Open Governance: Running Organizations and Governments like an Open Source Software Project

The National Archives of Australia have asked me to help teach e-archiving to public servants from state governments and the federal government in November. This would use some of the material from the course I ran at ANU last November.

Apart from adding some new material on OOXML, I was thinking of suggesting that Open Source could be a model for government.

One thing I have been musing on is why it is so hard for organizations to do web sites. The technology is cheap and easy, but many organizations find it very difficult to maintain a basic web site and most find blogs, wikis and social networking beyond them. Another thing I have been thinking about is what all the different sorts of web based content management tools have in common.

I suspect this is because the governance structures of organizations do not match that of the web technology. The traditional approach to this is to adapt the web technology to the administrative and decision making processes of the organization. The natural response in a government organizations or a university to "how to we improve the web site" is "lets form a committee". The reaction to Wikis has been to ban them.

My advice in the past has been for organizations to avoid having social networking and online discussion forums. Government agencies can't cope with having a lot of people discussing what they are doing on an official government web site. Instead I suggested they get some non-government organization to host the discussion. This way when something is posted which is controversial, the agency can say: "not our web site, not our problem".

But perhaps it is time organizations learned how to use web based tools effectively. I suspect this will require the organizations to change their governance structures, not just their administrative processes. They could simply replicate current structures online, but they will then miss most of the benefits. A lot of what goes on in organizations looks like time wasting nonsense, to someone used to online working. Instead, some of the techniques of open source development could be used for running organizations and nations.

One thing which content management systems have in common is that they need some way to manage. Management is not just about being able to change the footer on all the web pages with one command, but about deciding who does what. Perhaps governance (management at a higher level) could be something open source software could provide as a separate service. The particular application the governance was applied to, such as publishing a journal, running a course, business or government, could then be a separate add-on function.

In doing a quick search on "Open Governance" I discovered this is something government people are discussing, using government web tools. A search found a discussion of government in the Australia Government's GovDex online collaboration forum. Much of GovDex is restricted to government people working on particular projects, but some is publicly accessible and indexed by web search engines. This is a refreshing change for government agencies.

Secure Web Collaboration Across Government and Industry

The March Canberra WIPA/WSG meeting, today discussed government use of web based collaboration, including for sensitive matters at Cabinet level.

Brian Stonebridge, Department Finance and Deregulation
Topic 1: GovDex: a tool to support collaboration across government agencies

Brian Stonebridge talked about how to invest in ICT facilities which did not need to be kept adding to respond to government policy. The particular example was GovDex. A five nation collaboration workspace was demonstrated. This provides support for meetings between governments. Another example was support for the Australian Government ICT Standrads Group. One hot topic this is being used for is to establish the Australian Government position on OOXML (a position has been decided, but not released). Another demonstration was for communicating to new graduate staff. GovDex is secured to IN-CONFIDENCE level of security (PROTECTED cabinet level security and video is planned for GovDex 2).

My first thought was that the tools demonstrated would appear primitive to a group of teenagers organizing their social lives: Surely the Australian Government has something more advanced? Some of the discussion seemed very quaint and last century, for example pointing out that not all graduates may be working in Canberra and the Internet could be used to contact them. In the 21st Century the assumption that staff would be in a particular city, seems an odd one. I would have thought that a 21st century organization would make no assumptions as to where in the world there staff were working from. But the use of such tools need to be learned and also the government's security and public policy issues are difficult ones which most users do not face.

AGIMO is taking a gradual approach of fitting the tools into the usual bureaucratic processes. Ultimately this approach will not work: the processes will need to be changed to improve productivity. The main value of GovDex and similar tools will ultimately come from facilitating the change in these processes.

While I have been a registered GovDex user for some time (they let government consultants in), this talk was still very useful for me. I had the impression that GovDex was just for computer projects. Brian pointed out it can be used for any government project which needs secure collaboration. An example of this is that in the morning I was asked how a wiki could be provided to support the Australian Government's Review of the National Innovation System. My immediate reaction was to say "you can't do that, bureaucrats are not allowed to use wikis" (altought I teach them how to in an ANU course). But GovDex should be ideal for this providing the needed collaboration, but within a structure which supports the needs of government policy development.

