World Tour of Government Online

Tom Worthington

Immediate Past President of the Australian Computer Society

tom.worthington@tomw.net.au

Connecting Government at Internet World 98 Tuesday 11 August 1998 - Sydney

Abstract

What are local, state and federal governments doing on-line in Australia? How does this compare with the best in the world? Tom Worthington, one of the architects of the federal government's web strategy, will take you on a tour of the governments of Australia and the world, live on-line.

About the speaker

Tom Worthington Mr Worthington is Special Adviser for Internet/Intranet Policy, with the Australian Department of Defence and Immediate Past President of the Australian Computer Society. Information Age magazine lists Mr. Worthington as one of the 10 most influential IT&T people in Australia in 1998. His work since 1994 has been on the policy and practice of implementation of the Internet, including appearances before three Senate hearings. He established the first web home pages for the ACT Government, the Special Broadcasting Service, Australian Information Industry Association and the National Press Club.

To Book

Register on-line, or contact Internet World Registration, ph: (02) 9310 5544, E-mail: info@kirby.com.au. Mention that you are a colleague of Mr. Worthington and receive a 10% discount on the usual conference fee.

Draft of 4 August 1998: The content of this talk will be developed here. The "slides" will also be available. This document is: http://www.acs.org.au/president/1998/past/govol.htm Suggestions and comments welcome: tom.worthington@tomw.net.au

Contents

Introduction

What are local, state and federal governments doing on-line in Australia? How does this compare with the best in the world? I have some idea of that from my work, but the best way to find out is to ask. So I asked the on-line community, in Australian and around the world. The results are reported here, on this web page and for presentation on-screen, at the forum.

This is not the first time I have asked for help from 'net users. It takes some courage and a little foolhardiness, to cast such a request out into the ether. However, in the past it has produced thoughtful and sometimes remarkable results. This is not a scientific experiment or carefully judged competition, just my idea of the best suggestions made. However, this is much the same process I use to get ideas and comments for ACS and Government IT policy development (something my more old-fashioned colleagues find disconcerting).

First, I would also like to tell you some of the story of how the Federal Government came to be on the Internet and have web pages (Worthington, 1995b). It may be slightly different to what you may have read in official media releases.

The Three Eras of Government On-line

We have had three eras of Government on-line in Australia: pre-history (up to 1994), the conspiracy (1995-1996) and the e-publish-or-perish age (1997-1998). The next era, starting now is consolidation (1999-).

Pre-history

In the pre-history era, there were attempts to use on-line systems for government business. These were limited to single agency use or to closed consortia of agencies, due to problems of compatibility and public infrastructure.

Government Open Systems Interconnection Profile (GOSIP) was supposed to provide the standards for Government's to work on-line. It didn't work. The standards were developed using paper-era and mainframe thinking.

Pre-history ended in 1994 with a series of government enquiries into the Information Superhighway (ASTEC, 1994), (BSEG, 1994). Suddenly the idea of linking not just bits of the government, but the whole country and the world became fashionable. The end of the pre-history era might be best marked by the ACS's submission "Vision for a Networked Nation" (ACS, 1994), which not only helped set the policy agenda, but give a name for some of the government reports and initiatives (ASTEC, 1994).

The Conspiracy

In 1995 I gave a talk at a Canberra computer conference at which I explained how the government was being put on-line in Australia (Worthington, 1995b). The public servants, with a loose consortium of industry and academic enthusiasts were putting the government on-line with "pilot" programs. Only after this was successful was policy introduced to formalise it, senior approval obtained and then last of all Ministerial endorsement to retrospectively take credit for the "initiative". This is what I described as the Internet Conspiracy.

My role in the conspiracy was to help as a bridge between practical expertise in the academic internet community and policy working of government. This involved translating what was found to work, into something bureaucrats and their political masters could be comfortable with. Pilot implementations were emphasised, to prove the technology worked, followed by policy documents and interdepartmental work to make my more conservative colleagues feel comfortable.

The conspiracy survived a change in government and has been remarkably un-controversial. Many of those who now claim to be Government on-line policy experts have no idea where that policy came from, or how it was done. Regrettably they are still thinking, and working, in the off-line way which produced the unsuccessful GOISP policy. To overcome this problem the ACS is holding a conference in November to generate new Information Industry policy options for the next federal government (ACS, 1998). .

The beginning of the end of this era might be best marked by a question in Parliament from Senator Alston (then in opposition) to all ministers, about internet use (Hansard, 1995). This marked the point where government thinking changed from "what is a web and why would we want one?" to "why haven't we got one?".

E-publish-or-Perish

We are coming to the end of the e-publish-or-perish age. In this period every agency has to have a web page. Components of agencies go to extraordinary lengths to try to have their own on-line identity, separate from the corporate one, or to be at the top of the agency home page. Agency staff compete to be in charge of the home page and try to launch new "official" home pages, burying the existence of earlier pioneering efforts.

The creation of the new Federal Government Home Page represents the beginning of the end of this era. This site builds on the work of the conspiracy and provide a level of co-ordination of agency sites.

Consolidation

The consolidation era will last a few years and see more order brought to government web pages. We will see better definition of what is a government site, cross indexes, and special categorisation.

During 1998 we reached the point at which the information contained on the public government web pages started to be better than the information which agency staff have access to internally. Under this pressure, internal agency systems are being reworked or replaced with web based systems, which are extensions of the public services.

