As I said when I posted on open data earlier this year:

It’s not about the technology. It’s not about data quality. Or privacy. Or commercial sensitivity, or any of that stuff. That should all be dealt to as part of the everyday functioning of any administration. It is about accepting that we, the government, collect and manage this information on behalf of citizens and that it is our fundamental responsibility to make it available to them in a way that supports the creation of public and economic value.

The open data site is a very positive step forward in that direction.

A not so positive step forward; indeed, more a cautionary tale for public sector managers, is the headlong rush to capitalize on the positive engagement that open government initiatives are triggering around the world. It is genuinely difficult to understand the emergence of cardigan chic, but it is a phenomenon nonetheless. Transforming government is a business that everyone wants to be in; from social media consultants whose experience in the sector can be measured in a page full of tweets to corporations blinded by a sense of their own beneficence…

Adobe’s Open Gov site is an alarming example of the latter. The site is 100% Flash based. It’s like building a website to promote philanthropy — and charging people to view the content. The site is intended to:

promote the use of Adobe technologies to achieve the goal of “opening up Washington,” as well as highlighting ways in which federal, state, and local governments have implemented these technologies. Ars Technica

Publishing data in proprietary formats alone, or as the primary media, is a very bad idea. It does not lead to openness, it does not lead to transparency and it most certainly isn’t in the public interest. As the Sunlight Foundation rightly point out:

if the data format has an ® by its name, it probably isn’t great for transparency or open data. Sunlight Labs

Currently, sixty-seven percent of New Zealand public sector agencies hold some information that they can no longer access. Publishing agency data in proprietary formats is only going to exacerbate that issue…

DIA should be applauded for building the open data catalogue. It is an important step in opening up government information. It is, however, only one step. Agencies should be looking at registering their data sets, but they should also be looking at using open standards for that data.

By way of a disclosure, I have provided a small amount of advice to DIA about this project, but certainly not enough to prevent me commending the initiative (or sufficient for me to legitimately bask in any reflected approbation).

Photo: Swiv

Recently, Glen Barnes and Nat Torkington launched the Open Data Catalogue and it is encouraging to see how much government data has been submitted in such a short space of time. There are currently more than fourty data sets on the site, from central and local government agencies. These sets range from economic data provided by the Treasury, geospatial data, various sets of energy data and a collection of directories and registers.

The point to bear in mind as you scroll down this list, though, is that these sets represent a fraction of the data the Crown holds. This catalogue could easily extend to hundreds of pages…

So, while we celebrate the initiative of the Ministry for the Environment releasing data under a Creative Commons license, for example, it might be worth pausing and considering how we can accelerate this process.

That conversation is already taking place on the Open Government Ninjas List, where one of the threads has been about the barriers to opening up government data.

While I agree that most of these reasons have some currency, none resonate as much as the senior American official talking to John Geraci of O’Reilly:

There were some interesting apps in there, but overall they didn’t meet with the mayor’s agenda for the city.
Open Gov Is a Dialogue, Not a Monologue

This (completely guileless?) admission underscores for me what is the critical issue in opening up government data: culture change.

It’s not about the technology. It’s not about data quality. Or privacy. Or commercial sensitivity, or any of that stuff. That should all be dealt to as part of the everyday functioning of any administration. It is about accepting that we, the government, collect and manage this information on behalf of citizens and that it is our fundamental responsibility to make it available to them in a way that supports the creation of public and economic value.

This isn’t an add-on, or a ‘nice to do.’ It’s an integral part of our operating environment now.

There is an Open Data BarCamp planned for later this year. Come along and be part of the change.

Photo: Justin Marty

The topline results of our usage habits are fairly unremarkable: 78% of Kiwis use the Internet, 6% are ex-users and 16% have never used it. What is more revealing is the data on our attitudes to the Internet:

New Zealanders who use the Internet rely on it heavily. 61% think it would be a problem if they lost access, while only 2% think this would make life better.

More tellingly, as a source of information, the Internet is rated important by more users than are family and friends – 71% compared to 56%. Word of mouth, particularly that of family and friends, is generally quoted as being the most trusted source of information about companies and their products.

Perhaps Kiwis think of the Internet as more a source of news than product information? That makes more sense when you consider that newspapers or television only rate as important with 52% of the respondents.

Government

What are New Zealanders’ views with regard to government on the Internet?

New Zealanders use the Internet to access government, mainly for information about services (47%), from both local and central government sites. Unsurprisingly, the most common activity is accessing information about government or council services.

