the event itself.

Government 2.0 initiatives should aim not only to facilitate garnering those good ideas from the public but to provide a channel into government that is efficient in the best sense of the word and where the ideas going forward are peer reviewed. The openness and the accessibility of that final report, if you like, that goes to government is quite a challenge to prepare. The method we have used in our Public Sphere event to achieve it involves the use of a wiki, which allows everybody to contribute, to edit and to provide their ideas in that final document going forward.

The other issue about Government 2.0 that sits at the forefront of public policy consideration relates to access to government data. I am obviously trying to do my bit in improving engagement with people with excellent policy ideas and in providing a transparent channel to push them forward, but it is more than that, and there is a great deal that government can do as it develops its strategy to put information into the public arena.

Key areas of policy reform that are being actively discussed to facilitate access to government information include the area of copyright reform of public sector information, moving to more permissive copyright conditions for all government data which is neither commercial nor sensitive and where there is no issue being in the public domain in order to assist with enabling both private and community innovation on the back of that public sector information. It would greatly assist in facilitating collaborative Government 2.0 style initiatives. Recently at the conference held at Old Parliament House in relation to copyright, Professor Lawrence Lessig said the following in a podcast I recorded with him:

If you’re not free to use the materials of your culture in the debate and expression about how politics should develop, then the open democracy will be hampered in a way that is really unnecessary. So I think copyright freedom and open democracy are intimately connected and we need to see both of them move in the same direction.

Those comments were made in the context of placing public sector information that has no reason not to become public in the public domain. Senator Faulkner, in launching Information Awareness Month just a few weeks ago, said as much in moving to a new environment where the default position ought to be: if there is information generated in the public sector then it really ought to be placed in the public environment, unless you can demonstrate a reason otherwise.

There is another area relating to openness, and that is standards and formats. I believe that governments have a responsibility to ensure that data is made available in open standards and open formats to ensure that the best opportunity for innovation and reuse by both public and private sectors is available. Open standards are also vital for interoperability and sustainable systems. You can imagine that for the data that we are collecting, storing and perhaps archiving to be accessible in the future the standards used to record that information digitally need to be successfully and sustainably accessible in the future. That cannot happen with the appropriate amount of probity and responsibility by government if the standards are not open and interoperable.

A subset of this issue relates to metadata standards. This might be getting a little technical, but metadata is the information contained in a digital file that describes the content of that file. Again, if the standards are not open for that then we are compromised with respect to how we can access that information in the future.

The bottom line with all of these policy considerations, which are weighty and do affect all agencies and departments, is that they will require a culture change. Governments are naturally risk averse and it is difficult to collaborate across agencies and departments. For this reason, the sort of leadership that has been provided by Senator Faulkner in many of his statements, particularly relating to the work of the National Archives of Australia and their capacity to lead and offer advice to other agencies about the interoperability and openness of such standards, puts the government in very good stead in the future.

Another area I would like to mention in the same vein is geospacial information. I had the privilege of opening a conference on this topic this morning, spatial@gov, here in Canberra. It was sponsored and supported impressively by Geoscience Australia. Many of the issues discussed related to open access to government owned spatial information for both public and private innovation and the growing importance of spatial or locational data to policymaking across a raft of fields—not least issues like national security, emergency management and emergency response, but also things like managing our water assets, identifying community safety and perhaps analysing relative priorities with respect to social policy across a whole range of datasets. Spatial information has incredible application. I am very pleased to see the growing emphasis on it within government policy and I certainly commend Senator Carr for the investments made in this area through his portfolio.

Finally, Labor has put together a whole range of policies that start to address these issues, and they cover a number of portfolios. I have mentioned both Senator Faulkner’s former portfolio and Senator Carr’s portfolio, but I do want to fly the flag for the importance of the social networking tools of Government 2.0 in looking for better ways to engage in the future with the people we represent.