chieftech’s blog

• Enrol - I'm enroling for the first time
• Update - I've changed house or name
• Check - Check if I'm currently enrolled

This is not an official AEC website. It has been made by an independent advocacy group as part of our campaign to make enrolling easier.

Government 2.0 doesn't have to be about running nice fluffy community consultations online or getting MPs to use Twitter. It can be deeply practical too. So, with a federal election coming in Australia, advocacy group, GetUp!, have created a site to help people enrol or update their electoral role details online.

The fact that they've even created this site raises the question of why you wouldn't just use the official Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) site? Well, because you can't actually enrol online - the GetUp! site captures your enrollment electronically, but then faxes the form to the AEC.

However, according to the Sydney Morning Herald an AEC spokesperson has warned:

"A digitally constructed signature wouldn't be valid, and we would require a hardcopy signature on an enrolment form"

This is odd, because the AEC will accept a scanned form via email. However, I've always thought that an email was good enough anyway under Australian law?

However, perhaps what is more concerning it the attitude all round with this problem. Why wouldn't we want people to be able to enroll to participate in one of our most import civic rights, using the most convenient method possible? It also reminds me that digital inclusion is a two-way street.

UPDATE

Apparently, the AEC was swamped by people trying to beat the deadline for enrolments, which caused a few problems.

From the Daily Telegraph:

THE Australian Electoral Commission went into meltdown yesterday as thousands of first-time voters tried to register.

The AEC pleaded for patience as its fax lines jammed and many frantic voters swamped the phone lines trying to report the problem. A spokeswoman said the AEC was trying its best to cope with an unexpectedly large demand.

And the SMH:

The rush to join the roll ahead of the Monday night deadline was so fierce the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) at lunchtime boosted its call centre staff by 200 to 700.

The AEC website also crashed for almost an hour as Australians rushed to register to vote ahead of the August 21 poll.

The Government’s response to this report, which Senator Ludwig and I released today, shows twelve of the report’s 13 recommendations were generally agreed to.  We have deferred our response to one recommendation about tax deductibility for information philanthropy until it can be considered in the context of the review of Australia’s Future Tax System and the research report on the Contribution of the Not-for-Profit Sector.

The Taskforce’s central recommendation was that the Australian Government make a declaration of open government. The Rudd Government has accepted this recommendation and we expect to make such a declaration in the coming months.

Whilst today is the completion of one phase, it is also very much the beginning of a new one. The task now is to implement these changes, beginning with assisting agencies to make the most of the opportunities offered by Web 2.0.

Yesterday, Senator Tanner and Ludwig published the Australian federal government's official response to the Gov 2.0 Taskforce report.

The government agreed with the vast majority of recommendations, so I won't provide a point-by-point critique of their responses. The broad implication is that this provides a mandate at the federal level (and hopefully cascading down to state and local levels) for 'Open Government' and Government 2.0*. The Department of Finance and Deregulation has been appointed the lead agency, working along side the future Office of the Information Commissioner (OIC) and the Attorney Generals Department (AGD), and a multi-agency steering group, to help guide and support the implementation of Government 2.0.

One immediate implication for agencies is that the government also supported the Taskforce's call for an initial 12 month period (on top of the last 10 months of advance warning) where agencies need put together what is effectively their own Government 2.0 review and action plan. I did note that this includes not just external engagement, but "internal collaboration within their agency and between agencies".

However, with hindsight there are probably few surprises in the areas where the government didn't endorse the Taskforce's recommendations entirely or immediately:

• The role of the OIC versus the AGD in relation to public sector information and copyright;
• The didn't support the position that all consultations to be conducted in public (I actually agree with them on this point); and
• Deferment of the info-philanthropy recommendation.

The government also clearly stated that there will be no extra money for agencies to implement Government 2.0 - this is to be treated as business as usual:

The cost of agency change required to address internal technical and policy barriers will be the responsibility of agencies to absorb as part of their business-as-usual activities.

Personally, I think there are some critical steps that need to happen next:

1. The lead agency - Finance (I assume, in practice AGIMO) - needs to focus on actively facilitating the adoption of Government 2.0 through knowledge sharing and networking between people inside and outside government, not just issuing improved guidelines. In fact, the ongoing development of practices and guidelines needs to be a participatory approach by the agencies using them.
2. If individual agencies are going to address Government 2.0 as they have been mandated but also as part of business of usual, I think it will require swapping some existing ways of operating for new, innovative approaches.

Finally, on a related note - nice to see 'govspace' up and running.

*I'm a bit of heretic and don't see Open/Participatory Government as necessarily being mutually inclusive with the concept of Government 2.0, however they are mutually beneficial.

The agreement is significant to Google as it has spent more than two years trying to court the university to adopt Gmail for staff members. But the university was hesitant to move staff members on to Gmail due to regulatory and cost factors.

They were concerned that their email messages would be subject to draconian US law.

In particular, they were worried about protecting their intellectual property under the Patriot Act and Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Mr Bailey said.

"In the end, Google agreed to store that data under EU jurisdiction, which we accepted," he said.

The university had to comply with state laws, which mandated that data had to be stored in NSW.

Google was not going to build a local data centre anytime soon so Macquarie had to maintain an offline archive of data at the university, he said. In the past, Macquarie was concerned about the cost of relaying large files to and from the US, where Google's data centre resides. But this been resolved thanks to the Australia's Academic and Research Network (AARnet), which the university is a member of. "AARNet peered with Google (and Microsoft) which means it won't cost us anything more," Mr Bailey said.

A $2 million limited liability was increased to $10m in case Gmail stopped working. "You need proper recourse if your free email service stops working."

Its important to note how Macquarie Uni resolved their concerns about moving staff mailboxes to Gmail... a combination of getting their off shored data managed under a more friendly jurisdiction, creating their own archive to comply with local law, data peering and risk management through increased financial liability provisions. A good checklist for other large Australian organisations that want to go down the same path?

Social Innovation Camp is taking place in Australia next March, with initial meetup events taking place around the country. But what exactly is Social Innovation Camp all about? Watch this video from SI Camp Scotland:

Social Innovation Camp (Sicamp)is an experiment in creating social innovations for the digital age. The third Sicamp took place at Saltire Centre in Glasgow on Friday 19th June to 21st June 2009 and proved a huge success. Over 60 people joined in to turn six back-of-the-envelope ideas for web tools to change the world into real social start-ups complete with working software - all in under 48 hours. This video is a quick summary of what took place over the 48 hour period from beginning to end.

My initial advice to the task force was that one of the major lessons of the we and Internet to government is that you have to actually do it to make it work. Also you need to look to the academics and the private sector to see how it can be done. The third is to makes use of the policy and rhetoric from the USA, UK and other government but not necessarily their implementation. I am not sure that the taskforce members at the meeting understood the point I was making.

I have to say that I agree with all of Tom's points here. The only thing I might add is that they should look to the academics and private sector plus the non-profit sector to see how it can be done.