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Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0

Chapter 3: The foundations of Government 2.0

• 3.1: The culture of Web 2.0
• 3.2: Web 2.0 makes connections
• 3.3: Relinquishing control
• 3.4: Leadership
• Central recommendation: A declaration of open government by the Australian Government
• 3.5: The need for systematic changes to policy and culture: the case for 'whole of government' management
• Recommendation 2: Coordinate with leadership, guidance and support

3.1: The culture of Web 2.0

3.1.1: Public goods, serendipity and Web 2.0

A striking paradox helps us understand the dilemmas of Government 2.0.

All the most prominent Web 2.0 platforms for collaboration — like blogs, wikis and social networking platforms such as Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr — are available without charge. They function as community assets. In fact they conform to the technical definition of public goods:

• being freely available no-one is excluded from enjoying them
• one person’s enjoyment of them does not hamper others’ enjoyment of them — indeed it typically enhances it.¹²⁰

In traditional public policy thinking, governments supply public goods because individual firms have inadequate incentive to build value for others. Yet remarkably none of the major public goods of Web 2.0 have been built by governments.¹²¹

Thus although in a basic sense governments face the best economic incentives to build the public goods of Web 2.0 their internal culture is inimical to doing so. Web 2.0 evolved from the thousands of experiments in building value on the web. The culture that emerged was perfectly suited to capturing the extraordinary possibilities of the first ‘serendipitous network’. By design, the internet imposes no gatekeepers between those in the network, and accordingly none between the creators of value and users.

As one of the architects of the internet, Vinton Cerf (2006), stresses the uniqueness and importance of this fact:

Because the network is neutral, the creators of new internet content and services need not seek permission from carriers or pay special fees to be seen online. As a result, we have seen an array of unpredictable new offerings…[E]ntrepreneurs need not worry about getting permission for their inventions will [sic] reach the end users…This is a direct contrast to closed networks like the cable video system, where network owners control what the consumer can see or do.¹²²

The internet thus provided a medium for rapidly scaling up innovations, making them available to all, and thus generating explosions of new value. This created huge incentives to experiment in search of successful innovation to build value to users. For if only a small fraction of that new value could be monetised in some way — with micro-payments, advertising, freemium¹²³ or some other business model — a lucrative business could be created. The new economics of the internet rewarded those who collaborated with others — so that they could together build value to the user — rather than seeking to control others. It also rewarded openness to the ideas of others — for others might provide some way to enhance the value of one’s own offering.

The culture that emerged from this world was one that was flexible and adaptive of mediums — personal, immediate, provisional and, in consequence, informal. All these things mean that experiments are constantly run in Web 2.0 world, and as a result mistakes are constantly made. But they are equally readily corrected, sometimes by the original contributor, sometimes by others. We argue that governments should, indeed must, take on more of the cultural characteristics of Web 2.0. We do not imagine that they either can or should wholly replicate that culture. Our vision is one in which governments take into their own culture what is necessary to get the best out of Web 2.0 — for there is so much to gain — without compromising their essential character as the heirs to the traditions of modern government.

3.2: Web 2.0 makes connections

The world that is the product of this culture and these tools makes connections.

Firstly, it facilitates connections between people who may be unknown to each other but who bring some particular kind of knowledge — whether it is local, ephemeral or technical — to the solving of some problem. Thus recently, someone who had been a literature lecturer but who had worked in America’s mortgage industry became ill. Off work she took to blogging using her family nickname ‘Tanta’. She described the sub-prime mortgage market with such humour and meticulous integrity that her posts became ‘must reading’ for economists seeking to understand the financial crisis, including Nobel Prize winning economists. ‘Tanta’ became sufficiently well known that she came to be cited in US Federal Reserve (the Fed) Research on the financial crisis without the Fed knowing her ‘real’ name. Before Web 2.0 this almost instant connection of ‘talent’ or local knowledge with circumstances was far less likely to occur.

Likewise people using a search engine are unlikely to know who has performed a similar search in the past, but the search engine ‘connects’ them. For it has ‘learned’ from the links of others searching particular terms, the links that are of most value to them and by inference to those who come after them.

