 Hi everyone. Yes and Tim flies home this afternoon so I look forward to sleeping at some point in the near future. So what I wanted to do today was to really talk a little bit about disrupting the status quo and the fact that some of the things that are actually impacting upon governments today that are creating a reason that we need to change, basically. So we are basically in a period of great change and great expectations in a lot of ways. In ways that we kind of haven't really been before. I should very briefly say, because I didn't say it, my background is actually 10 years in the IT industry then I worked for a minister for three years but don't hold that against me. Mostly because I wanted to understand how the executive and legislative arms of federal government worked and it was interesting and it was insightful and having done that I then wanted to go into the administrative arm of government. So I've been working for, I spent a year doing half of that in federal government and half of that in the ACT government and I'm currently working for the first ever whole Australian government chief technology officer, John Sheridan in finance and as of two days ago I am now the director of coordination and GOV 2.0 which is very exciting. So yes, thank you. So there's a lot of things that are going to be changing around here as they say and there's a lot of exciting things to happen but I'll come to that to just go a little bit back in time. Why are we facing such changes now and why does government need to adapt now more so than ever before? So I'll go through some of the imperatives that I've noticed and I've had some interesting, a lot of what I'm saying I've got available in various different blog personnel. I'll actually be blogging most of this speech so feel free to not take copious notes if you were even interested in doing that but there'll be sort of notes and references available afterwards. I guess the first one that's really interesting particularly for Australia although I think this is happening also around the world is that we've hit a bit of a tipping point. A tipping point in digital engagement government. For a lot of years, how many people are actually working government? How many people are working in the broader ICT industry? Okay, so one of the things, so my focus is largely going to be around government. One of the things that was really a pushback for doing any sort of digital services was well what about the digital divide? The moment you do a digital service you're creating a problem for some people that are not online and that is a completely valid and fair point. The tipping point we've hit though is that more citizens are now engaging with government digitally than through any other medium. Now what does that mean practically from a policy perspective, from a resourcing perspective? Well, what it means is that if we put the resourcing and the into actually doing really great online services and we enable more people to actually effectively self-service, that actually frees up resources to help our more disempowered people, our people with more complex cases, our more vulnerable citizens. So actually digital engagement and digital services is a way to help with broach the digital divide because human resources are expensive but creating automated, self-enabling online services is actually a great way to help more people help themselves. So in 2009 in Australia was when we actually hit that tipping point where more citizens are engaging with government online than by any other means and around the world that started kicking off in different places as well. A second imperative, the internet is changing society expectations. This is one of my personal favorite topics and I won't go on too much about it but it's worth noting that because of the internet and people who integrate the internet into how they do everyday things. So not just people that go and do a search once a week. I love all these surveys that often do use Twitter. Is it once a week or once a day or once a month and I'm like I'm not off it? Is there an option that says I'm 100% connected pretty much 24-7? And there really isn't because the way that we think about how we integrate technology into our lives is quite changing. How many people here have heard the term of wearable computing? Cool. That's more than the usual sort of thing for everyone else wearable. We're getting to this phase where technology isn't just the thing you pick up and I hope you all like my nice Ubuntu Air. It might look like a Mac Air but it doesn't actually run any Mac software. We're getting to this point where it's not just the device you pick up. It's the one that you wear continually. It's the glasses that you have. Body hacking is a whole new area where people are starting to actually embed technology into their bodies. I have a friend in Melbourne who has an RFID chip, a radio frequency identity chip in his arm. He doesn't have any keys. He uses it to unlock his house. He uses it to start his car. He uses it for his cryptography stuff on his computer or his security stuff. Why wouldn't you? It makes your life simpler. We're getting to this point and we're right on the cusp of getting into a whole new era of how we engage with technology and how we integrate technology and how we do things. 