The Chairman of the Productivity Commission talked in Canberra last night on "Evidence-based policy" http://billboard.anu.edu.au/event_view.asp?id=37383. A few kilometers away Parliament was debating spending billions of dollars to address the Global Financial Crisis, with minimal analysis and little evidence to support either side of the debate. On the surface "evidence based policy" seems a tautology: how could you propose policy not based on any evidence? However, Mr. Banks took us through some of the not so obvious issues with the process.

At question time I asked if online systems and cross agency resources could make the process quicker and more efficient. I used the example of the Environment Department, who invited industry to Canberra on Tuesday to discuss reducing energy use. I suggested they conduct such consultation online to reduce energy use http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2009/02/national-strategy-for-energy-efficiency.html.

The Productivity Commission has a mandate and expertise in analysis of government policy, so they could commission an online policy system. It could be initially used by the Commission and then other agencies and state governments. The system could be similar to Australian Government online tender system "AusTender" <https://www.tenders.gov.au/>. It could use similar free open source software to GovDex, the Government's online collaboration tool <https://www.govdex.gov.au/>. Agencies could upload draft policies for consultation. The system would automatically alert those who had registered interest in the topic. People could download the draft and upload comments. The system would collate the results automatically. The Australian Bureau of Statistics National Data Network could be used to support analytical analysis of policies across agencies http://www.nationaldatanetwork.org/.

Providing an online system for policy analysis could cut government costs. Much of the resources in policy agencies are not devoted to analysis of policy, but to arranging meetings to discuss the policy. Eliminating these meetings would reduce costs. This would also reduce accidental or deliberate bias in the process, where only a small select group is consulted due to time or cost pressures (or to avoid criticism of the policy). A consultation and analysis of responses to Global Financial Crisis could be carried out in a few days.

More in my Blog at: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2009/02/evidence-based-policy-for-global.html.

I think this is an excellent idea Tom, although I'm unfamiliar with some of the technologies. We should have an ongoing online "summit" on most of the matters to do with government. Obama is promising to do this and started off with http://change.gov/. It seems to have lost a little democracy, because now you have to go to http://whitehouse.gov/ which seems a lot more corporate. Time will tell.

GrahamY commented 5 February 2009 6:01:04 PM:

"I think this is an excellent idea Tom, although I'm unfamiliar with some of the technologies. ..."

The people in Canberra are not necessarily familiar with the technology either, so the Blackberry wielding Senator Lundy and myself are convening a free symposium on "Combating the Global Financial Crisis using Green ICT" at the ANU on 19 February 2008: http://tomw.net.au/moodle/course/view.php?id=12

---
On 3 February 2009 the Australian Prime Minister announced a strategy to deal with the effects of the global financial crisis on the Australian economy. The strategy includes funding for national infrastructure, education, energy reduction and combatting climate change. Such a large and complex task will require rapid decision making and detailed oversight of projects. Computer based systems offer the opportunity to help refine the policy and aid in its implementation, as well as form part of the projects implemented. This event looks at the online systems already in place in government, industry and academia which would be harnessed quickly for this national endeavor. It also looks at how new systems can be quickly built and what training will be needed.
Questions to Consider:

1. How can e-government and m-government improve decision making an implementation?
2. How can social networking be used for government and business?
3. How can online systems be used to educate government in new techniques?
---

Brilliant ... go for it!

The somewhat related idea of online input to government policy formation was raised by OLO user jpw2040 on 5 November 2007 in this post: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=1277#23103 He had seen a post publicising a then proposed 'Australian Government Policy Development Blog' here: http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/11/03/saturday-salon-123/#comment-416073

The Australian Government Policy Development Blog initiative inviting submissions is still up on the web here: http://www.openforum.com.au/Survey , although the deadline for submissions is long past. Does anyone know how that initiative, if it has been pursued, would relate to tomw's proposal?

Whilst liking a number of aspects of tomw's proposal, I do have some concerns with respect to any Australian Government Policy Development Blog should one be being run, but I don't want to muddy the waters here without first knowing how tomw would see that proposal inter-relating with online input to evidence-based policy formation, if indeed it is seen as relating at all.

Is it perhaps possible that an alternate Forum , Onlinefact, might come to run in parallel with Onlineopinion?

Forrest Gumpp wrote 7 February 2009 8:38:43 AM:

>... Australian Government Policy Development Blog ...
> http://www.openforum.com.au/Survey
>... how that initiative ... would relate to tomw's proposal?

The policy blog was well meaning, but fatally flawed. It was a moderately useful experiment, but not a viable approach to government consultation.

At the simplest level I was proposing that agencies publish polices for comment on their web sites and have a central mechanism to allow people to be alerted to them. That is the easy part and the Australian Government already has the technology for this in its central web site and search engine. It is currently used for alerting people to media releases: http://australia.gov.au/News_and_Media

The hard part would be to collect comment on the polices. Being a former government technocrat, my preference would be to first automate the current manual system, rather than propose something radically different. The idea would be you could submit online a formal written response to a policy document. There would be no attempt at real time online discussion, which was a feature of the government blog which did not work and was one reason that experiment was a failure. This non-interactive approach is the way the online tender system works: https://www.tenders.gov.au/

If those first two steps worked: putting the polices online for comment and collecting formal comments, then the government could look at a more real-time online collaborative process. I suspect the government would like a collaborative process which allows groups in the community to form consensus views. The government can't take into account a completely different view from every individual citizen. It needs a way to group those views into a few positions so that a decision can be made. This commonly happens when industry and community groups put collective positions to government. Also it is what political parties are supposed to do. A government online system could provide some tools to help do this. In one way this is not a job for government, but in another way this is the definition of government.