Secondly, Web 2.0 enables data to be distributed to anyone on the internet for negligible marginal cost. Web 2.0 enables value to be added to data in myriad ways, by juxtaposing it with other data, by customising it for particular users and by allowing anyone and everyone who has the skills to transform it in ways that they find useful or that simply take their fancy.

3.2.1: Running the gauntlet of permissions

If governments are to become part of this world — as contributors and users of the vast potential of Web 2.0, their culture must encourage it. Right now it does not. Before government engages — whether it is by way of communicating with the public or releasing information — a panoply of permissions is required. In any but routine service delivery roles, officials are typically not authorised to speak to the public without substantial clearance processes. As documented in Chapter 5, before PSI can be made truly free for people to build on using Web 2.0 platforms, the hurdles that PSI must clear are truly daunting.

Instead of being immediate, government announcements and actions can take some time to be forthcoming while all possible stakeholders are consulted and points of view are considered. Instead of being informal, governments tend to speak formally with each word chosen very carefully. Government processes are intended to minimise the chance of making a mistake with little regard given to the potential costs this imposes on innovation — for it is virtually impossible to find new and better ways of doing things if one cannot experiment. And by definition a true experiment brings the risk of failure.

Consider the case of a state government legal office advising an agency which had proposed to allow comments on a blog to be immediately displayed to the public and only afterwards ‘post-moderated’ as this taskforce has done without incident. The legal advice provided was that while the chances of the agency being unable to rely on the defence of innocent dissemination were relatively low — the taskforce considers them extremely low — the agency should avoid ‘unnecessary risk’.¹²⁵

Yet the advice offered no weighing of the perceived benefits of avoiding the risk against the costs of risk aversion. In this case those costs include the cost of increased resources to check each comment. More importantly pre-moderation affects users’ experience usually requiring at least some hours to pass each time people are to exchange comments, with the blog effectively closed for exchanges out of hours. This impoverishes the discussion and robs it of participants who depart for other destinations because they cannot engage satisfactorily.

The difficulties the Social Inclusion Discussion Forum experienced in getting any real discussion going illustrate the point. (See Box 3).

Where agencies provide specific advice on risk management, as for instance security agencies do the agency may see itself as advising principally on the avoidance of risk and so may weigh those risks more highly than the possible benefits which may come from greater flexibility.¹²⁶ This is one reason the taskforce recommends that an agency be specifically identified as a Government 2.0 champion. (See s.3.4). For with such an agency’s participation, the myriad detailed issues of policy and practice can be considered within the context of the benefits of an agency seeking to promote Government 2.0. This is a context in which a more balanced decision may be reached, and one in which officials are more likely to be motivated to find ways to manage the risks that are identified rather than treat them as reasons not to proceed

3.3: Relinquishing control

Government must find a way of engaging far more with the community using Web 2.0 tools and approaches whilst remaining true to age old traditions of government. Officials should be able to express themselves informally, tentatively and candidly but they must also do so in ways that retain people’s confidence that they are acting fairly, professionally and impartially. Ultimately these public service values can be delivered in a less hierarchical manner. They must be, if we are to get to Government 2.0.

Yet relinquishing control is rarely easy.

Before it is relinquished, those who have control find it hard to see why doing so might be beneficial, not just for others, but for them. Yet this is a microcosm of our success within and outside government in modern times. In government through the struggles of previous centuries, we have come to understand that the separation of powers — the decentralisation of power within government — is not a harbinger of chaos but a central requirement of the rule of law and a foundation of a free and prosperous society. Likewise following the admonitions of Adam Smith and his intellectual descendants more recently in Australia, commerce has thrived once restrictions on trade and commerce designed to strengthen them had been relinquished.

The success of the market itself is an illustration that freedom and the decentralisation of power works to tap decentralised knowledge if we can set the ‘rules of the game’ to reward experiments and innovation that is socially beneficial. In each case, the relinquishment of control from the centre enabled decentralised knowledge and responsibility to be tapped. We have to move in that direction to get to Government 2.0. But it will not be easy. The two immediate preconditions are strong leadership and coordinated action. These are elaborated in the next two sections.