3D printing is going to change everything again because then we completely remove the barriers to everyone having access to different properties which will be quite interesting. But people expect more than ever before. They expect to be heard. They expect to be part of the conversation. They expect to be able to connect with whoever they want. The old sort of geeky adage and my background is definitely geeky is to route around damage. It has been translated into a social phenomenon. People expect to be able to get around things that are put in their way, whether it's technical, whether it's social, whether it's whatever. So people expect more. They're actually not just expecting more. They're actually more empowered than ever before. We're living in a peer-to-peer society now. So if you don't deliver a great service, they will go elsewhere. Now there is a big question I think around what is the role of government? And that's a whole other talk. But there are sort of a lot of questions around, well, does government always meet the needs of citizens? Is it the role of government to provide the one and only particular service? Or is it the role of government to provide a reference implementation of a service and provide it the APIs to the data and to the services themselves so that the market can actually compete on delivering that service as well? Maybe. In some cases. Government holds a lot of data. Government also has a lot of responsibilities when it comes to privacy, when it comes to service delivery, when it comes to actually serving the needs of our citizens. But there is a question I think around to what level. But I won't go into that right now. Ubiquitous mobile connectivity is obviously another pressure and another imperative for change. The way that people expect to connect with and communicate with and be served by public services is fundamentally quite different. And not only that, but also within departments and agencies. I mean the actual workforce expects to be connected. The amount of people just bring a second phone to work because their work phone is abysmal and they can't do all the things they want to do on it. So they just bring a second phone in and that's the one that they actually get their real work done on. There's a question around productivity there. If a person is more productive on a particular platform, why wouldn't you let them use that platform and get the productivity gains rather than forcing them to use another platform, which is not their platform of choice? I don't advocate that everyone uses Linux because I know that some people, if you gave it to them straight away and just said okay, this is all you can use, their productivity would go down. Me, however, when I'm forced to use something that's not Linux, my productivity goes down. So it's a matter of understanding your workforce and actually trying to figure out what are you trying to achieve. I think that the catch call of efficiency and productivity has become a bit of an end to itself. But why are we trying to be more productive? Why are we trying to be more effective and efficient? Why are we trying to save money? There's obviously a lot of budget constraints and I'll come to that. There's the question of what are we actually trying to achieve and I don't think that's always as clearly stipulated as it could be. So companies expect to connect with us and obviously there's going to be new opportunities with high speed internet that changes things even more. I think that one of the major imperatives we have is that the success of a policy or a program or a project is not necessarily as obvious as it used to be. And in fact quite often clear outcomes not even articulated from the start because people don't want to fail any more than they don't want to succeed in a lot of cases which is kind of fascinating. But the idea of saying well actually how you publicly communicate your policy and how you publicly communicate the success of that policy is almost as important as succeeding in the policy at all. There are several very high profile policies that I actually studied over the last few years that demonstrate that you can have actually a reasonably good policy. You can have a pretty good implementation but if you don't communicate that well publicly and someone else runs off with your narrative then your policy effectively becomes a failure. And we can all think of a few that have terrible public perception but actually when you look at the statistics and the numbers are not terrible policies. So your policy success is now directly linked to public perception of it which is quite a terrifying thing given that so many people in the public service don't tend to intuitively as a matter of course engage publicly in those kind of communications. Tight physical conditions. Obviously this is the biggest problem that has been faced recently. But I don't think the implications of that have been entirely realized. What's happened is over many years there's been not only no new investment but IT departments have been asked to do more with less and have got more and more into bunker mentality and quite understandably so. There's been a lack of prioritization based on a holistic vision and prioritization has basically been in a lot of organizations that can write the prettiest paper. In some organizations it's who can scream the loudest. In some organizations it really just comes down to which is the biggest security threat. But you haven't got that prioritization of spending based on where are we trying to go. It's based on how can we cope with where we're at. And that has led us to a situation where a lot of the solutions we have in place and a lot of the ways that we're doing service delivery have been stretched as far as they can be stretched and we desperately need to shift if we're going to remain relevant and have those services continue to deliver what they're supposed to deliver. Which leads to the disconnect between strategy and IT. So because of the bunker mentality of IT. I mean I've worked in IT departments. I completely understand where they're coming from. I've been it myself. Someone comes to you and says hey we want to do this new shiny thing. It's going to be fantastic and you're like you're an idiot. What you're asking for is no sense. It can't be supported. It's