Practice:Australia 2020 Submissions

Governance
The future of Australian governance: open government (including the role of the media), the structure of government and the rights and responsibilities of citizens

Definition
The term 'governance' describes the process whereby elements in society (institutions and civil society) wield power and authority and influence and enact policies and decisions concerning public life and economic and social development. At the heart of the concept of governance is the construction of effective, accountable and legitimate governing arrangements within the diverse institutional setting of the public, private and voluntary sectors. The process might look something like this (to a European).

http://www.euractiv.com/29/images/EUProjects_tcm29-165212.gif

The Change in Media
Media, as it was once known, has changed so much since the development of the Internet and it's graphic baby, the World Wide Web. In the most simple terms, it is now Interactive. Or at least it could be if our institutional habits allowed it. We have become accustomed to thinking of media as something which is produced by a professional organization for consumption by passive readers or viewers. But if social phenomenons like Wikipedia have shown us anything, it is that if simple tools are provided to people the result is the creation of media, which represents the inclusive knowledge of millions of people. It may also be seen to represent the creation of new and lighter process of local and global governance.

The challenge for Australia's democratic society now is to deepen these debates, both within and outside its institutions as well as upstream of decisions. This is must be done in a transparent and effective way: fact-based, constructive and professional.

A Concrete Example
The Australia 2020 summit begins by the invitation of a large number of people to a geographic location, for a short time. As such it reflects the conferencing habits of our academic institutions. I make the point because our processes of governance and our processes of education are mirror images.If our political leaders appear as seers on a stage, our teachers cannot help but impose the same approach on their students.

Submissions to the conference, which will have been received by an overworked secretariat prior to the event, are released so close to the event that the identification of good ideas and common solutions is impossible. The quality of the actors' rhetoric, although entertaining, will be noticed for a short time, perhaps for as little as thirty seconds, before the participants disband with promises of "keeping in touch". Perhaps they will and their correspondence to one another will add to their overflowing inboxes until the next, usually annual, event. This is, after (and before) all, the process. At least this is the media which represents the supposed process. There is simply no continuity,

The change in Process
But what if this process where to change? What if, rather than studiously ignoring the opportunities which new interactive media presents, we were to incorporate it, to reflect these debates, and attempt to be inclusive of people accustomed, in their governance, to being ignored and appearing apathetic. Perhaps they are not. Perhaps they are simply overwhelmed by the issued policy of three levels of their government as much as they are by the learning objects of their well-sectored educational institutions.

These media objects, beautifully produced by every silo, are constantly disseminated according to a logic of a bygone era. In government, the logic is that a waiting population requires a specific and well defined piece of information for every possible eventuality, so that, when they are alerted, they will not be alarmed. In education, the logic is that a student will be incredibly well trained, to a world best practice, so they when they are educated, they may take their place in an enterprise as efficiently as a cog is replaced in some industrial machine. If only we could use the old logic. Nowadays it is more likely every citizen is so distracted with information they find it impossible to be alerted. The bot has cried wolf twice to often. And students must prepare for a world in which many of the industries they are being prepared for just don't exist, or, if they do, will cease to.

The underlying assumption is that students and citizens are passive objects. The same Industrial Age logic will today have us believing in a skills shortage. We could just as easily argue that our organisations and our institutional routines are outmoded, and that our media does not reflect the new processes of an increasingly better informed citizenry.

Recognizing when something old has become an antique.
There is an easy way to recognise whether one is holding onto beliefs about an artefact or process whose useful age has passed. They just look antiquated. In the process of governance and the media which is produced by its processes, we have reached this point. Every citizen in every country feels the tug of a new process. In e-governance and e-ducation it's beginnings are founded in creating a link between any e-document and a forum where a group of peers can talk through issues and ideas. There isn't any complicated reason why we all feel this tug. It's because media exists to represent a process, whereas today we produce media that represents the way a process used to work.

So let us consider how the media which represents this process might work.

How the process and its media might look
In the first instance we should acknowledge that we are attempting to build an interactive process. Although there are few interactive elements of the Australia 2020 site at the moment, as we go down this path, there must be an increasing number of tools like a forum and wiki. To use the jargon of the education industry, we must have a virtual library and an interactive classroom. The aim is to build a Platform for Collaboration.

The library is pretty easy. It is being built from the online submission form The library may classified under simple indexes; each attached to its topic header. We will also need a full text search so that researchers can more easily find the threads of common interest across all submissions.

Perhaps a wiki might be provided so that editors can cut and paste between submissions, and provide synoptic views of the goings on. Each submission might have a link to an appropriate forum so peers might find peers, clarify their ideas, and build more comprehensive documents.

We should keep in mind that this media will act as a template for future learning. The aim is to describe a process, not publish a policy. So we should consider its utility as an archive for future conferences. This comes down to classifying the domain in the right place in the first instance. If we consider that this summit represents the top virtual classroom in the .gov.au domain, and it will want to align with its international peers, then perhaps a more logical place (for a National librarian) might be to give it a primary classification in the Nation's virtual library; something like 000.001.gov.au. The domain is now called Australia 202, but it would be a simple thing to redirect to a new directory in the broader .gov.au domain, which will ensure some consistency for an evolving learning process, and its National archive.

We have, in the regular Broadcast TV space a number of channels that could be used for the day. On my digital TV they appear to be on frequencies whose access lies between 40 and 48, although ABC2 seems to be the logical channel to ensure the days are made as inclusive as possible. Records of the proceedings might be hosted on the ABC's site and linked from the 2020 site. At least it will need to be this way until multicast technologies are more mature.

One important link here is to encourage viewers to send in their questions. With the agenda being so full it's unlikely a speaker will answer them (well) on the day. So we should direct them to a particular forum, by which i mean, point them at a specific forum topic and/or thread for each speaker, (the same one to which their presentation points after the event) not simply a general domain, where everyone must begin to hunt.

An important matter here is the staffing of the site. The skill of a good moderator/host, although new, is one which every teacher in the online world is getting up to speed with. In fact the government has spent millions of dollars on the infrastructure, without being able to encourage the required cultural change to make an interactive system work. Perhaps the important thing here is not to try and align peers too specifically. Lifelong learning requires 8 year old as much as 80 year olds.

National ID
One last aspect of the use of interactive media is the registration of users with an eye for the future. By far the greatest bugbear in the online world (interactive media) is what some call the million password problem. i.e every User must enter their username and password to gain access to an online service. This key is important as every user will have the capability to self serve on any government server, so long as they are granted access. And if they are not, the the world of egovernment is a pipedream.

We should remember, in our National interests and taking our three levels of government into account, agreeing on a login process will enable simple procedures, like changing an address on a driver's license, to be accomplished by a citizen. Addressing the single identity would also encourage developers in a silo of government to work on developing a similar service once rather than duplicating their efforts. It is a common limitation many believe that by offering a Single Sign On to their own departmental server, a departmental developer has done their work. If nothing else, for these conferences progress and media to grown legs and be inclusive of other jurisdiction's inquiries, one single Authority figure will need to be agreed upon.

Summary
Governance is no more about manufacturing policy than education is about producing content. In a world awash with media, both are are about creating understanding, and this requires communication, primarily between the inhabitants of our institutions, which are addicted to pumping out information. We have yet to even see the beginnings of the new Interactive media in our institutions. But we can see that it's introduction and acceptance is more about understanding a different culture, and the only way to understand a culture is to just do it.