chieftech’s blog

It is much more usual for local government to operate from a position of, at best, indifference, or at worst active opposition to unregistered street gardens.

Yarra council, by contrast, had the prescience to totally reverse its negative stance (with the help of some popular opposition to help them change their minds), and to come out in support not merely of a single garden but of guerilla gardens across the municipality.

I've had this story about guerilla gardening sitting open for a while on my computer. What I like about it is that as much as its win for the guerilla gardeners, its also a win for all kinds of civic 'hackers' (like the GovHack'ers). I think it also says that, and speaking from the relative comfort of Australia, that perhaps what we need in this country isn't so much open government in its most radical sense, but just some 'reasonable government' that won't block innovation, experimentation and volunteer action without a really good reason. Then interesting things can happen.

Hat tip to David Gravina.

What is striking is that virtually all the progress in openness in government in the US over the years has not come directly from the government. It’s been prompted and fought for by civil society. The insiders are being dragged along by the work of the outsiders.

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Of course Australia is not without its equivalents. Open Australia stands out for me, but there are plenty of others beavering away. I salute them. But if we’re going to match the world leader in this area (and there’s no reason why we couldn’t have a crack) we’re going to have to get quite a wriggle on.

I tried to submit a reply, but I think it got caught in the spam filters (too many links!), so here it is in the meantime:

Nicholas - we made a similar point in Headshift's Rebooting Australia paper, which was included as part of the CPD's submission to the Taskforce:

The big question, though, is how to achieve this? Despite the presence of politicians on Twitter, Australia's public institutions are unchanged, and we are still left with a government designed for the 20th century. We also lack some of the catalysts for change, like MySociety (www.mysociety.org) in the UK, and our third-sector is woefully under-prepared to step up to an enhanced role... There are some positive signals. Initiatives like Open Australia (www.openaustralia.org) show that even if the government itself lacks the capability, then the Australian community is itself ready for the job of creating new people-powered structures and services.

While civic society does have an important role here, I think its also instructive to look at the sources of income for UKCOD (the parent organisation of MySociety) - the mix of government and non-government funding is quite apparent. NESTA is another UK at arms length organisation that is playing a role here too, although their scope is broader than Government 2.0.

Recognising this, I think its unfortunate that the (current) scope of the Taskforce doesn't really appear to accommodate this need to stimulate Government 2.0 *from the outside*. I don't know if its too late to change this?

BTW along with Open Australia, I think ASIX deserves a mention for bringing SI Camp to Australia.

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.