Michele Huston, National Library of Australia
Topic 2: Wikis at work

Michele Huston talked about how wikis work in practice, with people initially experimenting and then settling down to organize their information. She discussed problems with the technology, including the editor. She suggested the simple editor has advantages in encouraging people to use simple designs (and at least having to work with wiki markup).

She pointed out a wiki is not intended as an archive, publishing work flow, secure documents or for blogging. These should rightly be done with other tools, although they can be interfaced.

Web collaboration for government

The March Web Standards Group meeting in Canberra features talks on the use of web technology for online collaboration in government agencies. Recommended:

March Canberra WIPA/WSG meeting

RSVP for this event below. 28 people have registered

Date: Thursday 27 March, 2008

Event Details

Time: 2.30 pm - 4.50 pm
Where: NLA Theatre, lower ground floor, National Library of Australia, Parkes Place, Parkes, ACT 2600
Cost: Free

First speaker: Brian Stonebridge, Department Finance and Deregulation
Topic 1: GovDex: a tool to support collaboration across government agencies

Brian Stonebridge is Director of the Collaborative Services Team in the Department of Finance and Deregulation. He has worked for a number of years to develop collaborative tools aimed at promoting a more harmonised approach to the delivery of government services. Brian is also active in the standards space and participates in a range of international standards fora. He represents Australia at the United Nations Committee for the Facilitation of Commerce and Trade.

Brian will talk about the opportunities for government agencies to use GovDex. GovDex is a resource developed to facilitate business process collaboration across policy portfolios and administrative jurisdictions. GovDex promotes effective and efficient information sharing, providing governance, tools, methods and re-usable technical components that government agencies can use to assemble and deploy information services on their different technology platforms.

Second speaker: Michele Huston, National Library of Australia
Topic 2: Wikis at work

Michele Huston is the Director of Web Publishing at the National Library of Australia. Her group undertakes web design for the main web site, authoring support for staff and develops the interfaces for complex web-based systems for the management and delivery of the Library's collections. Michele has been working with the Internet for 15 years and is particularly interested in exploring ways that the Library can benefit from popular Internet applications. In addition to the wiki project that is the topic of this presentation, she has championed a collaboration that allows Flickr users to add photos to Picture Australia and a new catalogue that includes book reviews from Amazon and allows Library card holders to leave comments.

Michele will talk about her experience implementing a wiki at the National Library of Australia. This talk may be of interest to you if you are considering incorporating a wiki at your work place to support various forms of collaborative activity. This is not a talk about the process of implementing a wiki, but is a case study on using a wiki to support the Library's extensive and varied collaboration activities. This wiki exercise did not start with a value proposition explained in business terms nor the assumption that users knew precisely what they wanted out of these tools. The wiki experience was a learning experience both for IT support and for the users. Michele is lucky enough to work at an organisation that isn't afraid of making a few (educational) mistakes!

Web collaboration for government

The March Web Standards Group meeting in Canberra features talks on the use of web technology for online collaboration in government agencies.The first talk features GovDex, a tool specifically developed for Australian Government ICT projects, and the second: the use of wikis in organizations. Recommended:

March Canberra WIPA/WSG meeting

RSVP for this event below. 28 people have registered

Date: Thursday 27 March, 2008

Event Details

Time: 2.30 pm - 4.50 pm
Where: NLA Theatre, lower ground floor, National Library of Australia, Parkes Place, Parkes, ACT 2600
Cost: Free

First speaker: Brian Stonebridge, Department Finance and Deregulation
Topic 1: GovDex: a tool to support collaboration across government agencies

Brian Stonebridge is Director of the Collaborative Services Team in the Department of Finance and Deregulation. He has worked for a number of years to develop collaborative tools aimed at promoting a more harmonised approach to the delivery of government services. Brian is also active in the standards space and participates in a range of international standards fora. He represents Australia at the United Nations Committee for the Facilitation of Commerce and Trade.