Separate agency sites will being to merge into topic based sites, to better suit what the customer (the public) as opposed to the agency needs. As both agency staff and the public will obtain their primary information from the same on-line source, the web will start to drive agency consolidation. Why have two separate agencies, if their information and services are being delivered by a common web site, which staff from both use?

The bounds of outsourcing increase with better on-line information sources. If staff are answering queries by looking up web pages, why do they need to be public servants from that agency? Why can't they be contracted call centre staff, located anywhere with a data line?

A painful and challenging time for senior public service staff is commencing. The information and services which were theirs to control are becoming diffused and public, so their decisions are more open to challenge. Private sector managers should take no comfort from this, as their turn will come also.

The organisation, could be argued is a relatively recent legal construct. Organisations seem real to us, because they are associated with buildings and other hardware. However, the time is coming when organisations become virtual collections of people, brought together for a task.

Best and the Worst of the Internet

One of the more dubious honours I have had is an invitation to shown Internet pornography to the Senate. This was part of a submission one of the several enquiries by the Select Committee on Community Standards Relevant to the Supply of Services Utilising Electronic Technologies, on the Regulation of the Internet (ACS, 1995):

The ACS is not "pro" or "anti" network regulation, so much as interested in assisting the community make choices on the use of technology for community benefit. To that end I have invited members of the networking community to suggest the "best" and the "worst" of the Internet. That is the material they consider of the highest quality and the most socially worthwhile, or that of the least value and possibly harmful (in particular for children). I hope to be able to display a selection of this material on-screen Tuesday.

What was remarkable about the suggestions received, was that they were not all about pornography. One in particular suggested that on-line gambling could be a problem. This was something not discussed in the popular press in 1995 (nor in the Senate), but has more recently come to prominence.

Five Minute Tour of Australia

For the opening of Interact 97, in 1997 I conducted the international audience on a Five Minute Tour of Australia for the opening of Interact 97, 16 July 1997 (Worthington, 1997).

Amongst the obvious stops on the tour, such as the Sydney Opera House, was the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex. This is a NASA facility in Canberra (and NASA was nominated as one of the international best government web sites this time around).

Hi-tech tourist

As well as being used for virtual tours, I have also found on-line suggestions of value for real visits to real places. Occasionally when visiting somewhere, for work or pleasure, I will write a high technology tourist report (Worthington, 1995).

Methodology

Criteria for This Tour

In requesting information on-line it is very important to make a clear request. I issued this on mailing lists and newsgroups:

Date: Fri, 03 Jul 1998 14:18:18
From: Tom Worthington
Subject: RFC: Best Government On-line Sites in the World?

This is to request your suggestions as to what are the best government on-line web sites in Australian and the world. I will present the results at Internet World 98, in Sydney in August and on the web. This is for a one day forum on "Connecting Government - Delivering Innovative Government Services Effectively on the Web".

You might like to consider the following criteria:

* PIONEERING: What government sites pioneered the use of the web and are still there?
* ACCESSIBILITY: What sites provide good access, by providing facilities for the visually impaired and low bandwidth users.
* INCLUSIVENESS: Where have the barriers between separate bureaucracies been broken down, or between the government and the citizens?
* MODESTY: Where have services been provided at low cost and which reflect a modest approach.
* RESPONSIBILITY: Where have important, but uncomfortable truths been told, by agencies, in the public interest?

Suggestions should be sent by e-mail, including the name of the suggestion and affiliation (if applicable). The name and contact details of the person making the suggestion may be published. The final presentation will be available at: http://www.acs.org.au/president/1998/past/govol.htm

Tom Worthington http://www.tomw.net.au/ PO Box 13
Immediate Past President tom.worthington@tomw.net.au Belconnen ACT 2617
Australian Computer Society Fax: 0419 499422
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My demo at SEARCC98: http://www.adfa.oz.au/DOD/dcip/document/dodweb.htm

This was sent out on the Link mailing list, Friday 3 Jul 1998 at 14:18. Link is a relatively small (400 people) and friendly mailing list, so I waited a day to see if my request was well formulated before sending it more widely.

The linkers liked it, so I then sent the request to newsgroups:

You will note that the postings are grouped, so that, for example, the international and local newsgroups are not mixed.

Then I sent it to mailing lists:

Eric Scheid forwarded the request to the Web-Critique-Theory list (about 250 subscribers overseas).

There is no way to reliably predict how many replies such a request (which would have been read by several thousand people) would receive. Normally I might get a dozen replies. On exceptional topics, such as internet pornography regulation, I have received hundreds of replies.

Many readers are content to "lurk" on the lists, reading but not replying. At computer conferences I frequently meet people who guiltily admit that they are lurkers who have read my postings for years, but never replied.

The Nominations

By Domain Name

Comments Received

The first response from Dr John Cook (Department of Communications and the Arts) was time stamped at Fri Jul 3 15:43:51 1998, which is about one hour and twenty minutes after the request was posted. John nominated Australia's Cultural Network, which (not surprisingly) is an initiative of the Federal Department of Communications and the Arts.

I have summarised the entries received, but otherwise the words are those provided by the nominators. Some ontes on the nominations:

In Order of Receipt

References

See also

 Comments to Tom Worthington MACS, Immediate Past President of the Australian Computer Society tom.worthington@tomw.net.au.