[LINK] Government 2.0: Policy and Practice

Tom Worthington Tom.Worthington at tomw.net.au
Tue Jun 23 08:35:30 AEST 2009


At 09:41 AM 22/06/2009, Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote:
>Tom Worthington wrote:
> > Government 2.0 ...
> > 
> <http://www.katelundy.com.au/2009/05/29/public-sphere-2-open-government-policy-and-practice/>...
>I don't think that we have any form of participatory democracy in 
>Australia and my preference is that we never do ...

The term "participatory democracy" was not used in the conference 
outline and we weren't talking about having every citizen vote on 
every law <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_democracy>. 
Most of the presentations and discussions were about how information 
is made available to the public and get comments from the public. 
This is about an enhanced versions of the currently political system, 
not a new system. Of course not everyone will agree that is a good idea.

As an example, in my talk I discussed how the Australian Government 
had used web pages for distributing information and how that could be 
done better with accessible, mobile compatible web pages. I talked 
about how next month at the ANU I will be training public servants in 
how to communicate online <http://www.tomw.net.au/technology/it/mgovernment>.

ps: In all the discussion of web 2.0 gadgets, the point can be lost 
that electronic communications are important public records. Public 
servants need to be reminded that they are required to file email 
messages and that unauthorized modification of such data is a crime 
which can result in 10 years imprisonment. This is something I 
discuss in my courses.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Australian National University  




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