[LINK] Australian Data ARK

Tom Koltai tomk at unwired.com.au
Thu Feb 12 20:09:28 AEDT 2009



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Crispin Harris [mailto:crispin.harris at gmail.com] 
> Sent: Thursday, 12 February 2009 3:53 PM
> To: Tom Koltai
> Subject: Re: [LINK] Australian Data ARK
> 
> 
> Here I have been, specifically avoiding this (and similar 
> discussions), but Tom, you managed to push one of my buttons 
> a little too hard <grin>
> 
> On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 12:38 PM, Tom Koltai 
> <tomk at unwired.com.au> wrote:
> > I also said elsewhere in the [50 odd page] Document that we need to 
> > retain every Government email, memo and action item on 
> every subject 
> > so that researchers can readily find the data in the future.
> 
> this raises a very important assumption:
>  - That the <organisation> collects and records the decisions 
> that it makes.
> 
> In my experience this is almost universally untrue. Very few 
> organisations have anything in the way of a formal governance 
> systems, and even fewer have sufficient formalised policies, 
> let alone a workflow or records management system to record 
> the decisions.
> 
> This is true regardless of the private/public/government 
> status of the organisation.
> 
> Even in organisations that DO have governance systems and/or 
> corporate records management, you will find areas of the 
> business that make important decisions that do fail to use 
> the frameworks.
> 
> I would have suggested that before you even consider 
> technical controls and document distribution, you need to have :
>   - a policy framework that can inform all data-security decisions
>   - a governance system to record and manage these decisions
>   - a records management system to store corproate document & 
> discoverable documents.


Crispin, I agree on every one of your suggestions.

The Computer age arrived in Australia in the 80's. 
There should already be policy in place for the handling, registry and
cross referencing of Government electronic data. We've had 30 years of
preparation time.
The reason there isnt - is that no-one has considered that it should all
be kept.

At OGN, we spent almost $180,000 for a lotus 4gl solution just so we
could capture every in/out email. It worked - sorta.
In legal document management systems in the '80's , I converted
everything to text (from Word Perfect) losing the formatting and
cross-references just so we could "grep" for content with advanced
strings. (Pre SQL days.)
The text files then became the preferred method of storing the entire
casefile (early AUSTLII datasets from SA and NT). They might only be
bare ASCII - but at least you don't have to scan in the Court Reporter
and run OCR on the result.

In the courts, there used to be an interesting methodology of
"Discovery". Give the other side everything - and let them dig. This has
changed in the last few years to - only give them everything relevent -
but if we don't want to give them something - say the laptop was stolen
with no backup.
The bench is starting to frown on "laptops being stolen" - particularly
in large organisations where IT Departments have backup procedures and
policies.

In the same way that Australian courts are moving from a paper
methodology to a digital one, and from a lack of technical understanding
to - "I don't think that excuse is valid" - so too do I consider the
government policies will move - with time.

I have learnt with Government that occassionally, developing policy
first can leave future technical loopholes. 

So the first policy - mine - is don't worry about policy - back up
everything. Then once we have established that everything is
automatically backed up - we can at leasrt access it via SQL search - if
you know the key words.

The beauty of the Google interface is that it doesn't care whether your
web pages adhere to W3C policy or if your style sheets are DHTML
compliant ot not. The bots search, the database logs the bot results and
the consumer is served a result.

Retaining the intellectual property of every Government action is the
target; being able to link it  to its peer documents in its original
format is the problem.

I am not qualified to even consider entering the discussion on Registry
and Policy issues.
However, I have discovered that today there are tools for manipulating
the data files that I gave retained from the 70's, 80's and nineties.
Which is just as well, because many of the original format programs wont
run on the homogenous set-up that I have. 

It is my experience that having the data - even in proprietary format,
allows one to eventually access it if the need is great enough.

So as a first step towards Government historical records, lets make sure
that it CAN be retained without being shredded.
Then - successive Governments - will no doubt develop policy.
And.... It will be a big job.

And in the mneanwhile - we can access it via Google. 

Tom






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