going to create the security risks and then they say just make it soon. So it's there's a disconnect. Serious disconnect and this isn't just in government. It's I think across the board between business and IT. So the business of an organization will sort of go and they'll do their strategic vision about where they want to go and it'll have lots of words like synergy in it and then they'll come back to the IT department and they'll say so we want to do blah. And by the way we want to use this product and by the way we want to use that particular and by the way we want to go cloud. How many of you remember SOA when that was hype? Yeah cool a few of you. There's a wonderful website called SOAfacts.com I suggest the rest of you check it out. It's a parody of Chuck Norris Facts.com and it is a website all about just how ridiculous the hype got around SOA. And we're seeing exactly the same thing with cloud and cloud there are definitely opportunities in cloud. Absolutely. Are there new technologies? Yeah there are a few but realistically it is also something to be very wary of because if you just say we'll just go cloud first which a lot of people are trying to advocate well there's a huge difference between me hosting an open data platform in the cloud which I myself am in the process of implementing right now and hosting a health service in the cloud. What are the jurisdictional requirements? What are the implications around whether I can even enforce the service level agreement requirement that I have in order to keep this service running up and running. There are so many complications in place and so it's something that needs to be considered very carefully. But this disconnect between strategy and IT means that a lot of people in an organization will just say well we just want to do blah and IT is saying no but it's okay we found this $5,000 cheap service online that we can just set up. So you've got the HR and PR and comms and all the other business units of your organization just running up and doing stuff all over the place. There are new websites springing up and how sustainable are they? It's a scary, scary situation that we're actually heading towards because rather than actually simplifying things and making it more citizen centric we're seeing as a result of the lockdown of IT and the disconnect between business and IT we're actually seeing things become a lot more complicated for people. And I think that a lot of people in government particularly in federal government but across the board don't think of themselves as a whole of government. The fact is that citizens do not care how we're structured. They just don't. They don't care which department or which sphere of government is actually delivering a particular service. They just want the service. They want to be able to put in their postcode because they don't trust you yet. They're not going to create an account with you yet. They want to put in their postcode and say what are all the health services close to me? I don't care if it's federal, state or local. Now getting towards that is a tricky thing and I'm going to outline to you some of my thoughts about that. But I'm still in this mentality of thinking of our business unit and as a cog and it's okay because my cog is perfect. It's shiny and all the teeth in my cog they work really well and I've spent a lot of time polishing it and it looks really really good and when I turn it it turns freely and you say yeah but the machine is broken but it's okay my cog is really nice. So everyone is focused on their cog and even though their cog is completely disconnected from every other cog and the cog next to it might be completely broken down. It's not my problem because I'm just looking at my cog. The fact is in government we are exactly as strong as our weakest link. So we need to make sure hello, we need to make sure our weakest links are stronger and we need to start thinking of ourselves as one entity when it comes, not one entity but certainly one entity when it comes to service delivery. How do we do service delivery in a consistent and cohesive and citizen centric way that actually removes the idea that citizens have to understand exactly how we work in order to get access to information. We should be making it simpler. So IT people are seen as no people they end up because of that those limitations being slow to adapt and change and there's a lot of pushback and often fairly so but it becomes a habit of pushback based on some stupid things coming through and then you start to just make assumptions. But the most important thing here is that the strategic development for that organization is completely missing a vital ingredient it's missing what I like to call the geek factor. Geeks are your absolute best resource they are your winning card, they are the people who have their finger on the pulse of what society is doing and where society is going. Hello. They are the ones who understand how what you're talking about might actually look in implementation and they are the ones who will be able to give you just through some good and not all geeks obviously you're going to have some people who just want to figure out how to optimize that particular database to that tiny percentage of a second to go faster and that's cool. But there will be in all of your organizations technology thought leaders who just love technology and if you get them involved in your strategic development from the start then your strategy is going to be more implementable, your strategy is going to be more realistic and when it comes to actually engaging with IT to get it moving they're going to feel part of it and they're going to have a certain amount of ownership of it and they're going to want to see it succeed. What I've seen happen over many years is that IT and