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.

Transcription

AN: Hi Nathanael, do you want to introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you do?

NB: Sure. My name is Nathanael Boehm. I work for the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR). My role is as a web designer but I do a lot of other stuff such as administering the section’s social media strategy. We look after the first ongoing Federal Government blog, which is blog.training.gov.au. We also have a Twitter account @TrainingGovAu. We have a DOPPLR account which we use for all our stakeholder engagement tracking and a few other things.

AN: So you use I guess Web 2.0 type techniques in Gov 2.0?

NB: Yes.

AN: What led you down that path and what does it mean to you and where can you take it?

NB: The reason we got onto it is because we have a lot of stakeholders. We deal with 4,500 Registered Training Organisations across Australia. Also the project we’re working on is a joint Commonwealth and State Government project so we have to deal with all our colleagues in State Governments and territories. Plus a lot of other stakeholders and of course all the users. So thousands of people. And it was just we needed a way of engaging with them rather than the traditional government, the great divide and then everyone else on the other side. So we used the blog to achieve that.

AN: Do you have any measures of how effective it is and how do you know it’s working?

NB: Well, it’s still early days. It’s been a few months now - probably six months since we launched it. Basically we’re basing our measures off feedback. We’re getting a lot of quality feedback on the blog and basically the whole engagement strategy behind it. So I’m getting a lot of positive response.

AN: So if others wanted to experiment down this path, have you got any advice on how they might go about it?

NB: I wouldn’t say experiment. You kind of have to have a plan for what you want to do, what you want to achieve with it. Don’t just launch a blog because it sounds like a fun idea. You have to have a goal, a problem you want to solve - which is what we did. So, if you can do that then go for it.

AN: Ok, thanks very much!

NB: Thank you.

So last night when I found that my local Chinese Restaurant was not online, just like the show Guerrilla Gardeners I got their menu and put it online as a hosted WordPress blog - ironchefcanberra.wordpress.com. Didn’t cost me a cent, took about 30 minutes and now people can access the menu before dialling in a take-away order without having to actually go to the restaurant first!

Isn’t what I’ve done more rude than those portal sites who publish business information without consent and then send the business an invoice to update the listing? Perhaps. As far as I’m concerned I’m doing both the business and the business’ customers a service. I’m not going to charge the restaurant anything - I’ll just write them a letter with the URL and admin credentials if they want to update it. If they don’t want to take over the site, I’ll just delete it.

But I think it’s important to show businesses that getting a website online isn’t the big drama it was a decade ago. You don’t have to pay for hosting, you don’t have to pay for a domain name. While we don’t advocate businesses creating DIY websites at least they don’t have to engage some mystical web master to hack some code. Code is taken care of now. The sorts of assistance businesses need to seek now are about information architecture, online branding, social media, user experience design etc - the sorts of topics that small business owners are more likely to be able to relate to, and the sorts of topics that actually have meaningful benefit for their online presence … not like the old-school website design process of paying a programmer to go away and develop something then come back and present you a finished website 3 months later. It’s not like that any more. Do businesses understand this?

My current goals for 2009 are:

• Write and publish a UX book.
• Write and publish a book about my ex-cult.
• Get more involved in OpenAustralia.
• Get more involved in Resilient Nation Australia.
• Get more involved in The Music Blogs.
• Ramp up or get out of the Free Australia Wireless project.
• Get more involved in (or get out of) Aussie Bloggers.
• Record an EP with my band The Camals.
• Join an additional band (different genre)
• Lose 8kg
• Start a new job.
• Do more photography.
• Read more books.
• Meet new people.

Why?

Checkpoint 6.1 of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 states: Organize documents so they may be read without style sheets.

This means that when you turn off the styles for a site like I’ve done with my blog for today you should still be able to use the site, read the content and navigate around as readily as if the styles were turned on.

Assistive technologies such as screen readers that many people use don’t care about styles. They look at the underlying structure of the page and convert the text to audio or with some machines Braille basically in the order that the page has been coded. That might sound a bit technical but what it means is if you don’t have a properly-constructed web page then people using assistive technologies may not be able to use your site, which could be a breach of the Disability Discrimination Act.

Also a properly constructed page means that it is easier to maintain and more flexible to modify or adapt for outputting to different devices and formats such as printing, iPhones and other mobile devices.

So CSS Naked Day is about raising awareness about professionalism in the web industry, accessibility and ensuring that everyone can use your site.