Citizen-centric services

Senator Kate Lundy's spoke on "Citizen-centric services: A necessary principle for achieving genuine open government" to the Citizen Centric Service Delivery 2011 conference, 1 March 2011: "... three pillars of Open Government. These are Citizen-Centric services, Democratising Data and Participatory Government..." . This speech makes the Gov 2.0 case well and complements the Information Commissioner's "Towards an Australian Government Information Policy". These are valuable resources for my Government 2.0 students.

Imagine a government experience that adapts to you and your circumstances: clear, seamless, integrated services that are both compellingly easy to use, always up to date and with a look and feel suited to your taste and comfort zone.

Citizen-centric services are not obscured or cluttered by the multi-layered complexities of government structures designed in some cases a century ago, and certainly in a pre-digital era.

Citizen-centric services deliver a tailored service to the degree of personal detail and relevance determined by how much information the citizen is willing to provide. Concerns about privacy can be addressed and managed by this permission-based approach to personal service: the more information the citizen is willing to share, the more personalised the service delivery can be.

Today, although there are several government departments and agencies that have incredibly innovative and intuitive online interfaces to their services and information, the fact remains that citizens have to go searching and often have to interact with several spheres of government as well as different agencies before they find what they are looking for.

It is unreasonable for us to expect all citizens to understand the complexities and structures of government service delivery. While the structures of government ought to be transparent, they should not determine the navigation and access pathway for citizens seeking a service. This approach is inside out. Whilst the organisational challenge is significant, the technology definititely exists. ...

With this in mind, I believe there to be three pillars of Open Government. These are Citizen-Centric services, Democratising Data and Participatory Government ...

Citizen-Centric Services

Imagine a government experience that adapts to you and your circumstances: clear, seamless, integrated services that are both compellingly easy to use, always up to date and with a look and feel suited to your taste and comfort zone. ...

Democratising Data is about recognising that government data is a public resource. It can facilitate both public and private innovation. Opening up government data is not just a matter of publishing a few pdfs. It is about ensuring that at the point of creation, government data is assumed to be destined for public release, unless there is a specific reason not to.

This means from creation:

• data should have a permissible copyright license such as Creative Commons,
• data should be stored in an open data format such that it is not locked into a specific product or technology,
• data should be machine readable so that people can create applications that can use the data for new services or analysis,
• there should be a strategy for whether and how to keep the data set up to date, and how updates should be published,
• data should include useful metadata such as date of creation, author, any geospatial information, keywords, to ensure the data is able to be re-purposed on other ways such as by plotting the data on a map. ...

Finally, the third pillar is Participatory Democracy. This pillar is about the proactive engagement with citizens such that their perspectives and experiences can inform and improve policy outcomes. Participatory government has always been there with consultation with citizens and stakeholders a strong feature of mature democracies.

This pillar is about engaging citizens collaboratively in the development, design and implementation of government policy. The web and social networking has provided new ways do this and citizens are exploring the opportunities with enthusiasm.

Policies can be developed and designed with an improved capacity to adapt to changing circumstances. This is crowd-sourcing at it’s most constructive: applied, purposeful and outcome oriented. The challenge for us all, including government, is to channel this goodwill and energy into the public interest. ...

From: Citizen-centric services: A necessary principle for achieving genuine open government, Senator Kate Lundy, 1 March 2011