What I was both encouraged and delighted to see was that 33% use the Internet to obtain information on government policy. One third of respondents are interested enough in government policy to research in online: that is an impressive result.

Unfortunately, the Australian report [PDF 3.9 MB] – which is in many ways a more interesting read – focussed on peoples’ interest in politics, rather than government, so there is no opportunity for comparison with our closest neighbours… Although it is worth noting that only 25% of users agree or strongly agree with the statement that by using the internet public officials will care more what people like you think.

Fewer Kiwis, only 15%, seek information online about political parties or MPs. In terms of e-government, payments such as rates, taxes or fines are made online by 21% of users.

All of these results contrast markedly with the findings in the Kiwis Count survey that SSC ran at roughly the same time. Only 4% of respondents used a website to contact a government agency about a service. That 17% gap is one that needs to be explored and understood.

Social media

To return to a recurring theme of this blog, it is the behaviour of younger Kiwis (and by extension, younger public servants) that should serve as a harbinger of change in the workplace.

A significant minority of users are active in posting different forms of material on the Internet. 27% have posted messages on discussion or message boards, 34% have posted pictures, photos or videos, while just 8% have posted audio material.

However, it is not just ‘casual’ use of social media. The report notes that a significant minority of users are engaged in forms of online content creation. 13% maintain their own website and 10% keep
their own blog. How are agencies planning for this influx of behaviour into their organizations? What sort of strategies do they have in place to support and manage this creativity?

Of course, it doesn’t begin and end there. The report’s authors note, with classic antipodean understatement, that socializing is a major use of the Internet. They found that 77% of users check their email every day. At least weekly, 34% use IM and 28% participate in social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook.

Accordingly,

most users say that the Internet has increased their contact with other people, especially overseas (65%). There is increased contact with people in the same profession (51%), those who share recreational interests (33%), and people generally in New Zealand (42%). [My emphasis]

Over half of the respondents use the Internet to connect with professional networks. It’s probably not such a good idea to block access to those sites then, is it?

Conclusion

There is a tremendous amount of material to sift through in this report. It is the first that New Zealand has contributed to the project (some of the other countries have notched up six or seven), and it provides a valuable insight into the behaviour of Kiwis on- and off-line.

It also provides yet more evidence (if you are still holding on to the forlorn hope that you can ignore this whole online thing…) that, as a profession, we need to be doing a lot more and urgently about getting our agencies in shape to adapt to — and manage this change.

Photo: kenyee

To recap, the concept of open sourcing government is essentially about allowing third parties (citizens, companies, non-profits, etc.,) direct access via APIs to government data, so:

that individuals, communities and businesses are able to interact with government web applications in ways that are useful to them.
5 principles for Govt 2.0

The UK Cabinet Office released a report in June last year that looked at what this would mean for their public management system. The economic impact alone, as the report makes clear, had the potential to make a significant contribution:

2006 figures from the Office of Fair Trading that estimate that improved availability of information to re-users could double the direct market value of public sector information to £1.1 billion per year.
The value of government information

The Princeton paper authors, however, seem to be going some way further, calling for the US federal government to reduce the role it plays in presenting online information to citizens. The authors argue that the key role for federal agencies should be opening up their data, rather than building websites that provide a platform (and by inference, not a particularly good one) and a filter for people to access the information.

Their premise is an attractive one. That government

should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that “exposes” the underlying data. [... The Government should] require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large.
Government Data and the Invisible Hand, p1.

Effectively, this means that government agencies could focus their attention (and taxpayer dollars) on the quality and accessibility of the information, and not on the presentation level. It’s a compelling proposition, particularly when you consider the current state of the namespace (in any jurisdiction, really).

The authors argue that the market, in the form of these third parties developing applications that reuse the government data, will drive economies of innovation and accessibility that are beyond anything that government itself could hope to provide. They list some of these advanced features:

• advanced search
• RSS feeds
• links to information sources
• mashups with other data sources
• discussion forums and wikis
• data visualization
• automated content and topic analysis
• collaborative filtering and crowdsourcing analysis

It is worth pointing out that some of these advanced features are already part of the namespace here; albeit with mixed success. Advanced search, RSS feeds, and wikis are all essential elements of the .govt.nz space.

