[LINK] Government 2.0 Taskforce released for public comment

[Tom Worthington]

Stilgherrian wrote:
> Government 2.0 Taskforce released for public comment
> ... available at http://gov2.net.au/  ...

There are some useful recommendations in the report. Unfortunately they
are buried in 159 pages of hard to read, hard to navigate report.

The report is an unfortunate combination of hard to read bureaucratic
writing and hard to read web formatting. The task force needs to work
out on exactly what it is trying to say and then say it, briefly and
clearly. Otherwise many of the good recommendations provided will never
be seen by most readers. The ANU has asked me to prepare a course on
"Electronic Data Management" (COMP7420 ) for servants in 2010 addressing
many of these issues: <http://cs.anu.edu.au/Student/comp7420/>.

The language of the report could be made a little clearer. For example:

     "Note: The recommendation summaries appearing in this Executive
Summary are arrbreviated from the recommendations appearing in the
report. For the precise recommendations of the Taskforce see Section 2"

This seems to be saying that the summary is a summary and for details 
you need to see the details, none of which needs saying.

Each recommendations has then been summarised. However, if the report 
was not so verbose, so many levels of summary and explanation of the 
structure would not be needed.

In addition I have suggested the taskforce consolidate the HTML
versions, offering a web page which has the executive summary and table
of contents of the report, with the rest of the report elsewhere. Also I
suggested offering that first in the list, before Microsoft Word and PDF
versions.

The reader will tend to pick the first option from the list. Most people
will not want the whole report and will be happy with the summary. It
would be a shame if they get a Mbyte of Microsoft Word they did not
really want, before they realise their mistake.

The reports recommendations are groups into 18 categories, which is far
too many. The first recommendation is described as "Central
recommendation", presumably to indicate that it is most important. That
need not have been stated as it is the first recommendation made and
therefore the most important.

A "Declaration of Open Government by the Australian Government" may have
some symbolic value but will not be of practical use. In contrast the
second recommendation contains a self contradiction and is worse than
useless: it recommends that an existing agency should be appointed lead
agency, but does not say which and the proposes coordination amongst a
long shopping list of agencies.

The third recommendation "Improve guidance and require agencies to
engage online" appears to already be under way with the Australian
Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) having already issued
some guidance and preparing more. The report seems to ignore AGIMO,
which will cause further confusion within agencies.

More comments at:
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2009/12/government-20-draft-report.html>


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Lecturer, The Australian National University t: 02 61255694
Computer Science http://cs.anu.edu.au/people.php?StaffID=140274