Brian will talk about the opportunities for government agencies to use GovDex. GovDex is a resource developed to facilitate business process collaboration across policy portfolios and administrative jurisdictions. GovDex promotes effective and efficient information sharing, providing governance, tools, methods and re-usable technical components that government agencies can use to assemble and deploy information services on their different technology platforms.

Second speaker: Michele Huston, National Library of Australia
Topic 2: Wikis at work

Michele Huston is the Director of Web Publishing at the National Library of Australia. Her group undertakes web design for the main web site, authoring support for staff and develops the interfaces for complex web-based systems for the management and delivery of the Library's collections. Michele has been working with the Internet for 15 years and is particularly interested in exploring ways that the Library can benefit from popular Internet applications. In addition to the wiki project that is the topic of this presentation, she has championed a collaboration that allows Flickr users to add photos to Picture Australia and a new catalogue that includes book reviews from Amazon and allows Library card holders to leave comments.

Michele will talk about her experience implementing a wiki at the National Library of Australia. This talk may be of interest to you if you are considering incorporating a wiki at your work place to support various forms of collaborative activity. This is not a talk about the process of implementing a wiki, but is a case study on using a wiki to support the Library's extensive and varied collaboration activities. This wiki exercise did not start with a value proposition explained in business terms nor the assumption that users knew precisely what they wanted out of these tools. The wiki experience was a learning experience both for IT support and for the users. Michele is lucky enough to work at an organisation that isn't afraid of making a few (educational) mistakes!

W3C Australia Standards Symposium

W3C Australia held a one day Standards Symposium in Canberra on 28 August 2007. This is a one day event to look at where web standards are going. These are my informal notes from the event, not official minutes. The symposium was organized with NICTA, with OASIS, OGC and AGIMO also presenting.

World Wide Web Consortium Australia

The World Wide Web Consortium's Australian office ( W3C Aus) is run by CSIRO in Canberra (on the other side of my office wall in the ANU Computer Science and Information Technology Building).

W3C issue what they call "recommendations", but which are really standards, for HTML, XML, CSS and other key web technologies. W3C was founded by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, in 1994. As with any standards work, there is a rich mix of political, technological and commercial forces at work.

A recent area of tension touched on in the introduction was the schism in the web community between HTML and XHTML. Those working on the next version of HTML (HTML 5) have clearly stated they want to go a different direction from the work on the next XHTML (version 2).

Other tensions are with intellectual property issues with web recommendations. W3C aims to produce technology which can be freely used, without payment of royalties.

W3C wants to expand the web beyond desktop computers, to devices such as mobile phones. That probably is more a matter of commerce, than technology, but the advent of new consumer smart phones may make a differecne.

Typically the W3C process is to first have a "workshop" in an area of interest, then a working groups is formed (if justified) and publishes drafts for comment, implementations are produced to see the technology works, and after several more drafts a recommendation is released. Perhaps more importantly, W3C releases revisions and new versions of recommendations. Implementation guides and web tools are also provided to help with implementation.

As well as the more technical standards for HTML and CSS, W3C also produces guidelines, such as those for web accessibility. There are dozens of working groups working on interrelated recommendations who need to coordinate their work. W3C membership costs money and working group members contribute their time for free.

W3C Australia head, Ross Ackland, claimed the future of the web was to: semantic web, mobile web, and sensor web. He suggested we were in the middle of a ten year adoption of the mobile web, with the semantic web was further in the future and sensor web was a newly emerging technology CSIRO would like to foster.

The semantic web tries to make a web which machines can understand. Ross argued that Web 2.0 and mashups were a "grass roots" ad-hoc approach to what the semantic web was attempting. My view is that WSeb 2.0 and mashups were providing useful services, while semantic web is a failure which should be abandoned.

The W3C Mobile Web Initiative in 2005 got the attention of the mobile phone industry. But the industry has had several attempts at turning the mobile phone into a viable mobile web device. The industry's attempt with WAP was a failure costing billions of dollars. W3C's own attempt with XHTML Basic, has had limited success. About the only one to be successful was Japan's iMode, which uses a version of HTML which the W3C rejected.