There are a couple of concerns that I have. The authors acknowledge that in some case there will be no private actor willing to step forward and create a compelling website based on the data. The notion that government makes all information accessible, irrespective of it’s apparent value, is a fundamental one. Abrogating that responsibility to third parties seems fraught with potential to disadvantage some sections of the community. Mike W leaves a comprehensive comment to this effect on Ed Felten’s blog (one of the authors of the paper).

As an aside, ensuring that people can access a government data set via a visualization (like EveryBlock, for example) using a screenreader can be done, but it is hard work…

More of a concern, however, is the notion that we can either continue to try to build usable websites or simply outsource innovation in the namespace. I don’t see, as the authors apparently do, that the two are mutually exclusive. Indeed, there is an argument that government should retain and build more capability for innovation, rather than adopt practices that would encourage this sort of activity to atrophy.

Those concerns aside, however, what the authors of the paper are proposing is both an effective and efficient approach to transformed government. We should be seriously considering the same here in New Zealand.

Photo: kool_skatcat

I have posted before about the seismic change that social media is bringing about for the public sector. As communicators, more than most other staff, we need to be able to track the impact of this change and begin to experiment and engage in order to provide our managers with the advice they need to remain abreast of developments or, in a perfect world, capitalize on this changing environment.

Are you getting the support and the tools you need to do your job well now and to grow and develop professionally? Or are you stuck in a backwater where managers are dismissive of the impact of this change and are determined to continue to pursue a course that was first plotted in the late ’90’s?

Unsure? Here’s how you can tell.

Internet access

Do you have unrestricted access to the Internet? No blocking of social media sites?

What about the ability to download files to your local machine? Do you have a bandwidth limit that means you have to prioritize your podcasts? Or is your internet traffic one-way only?

What about the ability to FTP files to a remote server?

Do you have a configurable web browser like Firefox, or are you stuck with Internet Explorer (I call IE7 ‘the pendulum,’ because it spends most of the time hanging…)?

RSS

If you haven’t got your head around this yet, then it should be at the top of your priority list. Being able to source, process and file an enormous quantity of fresh content from news sites, blogs and search engines is a basic competency for a communicator.

Do you have access to an online feed reader or aggregator, like Google Reader, Pageflakes or Bloglines?

Or have you installed a desktop client, like the free and brilliant NetNewsWire?

Mobility

Do you have a mobile device that allows you to access the Internet? What about reading your RSS feeds on the commute to work in the morning? Can you visit your agency website in a meeting and retrieve relevant documents quickly and easily? That last one is probably unfair, as we know it is not the technology that is the problem…

Conclusion

If you found yourself nodding smugly as you read through this post then you are obviously working in the public sector somewhere, but probably not here in New Zealand. If you were running at around 50%, then you are way ahead of the curve and you should probably contact me so I can hand over responsibility for this blog.

If, on the other hand, at the end of that list you realized that your agency is in the social media equivalent of the dark ages, then you have two choices:

1. start agitating for change
2. embrace the 21st Century

The clock is ticking. What are you going to do?

Photo: J.McPherson

Despite the evidence and regular predictions about the central role that mobile devices will play in the future of the web, public sector agencies (most of them anyway) have yet to recognize this and build or adapt their existing sites to accomodate these users.

One obvious reason is that public sector agencies’ investment cycles are a lot longer than twelve months and that we will start to see mobile-friendly sites developed increasingly over then next 36 months. That may be the case, but it points at what I believe is the fundamental problem with the .govt.nz domain space: that the management of government websites is mostly considered to be a technical function.

These are not, however, technical issues. The technology has been developed, is already widely used and understood. It is a question of business managers understanding how they can use these tools to better achieve their outcomes.

One possibility

Let me give you an example. We know that the telephone is New Zealander’s preferred means of interacting with government. We also know that it is the channel that causes the most grief for customers (and hence materially impacts upon the agency’s customer satisfaction ratings).

Yet how many government websites offer real-time interaction via the web, using instant messaging, for example? None that I am aware of (happy to be contradicted, point to examples in the comments).

Think about the advantages. You still have people in the ‘holding pattern,’ waiting to interact with a human being, but staff can see the nature of the query/complaint and make a judgement about moving it up or down in the queue.

You can also track contact drop outs against the logged query/complaint and garner much more data about the effectiveness of the interactions, because it can all be stored and – more importantly, given the volume of data we are talking about, searched.

Now to really add public value, you could have the customer service representative tag the data as it is entered during the exchange, for example applying microformats to describe attributes like location and time, which would effectively create a rich dataset for the agency — and for any enterprising third parties, much like Adrian Holovaty’s EveryBlock.