3.4: Leadership

As a world leader in public administration and public policy innovation, Australia should be a world leader in the transition towards Government 2.0. Yet we have fallen behind for lack of leadership and coordinated whole of government action. Given the magnitude of the tasks we can no longer rely on the isolated enthusiasms and initiatives of individual agencies and public servants. Fortunately as documented above there are several signs of more coordinated action towards Government 2.0.

It is notable that in the two preeminent leaders of the movement towards Web 2.0 — the UK and the US — leadership starts at the top with the head of government, not only endorsing the endeavour but being one of its most energetic champions. In the US, an ‘unprecedented’ level of openness has figured as a major goal of the Obama Administration and of the President himself. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has also recently made major announcements in support of greater information release and engagement.¹²⁷

Given the government’s aspirations for stronger, more coordinated governance and a renewed public service culture of openness and engagement as set out in our terms of reference, strong leadership is the first pre-condition to make the important cultural shifts articulated by Government 2.0 actually translate into practice.

Central recommendation: A declaration of open government by the Australian Government

Accompanying the Government’s announcement of its policy response to this report, a declaration of open government should be made at the highest level, stating that:

• using technology to increase citizen engagement and collaboration in making policy and providing service will help achieve a more consultative, participatory and transparent government
• public sector information is a national resource and that releasing as much of it on as permissive terms as possible will maximise its economic and social value to Australians and reinforce its contribution to a healthy democracy
• online engagement by public servants, involving robust professional discussion as part of their duties or as private citizens, benefits their agencies, their professional development, those with whom they are engaged and the Australian public. This engagement should be enabled and encouraged.

The fulfilment of the above at all levels of government is integral to the Government’s objectives including public sector reform, innovation and using the national investment in broadband to achieve an informed, connected and democratic community.

3.5: The need for systematic changes to policy and culture: the case for ‘whole of government’ management

As observed above, the new Freedom of Information policies and the promulgation of very encouraging new Australian Public Service Commission (APSC) guidelines for online engagement set the stage for Australia to join other leading countries in pioneering Government 2.0. Overcoming these difficulties will be challenging and confronting for some government processes and agency cultures.

A compelling report commissioned by the taskforce from former senior Commonwealth official Mike Waller with the counsel of former Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet Dr Peter Shergold summarised the situation thus:

• Information disclosure and reuse are necessary but not sufficient to deliver the transformation required in public sector agencies (and the people and organisations with whom they interact).
• Technology is a key enabler to which careful attention needs to be paid, but is unlikely to be a major impediment to delivery.
• The large part of the task is about refashioning large elements of the APS culture, structures and processes to deliver more interactive, citizen focussed policies, programs and outcomes.
• Elements of the necessary change agenda are in play but the pervasive and deep nature of the change agenda point to the need for clear accountability for overall delivery and role clarity amongst the many agencies with responsibilities for the constituent parts of the change agenda.

This advice from experienced former senior Commonwealth public servants and based on international experience accords with the taskforce’s experience of the past six months. For Government 2.0 leadership to be effectively established and maintained, the right governance arrangements will be critical.

The following three conditions should inform the design of Government 2.0 governance arrangements:

1. A Government 2.0 lead agency should be appointed as the central and accountable focus at a whole of government level to drive the implementation of the taskforce recommendations. The lead agency should maintain a longer term commitment to the wider Government 2.0 agenda across the Australian Government.
2. The lead agency should itself reflect and reinforce the practices, habits and tools of Government 2.0 and so, model the principles of openness, engagement and collaboration.
3. The lead agency should ensure that the Government 2.0 agenda is part of the government’s larger ambitions for public sector reform and public innovation. This reflects the taskforce’s view that the Government 2.0 agenda is an integral part of systemic changes to the culture and practice of public policy and governance, the next step in a long evolution towards a more responsive and citizen centric public sector.

3.5.1: The case for a lead agency

Current responsibility for functions associated with Government 2.0 practices are fragmented across agencies in the APS. Table 1 below sets out some (although not all) of these agencies.