this has happened over many years, technology generally has been seen as the thing that the geeks do and the rest of society has outsourced all responsibility. The amount of people now that are getting into, how many of you have heard of the whole sort of design thinking space? Yeah a few. So this is a space which is all about how do we design a service so that it's sort of this citizen centric approach but it's about finding new and innovative ways to design ways to do things and it's actually a very clever concept in some ways but in some ways it's also stuff that anyone who's any good at their job in designing a service should have been doing the entire time so it's again a little bit hyped. But what I see is a lot of people coming into that space saying oh well what we're going to do is we're going to apply some design methodology and then we'll get a great outcome but we'll leave the technology to other people because it's not about the technology. It's like it's all about the technology if you don't have technologists involved nothing you can do, nothing you can think of will be able to be implemented effectively. So there's my little rant. Some other imperatives. The impact of 24 by 7 politics and media obviously has been a bit of a problem and makes it harder for the public service to actually move and harder for the public service to respond effectively. My personal take on that is that actually transparency is the best defence for good evidence based policy. When we develop a policy response in isolation and a lot of the time it's very good because there's a lot of good subject matter experts in government. There's a lot of people that we go to to get their expertise as well and we create something that could be the best possible policy you can imagine. And then it goes to the minister and then it may or may not look like that after that part of the process. And then whatever happens after that there's a question around well if they go in another direction and that fails, who's accountable? Well they get to stand up and say well that was the advice we were given and then it all just falls back on the public service. The public service and politics has been so closely entwined in the hearts and minds of so many of our citizens that it's very very difficult for the public service to rise above that kind of stuff in a lot of ways. So I think it's actually kind of imperative and vital that we have a very strong engagement directly with citizens that when we're developing policy we do it in a transparent and open way because it gives us the best chance of having an evidence based policy with some peer review. I worked for a little bit of time in computer forensics kind of stuff and applied a lot of those skills. So if you have 4,000 people contribute to a consultation and you can say well the public feedback to this idea was 99% negative but then I apply some forensics and analysis skills and say yeah but 80% of those people work for that company or work for that lobby group or come from that region or were based in that country over there or gives you all the context that we've never really had before to be able to get a better analysis of what's going into these consultations. So we actually have some very very good opportunities to use the internet and to use transparency and online tools to accentuate how we've done policy development, not just consultation but policy development and then to have a very public and evidence based position that helps encourage people to follow an evidence based approach. So there's obviously a lot of expense in the replication of effort across agencies. I'll just skip through a couple of last imperatives. Skills is a big problem in a lot of ways. The skills for online engagement are quite substantially lacking in the government, in the public service should I say, and quite often it's given to the people in comms. Now the people that are in comms are used to engaging in their job are very much around the premise that the media exists as one of the very few one to many mechanisms to actually communicate to the general public. So we'll figure out how to optimize how we deal with the media and then the media become our one to many. The internet is now our one to many. We don't actually have to go through the media. We still need to work with the media of course, but there is a very different skill set in talking to a real person than talking to and in the language of journalism. There is a very different set of motivations. Generally the general citizen actually just wants to know what's going on. The journalist is looking for the angle, they're looking for very very different motivations. And the other thing is that a lot of the time a lot of public servants are sort of told well you need to get approval for anything that you say online, for anything you say on social media. And yet when you call up the help desk of one of the agencies you're talking to a real person and they're not saying to you, now listen just hold on one second I'm just going to get approval for this thing I'm about to say. Okay just hold on one second I'm just going to go get approval for this thing I'm about to say. It's ridiculous. Why are we not applying exactly the same policies that we have in customer service to online engagement? That's exactly what's happening throughout industry, it's exactly what's happening in telcos, it's exactly what's happening in so many other places and yet in government we keep getting stuck in this oh well we need to have a social media policy before we can possibly engage online, well you already have a social media policy it's called your customer support policy. And there's bunches of agencies that have really excelled in this space and done some really really great stuff. So I think there's now hundreds and