The solution

The first couple of aspects of the scenario above are pedestrian in both conception and execution. The notion of introducing semantics to the process has the potential to transform the agency’s interaction with its publics.

As I suggested above, the lack of coordinated and strategic development of the namespace is because what are essentially communications issues are decided by technologists.

A small part of the solution is wresting back control of the way our agencies interact with their publics; the greater challenge is to understand the technology sufficiently to effectively engage with management and the technologists in these discussions. Otherwise we will be doomed to keep arriving just in time for the ribbon cutting…

Photo: Waponi

Essentially, Wilson points out that these social sites are not built and maintained by the masses, rather they are the product of the dedicated minority.

In reality, a small number of people are running the show. According to researchers in Palo Alto, 1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site’s edits. The site also deploys bots—supervised by a special caste of devoted users—that help standardize format, prevent vandalism, and root out folks who flood the site with obscenities. This is not the wisdom of the crowd. This is the wisdom of the chaperones.
Chris Wilson

Unlike Wilson, I have no problem with the flimsy veneer of democracy being peeled back from these sites, as I am not particularly interested in the ideology of social media; but the reality of maintaining Wikipedia does provide some salient lessons for public sector organizations seeking to implement these content management systems.

Resourcing

The first point that these findings suggest is that while the wiki will cost (virtually) nothing to set up, it does require dedicated resource to make it a success. This would be in the form of staff whose statements of accountability include curatorial responsibility for the content, and software that supports them in this role.

Some of the tasks that they might be entrusted with range from flagging redundancies, locking pages and migrating content into other wikis or the enterprise document management system, archiving superseded content, through to jointly managing the taxonomic structure of the site.

Without these sorts of controls, particularly over an extended period of time, you run the risk of, at best, the quality and discoverability of the content will inevitably degrade, and the worst case is that you breach the Public Records Act.

Documentation

Just because it is a social media project, doesn’t mean that you can avoid your due diligence. Terms of Reference spelling out the objectives, governance and – most importantly – your content management strategy. That’s right: what are you going to do down the track with this thing? Is it a case of just install and leave it for the next generation to deal with? Or assess after 18 months, migrate everything useful into another platform and archive the lot?

The other, perhaps equally important, benefit of documentation is that you can share it. If your agency does start experimenting with wikis, then it would helpful for your peers if as much of what you did, learned and, if necessary, bungled could be made available, so we avoid the costs of multiple agencies figuring this out for themselves.

One other point about the paperwork: in terms of selling the project to senior management, having robust documentation will get you a lot further than a Govt 2.0 elevator pitch. If that documentation includes another agency’s post-implementation review and/or final assessment of their project, you are making it as easy as practicable for them to agree.

Conclusion

Providing clarity for your organization about what the wiki will (and won’t) be used for, who will be responsible for managing it to success and how they will be supported in that role, should be a methodical and deliberate process.

If we expect to see these tools become part of the standard enterprise suite for public sector agencies in the immediate future, then we need to manage their initial implementations with particular care and attention to detail — and resist the temptation built into the utility of the product to just fire them up and hope for the best.

Seb’s presentation, with the rather meandering title, A brief introduction to web 2.0 for government and non-profits: a perspective from the cultural sector included a case study on how to use some simple web 2.0 tools to deliver public value.

Using search, collabularies and folksonomies and analytics, Seb and his team were able to not only reorganize content on the website to make it more discoverable to a wider range of visitors, but have begun to feed data back to the museum that informs how they exhibit in the bricks & mortar building.

One of the examples he uses in the presentation perfectly captures this process. The Powerhouse has a locomotive in one of the foyers. Extremely popular with visitors, it is not even in the top 10 items searched for on the website. The honour for the most searched item on the site belongs to a frock, which – until this data had been mined – had never been exhibited.

In his book, Creating Public Value, Mark Moore writes that the task of public sector marketers (and he makes no distinction between marketing and strategic communications) is to:

find out what features of governmental performance are judged to be relevant and important by those who pay for the organization’s product: namely, the citizens and their political representatives.
pp. 186-187. My emphasis.

As I noted in the post on Search and Govt 2.0, the amount of information on government websites is multiplying at a rate that is fast outstripping our ability to map it in any meaningful way using traditional navigation models. And, as Seb pointed out, this is the realm of the long tail; at the Powerhouse, 95% of all available objects were viewed at least once in the first ten weeks, and the most popular was only viewed 28,000 times.

