Google Government
Jacques Chester has posted his submission to the Australia 2020 Summit at Club Troppo and it includes a lot of the Power of Information and Open Source Governance issues that have recently been discussed on this blog:
“Google Government” should be a motto going forward. FOI should be altered to place the emphasis on departments to decide at the point of creation whether a document is sensitive; the default should be full disclosure. All possible government documents and data should be accessible and queryable by any member of the public.
As blogged about previously, Barack Obama has committed to a version of this on the US campaign trail. However, something like this is going to require a big cultural change within government.
A much easier first step is improving the accessibility of information that the government is required to make publicly available eg parliamentary proceedings, committee work, bills and questions on notice.
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April 5th, 2008 at 11:48 am
Quite right; I picked that phrase up from the Obama campaign. It’s pithy.
April 5th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Jacques - yeah, Google Government is very pithy, though the latent political hack in me instinctively wants to avoid pissing off other ICT companies with the label. That’s why I use Open Source Government.
Do you follow Jeff Jarvis at all? His new book is going to be title “WWGD? - What would google do?” and is going to be addressing these issues in some depth. Should be good.
Cheers - Thanks for stopping by.