open source policy

Open-sourcing
policy development

Miriam Lyons, Executive Director, Centre for Policy Development
(with thanks to Barry Saunders & sparksman)

“
...laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of
the human mind...as new discoveries are made, new truths
discovered and manners and opinions change, institutions must
advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well
require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy
as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their
barbarous ancestors. Thomas Jefferson, 1816
Thomas Jefferson, 1816

”
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http://cpd.org.au | Level 7, 280 Pitt St, Sydney 2000
Phone 02 9264 0263 | Email contact@cpd.org.au

Why is this interesting?

• •
This presentation looks at speciﬁc experiments This presentation focuses on the online side, but
with online citizen engagement, but it's mainly it's important to recognise that innovations in
about giving an overview of the broader trends oquot;ine engagement - like citizens juries,
that these tools and tactics are part of. If online community cabinets, 'world cafes' and '21st
engagement was just about making decisions century dialogues' are also important and are
and making policy in exactly the same way in a part of the same trend.
di!erent medium, none of this would be
particularly exciting.
• This talk is building on some research our
Democratic Renewal Coordinator and I are
• What makes it exciting is that we are starting to working on, please check http://cpd.org.au or
see - both on and oquot;ine - a much-needed http://policydevelopment.wikispaces.com/opens
upgrade of democracy’s operating system - one ourcepolicy for more information (we'd love your
which might be more capable of handling the input!)
ever more complex problems we expect it to
solve.

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What do you mean, open source?
Open source policy:
Open source software:

•Information behind decisions &
•Code is published
decision-making process is readily
available
•Code can be edited by anyone, without
permission (or rather, permission is
•Participating in policy development is
preemptively granted via open source
easy
licencing)

•Culture & communities of
•Distributed community collaborates
collaborative policy development
on continuous improvement of the code
emerge

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Open Source cont.

• This is by no means a deﬁnitive list of the features of open
source software, but the ones most relevant to policy
development. Open source software was the ﬁrst of many
‘open movements’ - closely followed by open publishing
(indymedia), open editing (wikipedia) (both now called open
content), and more recently ‘open access’.

• Important point: many brains better than one – most
web2.0 icons - from wikipedia to amazon - rely on this.

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What do you mean, open source policy?
Open source software:

•transparency (you can see its brain)
•participation (you can tinker with it)
•collaboration (the software is part of a community dedicated to improving it)
Open source policy:

•transparency/access (default disclosure of information by public bodies)
•participation (you can tinker with that information and/or contributing to policy is easy)
•collaboration (process of policy development opens up to a wider circle of contributors)
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What doesn’t it mean?

• Getting rid of offline engagement

• Constant participation by everyone in
everything

• aph.gov.au/bigbrother

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Let's not get carried away...

• •
digital divide still Westminster
exists tradition: public
servants don't have
• internet is not the opinions
only asset needed for
•
effective is that a problem?
participation
• not everyone is
interested in
everything

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Background: open access

• Beyond Freedom of Information: proactive
publishing of as much information as possible,
in as timely, useful, and re-useable fashion as
possible

• Access is about more than making data public,
it must also be usable

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Open access goes beyond
policy-making

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Shift to open access won't be smooth
(The website of a federal open access enthusiast can be held back by the
websites of individual departments/other levels of government)

http://www.economicstimulusplan.gov.au/community_infrastructure.htm
http://www.recovery.gov/?q=content/accountability-and-transparency

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“ Open Government Data Principles

Government data shall be considered open if it is made public in a way that complies with the
principles below:

1. Complete: All public data is made available. Public data is data that is not subject to valid
privacy, security or privilege limitations.
2. Primary: Data is as collected at the source, with the highest possible level of granularity, not
in aggregate or modified forms.
3. Timely: Data is made available as quickly as necessary to preserve the value of the data.
4. Accessible: Data is available to the widest range of users for the widest range of purposes.
5. Machine processable: Data is reasonably structured to allow automated processing.
6. Non-discriminatory: Data is available to anyone, with no requirement of registration.
7. Non-proprietary: Data is available in a format over which no entity has exclusive control.
8. License-free: Data is not subject to any copyright, patent, trademark or trade secret
regulation. Reasonable privacy, security and privilege restrictions may be allowed.

