Adapted from a briefing I delivered to my team at work.
On 22 June I attended the Public Sphere conference held at Parliament House. It’s a formal BarCamp-style conference with short presentations by conference attendees, organised by the office of Senator Kate Lundy. It is the second conference of its kind in Canberra, the first one being held several months ago.
Yesterday’s full-day session was attended by around 130 people with a large proportion of interstate visitors from both government and private sector – all with an interest in Government 2.0 “stuff”.
The concept of Government 2.0 is essentially a new model of government that closes the gap between traditional-style archaic, monolithic authoritative hierarchy and the public. This is done through citizen engagement in policy development and service delivery designm iterative micro-policy development and release, consultation, distribution of responsibility, crowd sourcing, social media and networking, leveraging the power of communities, applying user experience design principles to policy and service design, transparency, information-sharing and open data …
Essentially it’s about decomposing the giant machine of government into something that citizens can relate to, can deal with, can engage with and influence to ensure that government actually meets the needs of citizens and provides an environment where citizens feel on-side with government.
It’s something that our team is already engaged with on several points with our progressive user and stakeholder engagement, social media strategy and UCD approach … but it’s something that we want to see implemented at a whole-of-government level.
So the conference yesterday and the 31 presentations was about discussing all these topics, sharing ideas, raising awareness, demonstrating techniques and models, case studies and examples of how to make this happen. It’s something many people are keen to see happen – both inside government and of course citizens who for many years have regarded as “slow, unresponsive government departments”.
Also, during the conference, Minister Tanner and Special Minister Ludwig came and announced the commissioning of the Australian Government 2.0 Task Force, made up of 15 members. They will be investigating and reporting on the next steps for taking the Australian Government forward through this necessary change in culture, structure, attitude, approach, direction and role.
I live-blogged the event with colleagues Craig Thomler and Des Walsh in addition to the usual Twitter backchannel. You can read our coverage of the event on Kate Lundy’s blog (press Play on the right-side box).
Also, some photos taken by me.
The Government 2.0 Task Force website (they’re currently running a banner design competition).
View the agenda of the conference.
// purecaffeine.com, UX, design, social media and Gov 2.0 blog by designer Nathanael Boehm, Canberra, Australia. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
