Gov 2.0 Taskforce: Recommendations

Minister's Office, Old Parliament House

At Gov 2.0 Taskforce: Ten Years On, we broke into groups to look at the "Engage: getting on with Government 2.0" report recommendations.  There is a live stream and online questions are accepted. From the two groups I talked to Recommendation 4: Encourage public servants to engage online , has had mixed results. There are now many ways for government to collect citizens views online. However, public servants are, if anything, more constrained in doing anything with the results of the consultation. The digital public facing system is not well interfaced to the old analogue public service hierarchy. There is then a widening air-gap between the public service and the political level of government. 

To me this problem of getting anything done in government sounded an old problem. As a public servant,I had to occasionally work around the official processes to get anything done. This was usually with official approval. For these purposes links to academia and the professions are useful. Unfortunately in the Internet age it is very much more difficult to have an off the record, or "other hat" discussion. To that end I have added "Teaching Gov 2.0 to Government" to the list of topics for discussion.

A recent example is that ANU will run the Cyber Bootcamp Project for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Such courses provide a way for government employees from across governments to have a relatively free discussion. Students can explore ideas as students, then work out how the outcomes can be put to their organizations as initiatives. This also happens in professional bodies, and standards committees.

ps: My old posts from ten years ago are at gov2taskforce