Much of this is already achieved via tele-conferencing but an online site might be another option once the technologies and process are understood.

I wonder if the lobbyists would go for it? Some may not go for the idea as face-to-face might be perceived as more effective in influencing and stating a particular position.

An online community cabinet or mini-summits as GY suggested with relevant ngos, departments and other advisory bodies contributing could open up the road to better participatory democracy.

Submissions could be made online in response to potential policy decisions and ideas proposed by government. Perhaps this sort of online access would be an extension to the current community cabinets.

Certainly worth looking at.

pelican wrote 7 February 2009 9:40:27 AM:

>Much of this is already achieved via tele-conferencing ...

Yes, teleconferences are useful, but can be combined with online forums, to get the best features of both.

>I wonder if the lobbyists would go for it? ...

I am sure the lobbyists would HATE it, which is why I suggested it. ;-)

Lobbyists want to be able to divide and conquer: presenting a diffierent case to each person they talk to. If they have to make their case on the record, this will make their job very difficult.

>Perhaps this sort of online access would be an extension
>to the current community cabinets. ...

Good idea. The face-to-face community cabinets must be very expensive to run. As well they are undemocratic, as most people cannot attend. An online extension of the process would be cheap and relatively straightforward to implement.

I suggested this for the "Inquiry by design" process to plan Sydney's transport infrastructure: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2008/11/fast-track-sydney-transport-with-web.html

The original proposal was a group of planners and stakeholders would get together and plan Sydney's transport in a few days. I suggested changing this to have part of the process online. The same materials the people at the face-to-face meeting had would be online and remote participants could make contributions. Few people could afford the time to sit on the end of a video conference all day, so there would be summaries and they could make a non-real time contribution.

Unfortunately the NSW government does not have consultative, or realistic, transport planning, instead believing the federal government will give billions of dollars for ill-defined metros <http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2008/09/metro-in-sydney-transport-plan.html>. The Australian Government could impose a consultative process on all those receiving such funding and provide the system to do it.

Tom, we have the software that could do all, or most, of what you are talking about, ready to go, more or less. We built it for a tender for the 2020 summit where we were unsuccessful.

I'm also interested in opening-up the OLO wiki for discussion, and thought the economic crisis might be a good one to do it on. I've actually started an entry for use in planning our March feature, which will be on the GFC. Very basic as I've just started. You can see the wiki, and what we did with food at http://issuesbriefs.nationalforum.com.au/wiki/Main_Page. You have to be approved to edit it, but we would be very liberal in approvals.

With the thread having not progressed for a while, I'll take the liberty of commenting upon some of tomw's remarks knowing that I'm not disrupting a rapidly progressing technical discussion.

First, this exchange between pelican and tomw:

pelican: "I wonder if the lobbyists would go for it?"

tomw: "I am sure the lobbyists would HATE it, which is why I suggested it."

Priceless. If OLO was to achieve nothing else than facilitate the bringing about of the situation whereby forked-tongue lobbying became no longer viable as a means to securing the 'inside track' in influencing government policy formation, it would have justified its existence.

A new dimension to democracy may be about to unfold. Potentially an extension of the secret ballot, in effect, in some ways, depending upon the transparency and auditability with which such a mechanism may operate. Also a bit like open source and Linux really, where the proof of the pudding is in the eating - with lots of very democratic taste-testing! We've been stuck with the policy-formation 'cathedral' model too long. Time to enter the 'bazaar'.

To digress slightly by way of illustration as to public perceptions of the significance of input to government policy formation, the comments to the current OLO article 'How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future' contains this rhetorical question and answer by the author:

"How do you think it was decided that it would be [a] good idea for John Howard to increase the rate of immigration to record levels after [he] won the 2001 elections for supposedly being a staunch protector of Australia's borders? .......I certainly don't remember it being discussed out in the open, with arguments for and against being put forward an[d] fairly considered. Clearly that it was a good idea to increase immigration was arrived at behind closed doors in discussions to which the wider public were not privy." See, for context, : http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8485#134880 , then scroll about a bit.

More info on the proposed OLO 20/20 software capabilities?

Here's a bit of an update on what happened following that survey.
The Online survey which was conducted by Open Forum formed the basis of a report compiled by Global Access Partners (GAP) which was presented to AGIMO and used to inform the AGIMO Online Consultation Guidelines which are available to the public here>> http://webpublishing.agimo.gov.au/Online_Consultation_Guidelines
Since then the government has run a few trials on their own platforms but more individuals and departments have also experimented with consulting on existing platforms such as www.openforum.com.au Open Fourm encourages all pollies and government departments to come utlises our neutral, independent platform to consult with the public.
Cheers, Sally (from www.openforum.com.au)