Table 1: Government 2.0 — entities, roles and responsibilities¹²⁸

Agencies/ Entities	Roles
	Policy/resource allocation	Program delivery	Advice / advocacy	Audit/Public reporting/Other
Government 2.0 Taskforce	Yes — time limited	No	Yes — time limited	No
Proposed Office of the Information Commissioner	Yes	No?	Yes — to agencies and the public	Yes — on performance of departments & agencies against FOI Act requirements for information plans
Department of Finance and Deregulation / AGIMO	Yes — on ICT architecture, policies and resources	Yes — e.g. cross government activities Responsive Government A New Service Agenda	Yes — to agencies on ICT issues	Yes , e.g. Interacting with Government Australians' use and satisfaction with e-government services — 2008
Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet	Yes — Reform of Australian Government Administration: Building the world’s best public service	Yes — departmental performance information in relation to programs and “system health”	No?	Yes? — e.g. in respect of broad public service reform outcomes
Public Service Commissioner	Yes — culture and people policies for the APS for Gov 2.0	Yes — people development	Yes — to agencies on people/culture issues	Yes — State of the Service Reports
National Archives of Australia	Yes — records management / archives policies	Yes — national collections	Yes	Yes — departmental record keeping practices
Line departments & agencies	Yes — topic specific input	Yes — front line delivery of “content”	No	Yes — in respect of own performance via Annual Reports etc
Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT)	No	No	No	Hearings on disputed FOI requests

Source: Government 2.0 Taskforce Project 13, Government 2.0 Governance and Institutions: Embedding the 2.0 agenda in the APS, Heuris Partners

As detailed in Chapter 4, both the UK and the US have driven the Government 2.0 agenda with strong leadership and coordination.¹²⁹

The functions of the lead agency should be to:

• provide leadership and act as a catalyst and exemplar of Government 2.0 to sustain the momentum of these reforms across the APS
• develop and maintain policies, guidance, education and support to assist decision makers to extend and improve the quality of online engagement, in conjunction with other relevant agencies
• work with agencies to develop and implement agency plans relating to online engagement and the use of online tools and platforms
• develop and maintain a toolkit to facilitate agencies’ access to a menu of Government 2.0 tools and platforms
• capture and share agencies’ learning about Government 2.0 through networks of practice
• recognise and reward outstanding practice and innovation in Government 2.0
• develop and report to government on the social and economic benefits of Government 2.0, in particular the value of published PSI
• position and embed Government 2.0 principles in the broader public sector reform initiatives undertaken by government.

Managing a successful and timely transition to a Government 2.0 culture has APS-wide implications. Experience in other jurisdictions has shown that strong political support driven by the leadership of a central agency is a common element of success in managing the required transition to Government 2.0. Thus the lead agency should be a central government agency with sufficient authority across the APS to ensure APS-wide commitment to necessary changes. The taskforce considers that the lead agency should come from within either the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) or Finance and Deregulation (Finance) portfolios.

The taskforce considered but rejected the proposed OIC as an appropriate candidate for the role of lead agency. The OIC’s remit currently has only partial coverage of Government 2.0 and is primarily an audit and compliance function. To use the words of the Waller Report, the lead agency’s role is that of advocate and coach. The taskforce agrees with the Waller Report that the lead agency and the OIC have strongly complementary roles, but they are distinct and best served by separate agencies.

The work program of the lead agency should be developed with and supported by a Government 2.0 steering group, in consultation with relevant agencies.

3.5.2: The lead agency as an exemplar of Government 2.0

Considered risk taking, experimentation, innovation and wide-scale citizen engagement will all be necessary features of a successful change program. The lead agency must be an exemplar of Government 2.0.

It is imperative that whichever agency is selected as the lead agency, it leads by example, modelling Government 2.0 in practice. Its mode of operation should exemplify and extend the possibilities of Government 2.0 principles and approaches in practice.

As documented in Chapter 7, the taskforce has sought boldly to adopt and demonstrate Government 2.0 in its operations. It helped foster the development of an extensive community which has matured into an active community of interest. A critical role for the lead agency will be to maintain and extend the role and reach of that community.