hundreds of social media presences and twitter accounts and blogs and all these kind of things happening which is a really really good sign. But there are still much more skill required and really getting beyond it just seeing as comms and getting into that sort of customer service exercise. And there are I guess dangers and opportunities for engaging broader skills and experience and expertise throughout the public service. I mean being able to say look we want to put together an online engagement team from anywhere in the department or agency or in the company you know anyone that's interested give us a yell. I once had a very large department consult with me about their, well talk to me about their social media policy and they were getting my feedback and they said so how can we get all of our SES online? I said you shouldn't. And I said what? I said well you shouldn't. You've got a bunch of SES that don't want to be online. And if you've got people that don't actually want to be on twitter and you're forcing to be on twitter as a matter of policy it's going to suck for them, it's going to suck for you. Because they you know people can smell it if you don't genuinely want to be there. I had a meeting with a woman senior policy advisor for a minister that will remain unnamed and we had this whole conversation because they wanted to do a big public consultation about a very contentious topic. And the conversation was off by about two degrees. You know something's off by two degrees it doesn't feel too bad to start but it becomes kilometers down the track. And so about 20 minutes in I just thought okay I need to figure this out so I started poking and prodding as I can you know be mildly contankerous as you can probably see. And finally and she got really irate and she finally slammed her hand down at the paper and she said Pia, people should feel privileged we're allowing them to have a say at all. And I said thank you and I laughed and she was very disconcerted that this you know like little policy advisor for this person that she doesn't even know was laughing at her. But I laughed and I said look thank you so much for saying that because now I understand why this conversation has been so wrong. If you don't change that perspective your consultation will fail and you can't blame the technology and you can't blame the people and you can't blame the methodology. You only have that perspective to blame because people will smell that perspective a mile off and they will run for the hills and at best they will run for the hills. At worst you will get trolled beyond an inch of your life. And then I explained trolling to her and she wasn't very happy about that. But the point here though is that one of the big challenges that we have is a cultural change because the idea that the general public have something of value to contribute even if it's just feedback or even it's just an experience or even an idea is a new idea for a lot of people in public service. There is sort of the idea of serving the public's best interests and there is the idea of getting the experts in so we can have the best possible outcome but the idea that there is something of value to be gained from a public consultation is for a lot of people not entirely there. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done. There's a lot of pressures from industry to do certain things this whole cloud first and every time you say anything that isn't cloud first suddenly you're an antiquated dinosaur and it's quite funny. I remember going into a three and a half hour cloud consultation once I nearly committed hierarchy seriously. This company decided to talk to us about what everyone around the world is doing and within about ten minutes we were able to point out that every case study they gave us of every government was running government hosted cloud actually or government owned organizations like a government owned telco hosted cloud. So you're telling us to do something which isn't actually what the evidence you're presenting to us says. And then you got very irate and started pointing out that you know data gov au was hosted in the cloud and I'm like yeah it's open data. That's cool there are many many many things you can do in the cloud but you need to be strategic about it because otherwise we're just going to go through another version the 21st century version of the outsourcing crash of the 90s and we don't want to do that again because that kind of sucked. Apps is obviously one of the big pressures that's facing everyone at the moment. Everyone wants an app and yet building a native app that works on an iPhone and only that particular version of iPhone and then a month later it breaks because you know something a library is updated. Not necessarily the most sustainable way to actually deliver a reliable inclusive service for information service delivery. The idea of responsive web services is far better but you've got to get that balance and pushing back sometimes again on ministers or again on people up the stack and saying you know what an app store or building an app is that actually we're going to meet our policy goals and you know coming back to that question, what's our policy goal? How are we going to meet our policy goal? Is spending 30k on an app that we're going to have to spend 100k over the next few years trying to maintain and keep up to date? The best way to go about this. And particularly anyway I won't go down my app ramp. Digital city is another pressure that's coming up from a policy perspective. A lot of people running around talking about the importance of having a digital city strategy with no one actually understanding what that means apart from Wi-Fi and of course IT, your technologists within your organization know all of this stuff. If someone comes to you