by msweeks
Sydney-based IBSG Director, heading up the IBSG public sector team in Asia Pacific for Cisco. Co-author of the Connected Republic 2.0 More about msweeks
Australia 2020
I've put in some links for the recent Australia 2020 exercise, which saw 1000 people selected to join the new Australian Prime Minister and some of his senior Ministers for a 2-day ideas and strategies session in Parliament House in Canberra last weekend.
In many ways, the whole process can be seen as a powerful experiment in open innovation, a real attempt to throw open the traditionally impenetrable process of policy and decision making to a much wider influence. The event was streamed on the web - at the web site, you will be able to review some of the session for the next few weeks I think - http://www.australia2020.gov.au/. It was also broadcast on ABC television (our public TV channel).
The event, which was the culmination of a process of smaller events in schools and communities around the country leading up to the Summit itself, has been the subject of much comment in the mainstream press and of course in the blogosphere. Depending on your point of view, it was either a very clever political exercise in spin and issues management, ending up with a series of ideas pretty much along the lines of current government policy anyway, or a genuine attempt to create a richer and more interactive policy conversation.
My view is that the event manifests a little of both - clever politics without a doubt, but with some good ideas from an interesting diverse group of people responding to the dynamic of a collective deliberation process that provided some discipline and structure to move towards a few concrete proposals.
Much will depend, of course, on what happens next. All of the material from the Summit is going to be posted on the web The website already contains the thousands of submissions people sent through before the Summit in the 10 topics that formed the themes for the discussion. The full write up of all the ideas and proposals that came out of the 2 days will also be on the site in a few weeks, I understand. There is already an interim report (attached) which was actually presented to the PM before the end of the Summit itself!
PM Rudd has committed to responding to all the Summit's ideas, including those he and the government will not take forward.
In may ways, despite the use of some new tools (eg web streaming - but it was only limited) the process was a reasonably "World 1.0" approach to a fairly traditional planning process. But the potential of building on this first attempt and gradually introducing many more collaborative and interactive tools into the process is considerable. Have a look at one blog post (I've put the extract at the end of this email) to illustrate how far some people feel the process still has to go to really harness the potential of the new tools of collaboration...
But as an example of a fairly ambitious and, for the most part, reasonably successful exercise in Government 2.0, and with real political leadership (the whole thing was led by the PM himself), it's a very worthy story.
Comments
Martin Stewart-Weeks said: Here's a view from one blogger whose critique is largely driven by the sense that Australia 2020 was all a bit "World 1.0"...
I miss something from the coverage of the 2020 conference? I saw people with pens and paper. I saw no evidence of an internal wiki (or something similar) being used. It seems they are using 1020 technology to manage the output of our best and brightest.
I hope I’m wrong, and that someone will point out my error.
If the government couldn’t organize a search engine, and collaborative software such as a wiki and electronic whiteboard software for participants (even if they had to bring their own laptops), then I’ve got to wonder how much thought actually went into organizing this in the most productive, forward looking way.
Imagine if all the participants were working on a wiki preloaded with all the papers by each participant, all the contributions by the public, links to public documents that supported their ideas, and all the categories and cross-references that could have been automagically munged with an SQL-savvy bot.
It’s not the ideas stupid, it’s self-organizing of ideas and linkages between them that creates value! This is especially important when individuals are chatting to each other… they could easily have created tags and links between two ideas in two pages in a couple of seconds. And by close-of-business, a monkey could have run the stock standard wiki reports to produce tables of cross-references, most-linked-to pages, etc, etc, etc.
As they walked away, each participant could have been given the wiki export to take home and load up on their own computer, the wiki could have been made public with second-tier and invited-but-couldn’t-make-it folk given logins that allowed them to edit the pages.
It seems like the technology given to assist participants and make analysis and value-adding of their efforts actually useful was merely an advanced version of what was available in 1020: microphones and speakers replacing megaphones and loud voices, paper and textas rather than quills and parchment. No real innovation, again, unless I missed it.
It’s not like our best and brightest wouldn’t know how to use a wiki given that wikipedia is in the top 5 read sites in the world, and millions of people have edited wiki pages (although not necessarily in the wikipedia).
I wonder if any of our best and brightest raised the idea beforehand, whether the government read the discussion paper on efficient electronic consultation mechanisms for a recent AGIMO inquiry and twigged that the same 21st century tools could be installed in a couple hours for this conference (a server, an OS, a wireless LAN, MySQL, Apache, a "Google mini", then give all participants the URL on the internal LAN and tell them to create their own wiki accounts). It’d take less time than planning the seating arrangements!
posted over 3 years ago
Kerry Webb said: I think the unknown blogger is a little hopeful about the Best and Brightest being able to use a wiki. My experience is that very few experienced Web users have such skills.
And that's not what they were there to do.
posted over 3 years ago
Dan Hill said: Agreed, Martin. Although the actions that emanate from the ideas are really the most important aspect, the use of basic contemporary tools as you suggest would actually help that translation point from ideas-forming to policy-forming and beyond. Our tools today enable translation, knowledge transfer, filtering, contextualisation, presentation etc., like no others have.
However, it was great to have ideas back on the agenda again in the first place. Totally welcome. Shame that cities and technology - and crucially the congruence of the two - weren't quite high enough on the agenda, but that leaves an opportunity to develop something there ...
posted over 3 years ago