A project¹³⁰ to review the taskforce’s success in demonstrating the potential of Government 2.0 outlined a proposal to develop a whole of Australian Government community of practice to enable communication and collaboration to further open access to public sector information and facilitate greater online engagement through a series of internal and external online forums to develop best practice policies, standards, data and guidelines.

To be successful, Government 2.0 must also remain closely linked to key public sector reform and renewal agendas. The lead agency will need to embed Government 2.0 principles and practices into changes following from the Advisory Group on Reform of Australian Government Administration (the Moran Review),¹³¹ the Review of the National Innovation System (the Cutler Review)¹³² and the Review of the Australian Government’s Use of Information and Communication Technology (Gershon Review).¹³³

Recommendation 2: Coordinate with leadership, guidance and support

2.1. A lead agency should be established within the Commonwealth public service with overall responsibility for advancing the Government 2.0 agenda, providing leadership, resources, guidance and support to agencies and public servants on Government 2.0 issues. Its work program should be developed in consultation with relevant agencies, for example Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the proposed new Office of the Information Commissioner, Department of Finance and Deregulation, the Australian Public Service Commission, National Archives of Australia, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, through a Government 2.0 Steering Group.¹³⁴

2.2 The Australian Government should engage other members of the Council of Australian Governments to work with the lead agency to learn from each other and promote their successes in the development of Government 2.0 strategies.

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Previous Section: Chapter 2: How does Australia compare internationally? | Next section: Chapter 4: Promoting online engagement

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Footnotes

120. Classic public goods in economics textbooks are defence and lighthouses. Traffic lights are a local public good. Web 2.0 platforms are typically super public goods because the value of the network rises with each participant.
121. Though the public good lies at the centre of the system, the initial engineering of the internet itself and some of the fundamental software of the world wide web have been projects of government. Other public goods of Web 2.0 have been built by the commercial sector and by individuals or organisations not primarily motivated by profit.
122. Quoted in Lee Robin S. and Wu, Tim, 2009. ‘Subsidizing Creativity through Network Design: Zero-Pricing and Net Neutrality’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2009 — p. 61–76, at p. 66.
123. The business model involving giving products away to some users while selling it to others.
124. Correspondence with the taskforce in the course of working on a project on the economic value of PSI.
125. Confidential correspondence of the taskforce.
126. See ‘The Theory of SPIN: Serial Professional Innovation Negation' on the taskforce blog at http://gov2.net.au/blog/2009/08/04/the-theory-of-spin-serial-professional-innovation-negation/ [] or http://tinyurl.com/yl8ncym [].
127. http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page21634 [].
128. This table is taken from the report of the Government2.0 Taskforce Project 13, Government2.0 Governance and Institutions:  Embedding the 2.0 agenda in the APS by Heuris Partners http://gov2.net.au/projects/project-13 [].
129. As noted in the Heuris Partners Project 13 Report:

     Gov 2.0 is not at bottom about technology or even ubiquitous access and use of public sector information. It is about a fundamentally different way of approaching much of the business of government. As such, it is highly desirable that one agency/executive carries ultimate accountability and one with the skill sets and leverage required to prosecute successfully and embed the change agenda across the APS.
     Government 2.0 Taskforce Project 13, Government 2.0 Governance and Institutions: Embedding the 2.0 agenda in the APS by Heuris Partners, p. 23, http://gov2.net.au/project/project-13 [].

130. Government 2.0 Taskforce Project 19, Online Engagement Review by Collabforge, http://gov2.net.au/projects/project-19 [].
131. http://www.dpmc.gov.au/consultation/aga_reform/index.cfm [].
132. http://www.innovation.gov.au/innovationreview [].
133. http://www.finance.gov.au/publications/ict-review/index.html [].
134. This is not to preclude the possibility of one of the listed agencies being or including the lead agency.

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Contact for information on this page: government2report@finance.gov.au

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Copyright Notice

Notwithstanding the general copyright licence provided for on www.finance.gov.au, the Government 2.0 Taskforce’s report and associated material is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia licence [] except where the copyright of others is cited.

The report should be attributed as the Government 2.0 Taskforce Report; the logo and front page graphic should be attributed to Ben Crothers of Catch Media.

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