The Sensor Web will provide some standards for sensor access in the future:

The Sensor Web is a type of sensor network or geographic information system (GIS) that is especially well suited for environmental monitoring and control. The term describes a specific type of sensor network: an amorphous network of spatially distributed sensor platforms (pods) that wirelessly communicate with each other. This amorphous architecture is unique since it is both synchronous and router-free, making it distinct from the more typical TCP/IP-like network schemes. The architecture allows every pod to know what is going on with every other pod throughout the Sensor Web at each measurement cycle.

From: Sensor Web, Wikipedia, 21:20, 26 July 2007

CSIRO have a sensor web in Brisbane which can be accessed via web services:

This server contains test deployments of the Open Geospatial Consortium's (OGC) Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) services. ... getCapabilities ... data from the sensors deployed by the Autonomous Systems Laboratory in Brisbane, Australia. The sensor measure temperature, soil moisture and onboard diagnostics at three locations, qcat, belmont and gatton. There are roughly 125 stations with two or three sensors each. This yields over 250 data sources of which about 150 appear to be active. Each source reports every few minutes with data coming in every few seconds. ...

From: CSIRO ICT Centre SWE Web Services, CSIRO ICT Centre, 20 April 2007

Ross ended by asking what Australia could do for web standards. He pointed out that successful standards also needed market adoption. Standards take about five years to develop. The benefits are global. How does Australia contribute? An example is standards for water data standards to help with conservation in Australia and world wide.

OPEN GEOSPATIAL CONSORTIUM

OGC develops "specifications" for digital maps. The aim is to be able to knit together different online mapping services to produce a coherent view for the user. OGC works with W3C groups, ISO (ISO 191xx series including ISO 19115 for Metadata) and OASIS (such as Common Alert Protocol (CAP) for emergency messages), IEEE (Sensor Model Language: SensorML).

OGC sponsors scenarios to test implementation of standards (much like the Coalition Warrior Interoperability Demonstration [CWID] for military IT). OWS 4 in December 2006 worked on sensor web enablement SWE, geo processing workflow GPN and geo-decision support. OWS 5 for 2007 is being planned.

One thing which got my attention was mention of "Social Change On-line".

At question time there was a philosophical discussion of what a standard was, their benefits, disadvantages and processes. This was entertaining but not very enlightening. Perhaps there is a need for some courses on what standards are and how they are created.

Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards

Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) was foundered in 1993 for SGML related standards (more recently XML standards). It has more than 60 technical committees. Individuals and organisations can join. A well known OASIS standard is ODF, based on the OpenOffice.org office document format. OASIS produces horizontal standards (general purpose technology) and vertical standards (for a particular business function). Other standards are Universal Business Language (UBL) , Customer Information Quality (CIQ) for identifying locations, organisations and people and Common Alert Protocol (CAP) for emergency messages.

Semantic Web

W3C's Semantic Web is about being able to process information. Current work is on an English-like version of the Web Ontology Language (OWL). This reminds me of the attempt with COBOL to create an English-like computer programming language which could be understood by non technical business people. The result was a verbose language which was still unintelligible to business people and cumbersome for trained computer programmers.

SPARQL is the semantic query language. POWDER the Protocol for Web Description Resources. GRDDL the Gleaning Resources Descriptions and Dialects of Languages.

This was the least useful session of the day. The Semantic Web may well turn out to be very useful one day, but so far all that appears to have been produced are a bewildering array of unintelligible standards. About the only prospect of any of this work ever being of use would be to apply the process Tim Berners-Lea used to create the web, where he took a large and complex standard (SGML) and trimmed it down to the essentials to make HTML.

GEOSCIENCE AUSTRALIA

Chris Body presented about standards in Geoscience Australia. GA seem to have suddenly become more visible, with work on geospatial standards and Tsunami warnings. The Special Minister of State, Gary Nairn, announced an Australian Spatial Consortium (ASC), on 14 August 2007, but it was not clear to me what this is.