By surfacing what is relevant to the Powerhouse’s online visitors, Seb’s team have done more than design a better web experience. Using that information to design exhibits that appeal to it’s physical visitors, and thereby increasing revenues as well as customer satisfaction, they have delivered on the organization’s strategic plan PDF [70 KB].

It’s true that this case study represents something of the best of all possible worlds; both the website and the physical organization are essentially object repositories, and this isomorphism lends itself to a relatively straightforward value chain.

However, the lessons learned at the Powerhouse can be readily translated across the Tasman and are equally applicable to service delivery and policy agencies here in New Zealand.

My presentation at the conference was on the Principles of public sector social media, it is an s5.

Disregarding the wisdom of issuing categorical imperatives for the moment, time and a little more analysis have led me to reassess my stance on the sovereignty of public sector social media initiatives. In my haste to arrive at a series of principles that would serve as a discussion guide for public sector communicators, I overlooked those instances where government agencies would be well advised to use hosted services.

The most glaringly obvious example is video sharing. It would be a waste of taxpayers’ money to try and replicate a service like YouTube in the government namespace.

The important point to note here is that the content you post to these types of sites is not beyond the control of the Crown. You are only uploading a copy that can be accessed and shared by others. In each case the content that you are ’socializing’ could, and should, remain part of the public record.

Much the same argument could be made for social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us or, somewhat less strongly, photo sharing sites like Flickr.

This isn’t intended as (additional) encouragement to start creating agency YouTube channels and Flickr streams. There are still some considerations before you go into an uploading frenzy…

As an example, let’s look at a case where your agency has produced a video. You would like a wider audience than public servants, so you just create a YouTube account and away you go? Alas, no. The Government Web Standards still apply. So, once you have posted the video to YouTube, you link to a full transcript on your agency site.

In terms of sovereignty, government agency channels on hosted sites could be thought of as a little like diplomatic posts; they may be ‘offshore,’ but the same standards still apply.

Of course, this is not limited to the public sector but, given our obligation to make information available and to keep it available as outlined in the Policy for Government Held Information, we are in a particularly invidious position.

One of the obvious ways to address this content crush is tagging. However, I can’t help feel that this is only part of the answer to the problem or, less optimistically, at best a short term solution.

With only 600 odd items in my delicious account, I already feel a sense of dread at the cognitive overload when I look through my list of tags trying to locate a page saved a couple of months ago. Looking at Hamish’s bookmarks renders me dumb with equal parts awe and despair.

The Answer

As I suggested in 5 Principles for Govt 2.0, the answer is Search. Or, in Jon Udell’s far more elegant phrase,

we’re in the midst of a long transition from container-based to query-based storage and retrieval
Tagging and Foldering.

An important point to qualify here is that the term long transition shouldn’t be taken to imply a process that is either leisurely or painless; in government, we can rest assured it will be neither.

I should also point out that, for the government namespace, the demand side search issue has already been solved. The new search on newzealand.govt.nz is frighteningly good (if you are a content owner in this namespace, just search your domain and you will see why it is frightening — everything you have posted in now surfacable).

As an example, when I wanted to pull up the Government Held Information Policy, I searched the SSC site using the, what I thought, obvious terms: “government held information” “policy framework” and finally (I am a lazy typist) I went for the whole phrase. Result? Nothing on the first page of the three searches. An advanced search on newzealand.govt.nz, using the phrase “government held information” restricted to “ssc.govt.nz” and, bingo! straight there.

Supply Side Search

The real issue for government is not the search tool. It is preparing the content for search — making it discoverable. This is where we will have to reinvent business processes and essentially apply a new model to the creation and publication of government held information.

However, until we have XML editors installed across government, and we continue to rely on the thoroughly broken model of trying to convert Word documents to valid HTML, then we will need to pay far more attention to these supply side techniques.

So, in the meantime, we need to focus on:

• semantic markup
• seo
• folksonomies, and last but most importantly
• validate your pages.

All these techniques will address the symptoms, but to get to the heart of the issue will require a more fundamental and profound change.

Conclusion

The exponential growth in the amount of content on government websites should be viewed as an opportunity to transform the namespace by creating social and economic value. There isn’t much point talking about the long tail if it is squashed under a fat rump of poorly marked up, irrelevant and dated or superseded content…

Photo: singleframe.