with a shiny power point presentation and it's usually power point although they're getting more into Prezi these days and they say oh what you need to do is you need to do XYZ, go to your geeks and say to them what on earth does this mean? Seriously does this make sense? And your geeks will be like well let's talk to you about what it can do or not. Geeks are the most underappreciated resource that we all have access to. So just to finish off the imperatives a bit. I guess after a long period of being in Stasis we need to basically as government, as public service, we need to rapidly adapt or die in my opinion. A little bit like Sigourney Weaver and Alien. So if you need a bit of a role model I reckon aliens or aliens is probably a reasonable thing to think about. We've been in Stasis, we've got to a point where we've done as much as we can kind of do, we need to adapt, we need to change to meet these imperatives which are pretty serious imperatives, otherwise and we'll never die. There will always be a role for government but will become less relevant. And government realistically speaking is pretty much the only institution which has the actual service to the citizen and service to the public as its core mandate. So if we basically create a position where citizens are having to go and get all their services from companies and from other places and we're not making those things available and we're not making the information in the data and service APIs available then we're effectively locking people into a way that isn't necessarily in their best interest. So in terms of disrupting the status quo, how can we fix all this? This is kind of where I get to the positive side of it because I've given you all the doomsday stuff. We're kind of you know rock meets hard place in that situation so what can we do about it? Obviously one of my things has been this whole gov 2.0 thing and yes I know it's a stupid term. Who here hates the term web 2.0? Yay. Web 2.0 has really become a bit of a buzz term as well and I love it when people say, I've actually heard someone actually say this oh you know we're going to, we've been thinking about web 3.0 but we're not going to implement it until we finish implementing a web 2.0 strategy. What are you talking about? It's actually, it's interesting and again no one's talking to the geeks. So for me gov 2.0 an apologies for the term but it has become a little bit probably slightly due to me. But it kind of comes down to three things. Open and transparent government and what does that mean from a technical implementation perspective? Well look at what data you've got. Is it able to be opened? Does it have privacy implications? Are you able to de-identify and still make certain aspects of it open? But the big thing is rather than treating open data as a reactive retrospective FOI mentality kind of approach trying to see it as well how can we have proactive data publishing, real-time data publishing. How can we actually put information out there in a way that is engaged with our system so it's automatically pushing stuff online. If you're publishing, I'll give you an example, tenders obviously need to be published and contract information needs to be published. And there's in the ACT that's one person who spends four hours a month you know taking the stuff out of the database cleaning it up, putting it into HTML stuff, putting it online. If we can automate that that's four hours of productivity gains we can get. So proactive data publishing particularly in the case of a lot of data which we have to publish anyway creates a whole bunch of productivity gains and creates a whole bunch of opportunities that the information is now available in a machine readable format that other people can actually use more effectively and not just other people but other parts of government. The amount of times that you wanted to get access to some statistics or some data about a particular thing and that department won't give it to you and then or you can't find the person to talk to it's all very complicated so it's just easy to just go and buy it again. There's a lot of documentation and duplication of efforts and of data creation in government that you know is a waste of money really. So open data the amount of effort to actually release something to the general public is close to the amount of effort that it takes to actually release something to another department. So in terms of best value for money, in terms of best most efficient use of money, if we're going to release it to another department anyway why wouldn't we release it publicly? So there's a lot of opportunities there and this idea does anyone know what I mean by the term API? So for everyone else, if you've got an API is a programmatic interface to a service so what does that mean? If I've got a form that I want to fill in to change my address well you can go to the website and you can fill in the form. If you make the API available it means that someone else can get the code of how the form works. They don't have access to your data, they don't have access to the privacy information they don't have access, you know you put in place all the appropriate security mechanisms as well but they can see how the form is going to work so now they can make an app or they could make another website or they could integrate it with another service that like another department could say okay well if you want to change your address with us why wouldn't we have it so that it sends through that as a suggestion to that other department? Why wouldn't, in the ACT I have to say a lot of people like to bag out Canberra and I can kind of understand it but it is a lovely place. The ACT government have the most citizen centric service delivery in Australia and it doesn't mean it's where it could be but it's