Source: Open Government Working Group
http://resource.org/8_principles.html

”
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Who's driving the open access agenda?

• 'Open' enthusiasts

• Media & FOI advocates (more in the UK than in
Australia, where there is not yet widespread
recognition that investigative journalism isn't just
about finding hidden data but also about finding
patterns in public data)

• Content conduits (Google and Yahoo were both
represented on the 'Open Government Working
Group' which came up with the 8 principles on the
previous page). Just as media companies support
FOI, content conduits support open access.
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Who’s doing open access well?
•
• UK’s Office of Public Sector
Australian Bureau of
Information (OPSI)
Statistics (ABS) http://www.opsi.gov.uk/iar/index
http://tinyurl.com/cak84w

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Background: collaborative governance

• Proliferation of ‘influencers’

• Declining trust in large institutions

• Increasing proportion of public service work
involves ‘wicked problems’
http://www.apsc.gov.au/publications07/wickedprobl

• Need to solve complex problems and cut
through information overload quickly and with
limited resources
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________


“
Ego-centric thinking Network-centric thinking

Information-sharing,
distributed power,
Ego, competition, cultures of
empowering people to seek
personality, resistance to
afﬁnity and exercise inﬂuence,
knowledge sharing, access to
Values promiscuously sharing
information is seen as a
information; building
source of strategic power; the
relationships, managing
organisation knows best
knowledge; the network
knows more than we do

Transparent, collaborative;
Top-down hierarchy; authority
distributed decision-making
Structures and decision-making
opening itself up to the
reserved to the top or centre
contributions of its members

”
Communication Members to 'centre' Members to each other

Source: Edited version of table in Martin Weeks' ‘From Control to networks’, in Beyond the Policy Cycle, 2006
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“
Experimentation and discovery are
a more effective route to improving
system performance than
centralised design.
Jake Chapman, ‘System Failure’
Demos UK

”
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“
The best way to have good ideas is
to have lots of ideas, and then to
discard the bad ones
Linus Pauling

”
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Where’s Australia at?
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________


“ ‘The Rudd Government is…keen to explore the ways
technology can be used to establish more
immediate and collaborative relationships between
government and citizen. It is clear that in the long
term the kind of output unlocked by Web 2.0
platforms will have a dramatic impact on
policymaking processes and the institutions of
government.’
Lindsay Tanner, Minister for Finance &
Deregulation, May 2008

”
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Australia.gov.au:

•Single sign-on for multiple govt websites
•Portal for public inquiries
•So far focus is on services, not
participation – e-governance, not e-
democracy.

•Still early stages – may change. Minister
Tanner pledged a focus on ‘innovation,
collaboration and reuse’
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What tools are being used?

•Modernised-traditional (web1.0 government
sites with a few more convenient features – e.g.
online submissions)

•Blogs (Digital economy blog trial, HREOC
listening tour blog)

•Forums (Early Childhood Learning Framework)
•Wikis (Melbourne future plan)

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DBCDE: trial consultation blog

Blog was flooded with protests against net filtering, & reception
to blog itself was mixed...
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“ 1. It looks like a government department website
2. It reads like a government department website
3. There's an uncomfortable distance between the bloggers and the
readers
4. Comments only during business hours
5. It's only open for two weeks
6. Will your words be twisted into a mandate?
7. It has a quot;terms of servicequot;
8. It's only open to over 18s
9. Readers must agree to pay all Australian government legal costs
10. P.S. Please excuse any lies we may tell

Source: Dan Warne, editor of computing mag APC ‘The 10 sins of
Senator Conroy, the blogger’

”
http://apcmag.com/the_10_sins_of_senator_conroy.htm

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• Trial blog was a commendable initiative - in one way the Department of
Broadband, Communications & the Digital Economy did exactly the right thing
- trial. Experimenting even if the tools aren’t quite right & you don’t know
exactly what you’re doing is how good websites evolve.