ANZLIC (Spatial Information Council) have provided the ANZLIC Metadata Profile (December 2006) ISO TC211 framework. GeoNetwork is a metadata entry tool endorsed by Australian agencies in August 2007.

Geoscience people have a preference for formal international standards. However, GA is aiming to have any Australian contributions to be available free for public use under a Creative Commons licence.

Australian Government Information Management Office

Brian Stonebridge from AGIMO working on a standards governance framework. Brian argued that standards are boring to end users, there has to be some value to the user to get them interested. Brian's presentation was the most impressive of the day, because he was taking about how the standards could be used for the benefit of the community and he actualled used the technology he was talking about to make the presentation, via AGIMO's GovDex:

GovDex is a resource developed by government agencies to facilitate business process collaboration across policy portfolios (eg. Taxation, Human Services etc.) and administrative jurisdictions i.e. federal, state or local government levels. ...

From: Welcome to GovDex, Australian Government Information Management Office, 2007

Brian mentioned that some of the work is being done online, via the system with the French government.

Brian estimated that development of standards for government use will cost about $2M a year to administer. This is not the development of new technical standards from scratch, but selecting and profiling standards for a particular application (such as selecting e-document formats for an electronic application for building a house).

AGIMO have developed a plugin for enterprise architect for government standards.

AGIMO will use underlying international and national standards, and over this methods and tools, governance and references models. The business case for this is that it will reduce the cost over time.

Unfortunately Brian then lost me in an assortment of acronyms, including:

• GIEM, Government Information Exchange Methodology (UMM v2.0 and CCTS v2.0). This extends the Canadian GSRM and is similar to the upper layers of AGA.
• AGOSP: Australian Government Online Services Portal.

Also NICTA launched a three-year research initiative in eGovernment in January 2007, but it is not clear what this is intended to achieve.

Overview of the day

Ross Ackland argued that we were now "moving up the stack": the low level standards for digital communications using the Internet are set and largely working. The web provides an digital publishing overlay for this. Now more semantic content is being added to the web with standards in areas such as Geoscience and more general areas such as the Semantic Web. This is a useful way to think about the work, but the reality I see is not such a clear or systematic path.

Ross asked what should W3C and other bodies do to further standards in Australia. W3C has only a few full memebrs in Australia, due to the small size of the It industry.

I suggested that NICTA, CSIRO and other interested parties could create a one hour presentation explaining how standards development works in Australia. This could be placed on the web and offered to ACS and other IT groups to explain where standards come from and how they could get involved. This may help avoid some of the controversy and confusion surrounding issues such as the proposed adoption of Microsoft's OOXML format as an ISO standard.

One way to look at this which Ross pointed out is that the point of view about the systems are built will change: instead of building an application for an organisation and then try to interface it to other organisations, we will build the interfaces first. From the wiser perspective, I suggested that the web standards effort could be seen as building a global computer system for processing information, much as the Internet is a global system for communicating information.

Some Overall Issues on the Day

* WHERE IS ASIA?: Several speakers talked of how the standards committees were heavily influenced by US government agencies (particularly the military and security) and less so by European organisations. There appears to be little involvement by Asian organisations. There appeared to be a lack of interest in why this is so, the problems it will cause and what to do about it. Australia is culturally close to the USA and Europe and so can ride on the coat tails of the current standards process. However, at some point Asian countries and industries may decide their interests are not being served by the current standards process and decide to set up a new process for standards. Perhaps Australia can play a part in bridging the gap. This could address cultural and geopolitical issues using the web technology itself.

* USING THE STANDARDS: Many groups are producing advanced web standards. Some Internet and web tools are being used by committees. But the output of the standards committees are PDF documents or web pages. It might be useful for the web standards groups to apply some of the technology they are proposing to the standards process itself.

* USING STANDARDS: Perhaps one area in which Australia can contribute is to helping test and implement standards. This will provide useful feedback to the standards developers and also provide potential useful products.

