With its new taskforce, the government has got straight back on the web 2.0 horse after taking a nasty fall last year with Communications Minister Stephen Conroy and Finance Minister Lindsey Tanner's blogging trial, but how long will it stay on?
With its new taskforce, the government has got straight back on the web 2.0 horse after taking a nasty fall last year with Communications Minister Stephen Conroy and Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner's blogging trial. But how long will it stay on this time?
All in all the ministers (or their staff) wrote 10 posts in their past blogging foray, which had about as much character as soggy cornflakes.
All in all the ministers (or their staff) wrote 10 posts in their past blogging foray, which had about as much character as soggy cornflakes. Despite the
cornflakiness, however, they received around 1500 responses (mostly
chastising Conroy for the filtering scheme). Yet they still left
the normal submissions channel open, which is where they likely got
most of the fodder for their paper anyway.
It seemed to me it was a token attempt that didn't even amount
to Tanner and Conroy sticking their little toe into the pool of web
2.0. There was no real collaboration and little sense of community.
If the new taskforce announced yesterday didn't have high fliers such as government
chief information officer Ann Steward and Google engineering director Alan Noble as
members, I'd say it would be a big waste of time and
money.
Yet with them and many other illustrious names on board they
might stand a chance, but only if the taskforce doesn't recommend
putting web 2.0 on the surface of the government like a band-aid.
It needs to be integrated into a government that has been altered
from within to match the tenets of web 2.0 — openness and
collaboration.
As a journalist, I obviously love the idea of the government
becoming more transparent. I've mentioned that the government is already
more open than the private sector but there's still a lot of
scope for dodgy dealings behind doors.
Yet just setting up a Twitter account
won't make the government transparent. Nor will creating ingenious applications to display
information in new ways. It's more about getting data out of the
walled garden. Unless it's out, there's not a lot of use for web
2.0 applications that use it.
Just setting up a Twitter account won't make the government transparent.
Of course, once we have a wealth of data flow, there would be
scope for applications to delve into that information and tell the public
when the government has done something cool/scandalous/suicidal/Utegate
that we should know about. But until it's been decided that some
information should be aired, I just can't see this whole
transparency thing being driven by web 2.0.
Consider the
RailCorp iPhone application saga. There we had publicly
available information and someone who used their time to make an
application to make it easily usable by rail commuters. It seems this is exactly the sort of thing
the taskforce would intend for some of its $2.4 million in
funding. But what happened? RailCorp complained about the
application designer using its information.
Now let's look at community collaboration. I think it's a great idea. Get the
community to, in a way, self-govern. But how does the government
think it's going to take it all in if people start publishing their
opinion or offering their help willy-nilly via the tubes? You'd
need to have an army of people sifting through people's doggerel to
get the few pearls of wisdom that are bound to be there.
So if everyone starts using web 2.0 to get their message to the
government, I can see one of two things happening:
It works. Lobbying dies a slow death because the government
knows what its voters really want. Strong online communities of
like-minded people become forces to be reckoned with.
The government gets drowned in sheer wealth of information and clings
to the old model to maintain its sanity.
Naturally there would be ways to stop the second outcome
happening, but it'll need a lot of thought, which is what the taskforce is for.
I wouldn't be surprised if the taskforce spent little time
looking at the technologies, devoting more of its efforts to
looking at how the government works internally. Because the way it
is, the web 2.0 transplant won't stick, in my opinion.