But some lessons can still be drawn from DBCDE's teething pains:

• pick the right tool for the job (a forum may have worked better in this case,
allowing the cleanfeed debate to sit alongside debate on other questions,
which were also important)

• know the culture of the tool you’re using (regular responses, not once every 2-
3 days)

• If you don’t have a good internal website set-up, why not use an o!-the shelf
open-source platform that everyone’s familiar with? A wordpress blog would
have been much easier to manage and use.

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“ HREOC listening
tour blog featured
personal stories
which encouraged
readers to respond
with their own
stories

Sex Discrimination
Commissioner
Elizabeth
Broderick's posts
were signed 'Liz' &
included comments

”
about having the
kids in tow on the
tour.

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2020 summit online
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appropriate tech

• 8000 submissions

• simple to use

• participation beyond the bleeding edge l33t
nerds

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But did miss
opportunities. Citizen-
to-centre participation,
not citizen-to-citizen
collaboration. Search
function is basic –
doesn't allow people to
easily discover whether
someone else has
submitted the same idea

Contrast with
Getup.org.au's 2020
website:members
can rate each other's
ideas & add
comments –
categorisation is
intuitive.

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Submissions to tax
review – sort by date or
author – no information
on which of the terms of
reference are referred to

Submissions to National
Human Rights
Consultation –
contributors select
primary & secondary
categories while making
submission online.
Published submissions
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can be browsed under http://cpd.org.au | Level 7, 280 Pitt St, Sydney 2000
these categories. Phone 02 9264 0263 | Email contact@cpd.org.au

Other tools: wikis

Melbourne City Council used a wiki to get feedback on its strategic plan. The site received
30,000 page views from 7,000 unique visitors while the wiki was active, with 200+ edits
made by 150 participants. Wikis work best as a crowdsourcing tool – there are as yet no
examples of a government wiki attracting a crowd. This may not be a handicap for some
purposes, such as facilitating the contributions of an interested & informed community to a
specific document. But there are easier jobs that can be crowdsourced...

Active crowdsourcing: research
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Passive crowdsourcing: taxonomy & navigation
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Ingredients of successful online engagement

Culture & leadership:
Right tool for the right job:

•starting small
•blogs

•willingness to experiment
•forums

•adapting as much as possible to the culture
•wikis
of the medium

•independence?

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The right tool...
• •
Blogs: targeted short-term consultations Wikis: facilitating group collaboration on a
with clear terms of reference, or long-term single text, work most effectively when
platforms for discussion & ideas used for collaboration between like-minded
development contributors, or to quickly compile fact-
based content (such as directories and
encyclopedias). Successful wikis tend to
• Forums: consulting on a wide range of have a core ‘community’ of contributors
topics, sparking discussion & throwing up who have a clear understanding of the
ideas rather than developing in-depth & purpose of the site and act to mediate
considered position statements. Can hand contributions which deviate from that
more power over to participants by shared understanding. As such, they take
allowing anyone to start a new topic time to reach their full potential.

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Recap: advantages of online engagement

• Accessible : online forums are more accessible to people in remote areas or less mobile people
who rarely get a chance to participate in public meetings.

• Engaging : some tools, such as consultation blogs, can be more informal and inviting than
formal inquiries. This can open up opportunities to involve a wider group of people in generating
more creative ideas.

• Collaborative : Most consultation processes focus on the communication of groups and
individuals’ ideas to a central committee, with little opportunity for horizontal communication
between those being consulted. Used well, online tools can potentially increase the quality and
depth of ideas that emerge from a consultation process.

• Cheap : it’s cheaper to run a website than a series of public meetings, cheaper to collect &
compile more information more quickly using a wiki, etc.

• Easy : Tap into the energy and ideas of busy people who find it difficult to make time for
traditional forms of community involvement but love having a say through a quick and simple
online form.

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Ideas

• ‘Open inquiries’: policy sandboxes, contributor profiles, tag-based
search & indexing, rss feeds

• ‘Open briefings’: what if general public could also make requests for
research papers & background notes from the parliamentary library?
What if these briefings were crowdsourced?

• ‘Open images’: all government departments release images on flikr
under creative commons licenses

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Further reading

• http://cpd.org.au/category/all-articles/democratic-re

• http://policydevelopment.wikispaces.com/opensourc

• http://twitter.com/centrepolicydev

• http://delicious.com/tag/opensourcepolicy

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