* AUSTRALIAN DEVELOPMENT THROUGH STANDARDS: The most productive part of the day was meeting David Peterson from Boab Interactive . This Australian IT company is the latest member of W3C Australia. They are based in Townsville, North Queensland and doing web work, mostly with tropical environment research projects. Some years ago the AUstralian government funded me to see how to get regional ICT happening.

EasyBiz from Victorian Government to reduce paperwork for business

EasyBiz is a web site to reduce government paper for small business. It is funded by the Australian Government's $50 million Regulation Reduction Incentive Fund, but is being piloted by local government in Victoria.

The pilot project will work with a subset of transactions for planning, building, health and local permits. EasyBiz plan to have 25 transactions online by March 2007.

EasyBiz will provide an online channel for small business to apply for council permits. This means they can discover the permits they need, prepare and submit applications 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. EasyBiz will make this process more efficient, by reducing re-work on forms, and re-using data across forms.

The vision is that EasyBiz will eventually allow small businesses to complete, save and submit all their Local Government compliance forms online. EasyBiz will provide for interconnection with State and Federal compliance forms systems to allow businesses to potentially manage all their government compliance requirements at a single web portal of their choice.

An interesting part of the process is that some of the corrdination for the project is being done on-line. The agenda, minutes and documents of some meetings are avialble on the Govdex system:

collaboration GovDex is a resource developed by government agencies to facilitate business process collaboration across policy portfolios (eg. Taxation, Human Services etc.) and administrative jurisdictions i.e. federal, state or local government levels.

GovDex promotes effective and efficient information sharing, which is core to achieving collaboration. It provides governance, tools, methods and re-usable technical components that government agencies can use to assemble and deploy information services on their different technology platforms. GovDex is a key enabler to a whole of government approach to IT service development and deployment.

GovDex is managed by the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) in the Department of Finance & Administration. AGIMO ...

From: Welcome to GovDex

Some of the content:

Oakton identified gaps between existing VBMK functionality and EasyBiz requirements, including:

Forms platform is not established in either system. One key item to consider is the type of form (PDF v HTML) and the supplier (Adobe, IBM Workplace forms or XForms).
The main considerations will be sustainability and cost; Output Manager may need work in VBMK to meet EasyBiz requirements ...
Minutes, TDRG Meeting 2, Project No LA10854, 4 September 2006

Further work has been identified to progrress the design of the EasyBiz Portal. We estimate this work will take one month to complete by Jason and understand that this work needs to commence later this week. The work required is as follows:

• Determining the Forms Platform solution
• Determining the Payment Gateway solution
• Mapping requirements to existing VBMK platform components within the scope of closing any perceived technical gaps
• Architecting new EasyBiz components and data flows within the VBMK platform
• Leveraging off the VBMK/BEP Smart Forms demonstration project to achieve the above goals
• Identification and design of extensions to existing VBMK components
• Identification and design of extensions to new VBMK components

Agenda, EasyBiz Technical Development Reference Group Meeting, 29 Sept 2006

This document provides a “broad” definition of each of the EasyBiz transactions and may
vary slightly for each council. ...

Application to build over easements (EB001)
This permit is required if a small/home based business intends to build over an existing
easement. eg sewerage and water connected to property. The permit must be applied for any new construction or enhancements to an existing building. This is a Building Services.

Builders Refuse Bins (EB002)
This permit is required by any small/home based business that intends to place a bin skip/bulk rubbish container onto a public road or public access area. In most instances this will relate to construction sites or large public events. The bulk rubbish bin may be placed on the road, on the nature strip. This is a Local Law permit.

Building Inspections (EB003)
This permit is required by any small/home based business that requires council to inspect a building that a building permit was granted for previously by Council. This is a Building Services permit. ...

From: EasyBiz Transaction Definitions

Some of the other GovDex supported projects are:

1. Electronic Development and Assessment Forum Communication Protocol (eDAF)
2. Grants Management Public (GrantsMgmtPublic)
3. International Standards (INTLSTDS)
4. National Name & Address Project (NameAddress)
5. RRIF - National Electronic Development Assessment (NeDA)
6. RRIF - Red Tape Blueprints Project (NSW) (RTB)
   

From: My GovDex Communities