certainly far more ahead of anyone else. I can change my address in one place and it goes to the entire ACT government. I can go into a what I call a Canberra Connect store and access all of the ACT governments from the one place. I can access all the ACT government services through the one website. It's actually very very clever how they've done it and anyone that wants to find out more about that I can talk after the talk about structurally how they've done it and from a policy perspective how they've done it but it's very very interesting. So open and transparent government is about this concept of making government itself an API because if you can collect and aggregate the information and the services from across government in a thematic way now I can say okay well let's have a health website, a single health website, not 14 websites across four different departments that do all different aspects of health but one website that actually aggregates all of it into the one place properly now you start to get these opportunities to get into the second principle which is about citizen centric design. So moving from a structural to a thematic approach and personalised delivery of information and services. I may say okay I want to know about health services available from the government. Well okay show me the ones in my postcode show me the ones from my age. You know what maybe I will create an account because you know there's this new medical record thing that's been created for me you know because I went to the doctor last week anyway so oh you're going to remind me when my baby is out for a vaccination. Oh now you're going to tell me about the information coming up about my obligations from a retirement perspective or my opportunities from a retirement perspective. You actually get an opportunity to deliver a truly personalised service to citizens. The third one is about public engagement which I've spoken about a bit. I think that Gov2O and the and there's a really strong Gov2O community in Australia and there are skills being developed in this area and there's a lot a lot of very innovative very innovative projects happening around Australia so I would suggest actually having a look at that community and if someone introduces themselves to you as a social media expert punch them if you want to know how to do online engagement well if you want to know how to do any of this stuff well find people that have done it and find a number of them have done it and ask them how they did it and talk to your geeks and ask them how they would do it. Now some other opportunities innovation in the public service I think is a bit of a challenge particularly when everyone is under the pump one needs to defend spending any money and of course I was there the day that the IT reinvestment fund from the from the federal government was actually withdrawn back into the general budget and it was very frustrating because the whole point of that IT reinvestment fund was to actually provide funding for departments and agencies to do things in new and interesting ways. That put us back a few years in my opinion and it was highly frustrating. How can we get innovation in the public service under the circumstances we're working in? One of it is about actually encouraging a little bit of playtime and a little bit of skunkworks. We don't have money but we do have people. If you can give your people even just half a day a week or even just a couple of hours a week or maybe a week or a month to just play on something that they want to do. You could run internal hackfest. You can have like little internal competitions to see if you can come up with new and clever ways. There's a lot of stuff you can do just within your departments and within your companies to actually encourage skunkworks exciting culture for gigs to do what gigs do best. You can engage with the community. You can get involved with things like GovHack and one of my fellow GovHack people is right there, Jeff Mason, but we have a team in Canberra who are putting together this big national hackfest on government data working across seven cities with four different state governments and federal government. Anyone interested in that? Come and chat to either me or Jeff after the talk but you can get engaged with the community with these kinds of things and a hackfest isn't just about saying well how can you use the data but also how can you you know what sort of stuff can you create but it's also about saying well how can you do this better and if we see something done better that we like how can we integrate that into our business as usual. Why wouldn't we go and engage with those developers or why wouldn't we take that idea and see if we can implement it into ours as well. It's like a I mean I really hate to put it this way and it's a little bit crass but it's a really really cheap way to do innovation in a way. Get involved with what's happening out there because people have their own motivation to want to do things better so why wouldn't you tap into that and collaborate with those people. Skills development, I think one of the challenges is that government is not seen as the place where you know hardcore technology innovators go in fact it's kind of seen as the opposite in a lot of cases but if we can actually start to create a culture of technology excellence and awesomeness across the government then we can attract and support a geek culture and an innovative culture that actually gets things done. The amount of people I mean innovation is also a word that has been completely screwed around. A lot of people hear the word now and they shudder and I understand entirely why but real innovation is actually about letting cool people do cool things. Actually giving them permission to play and to come up with new ways to do things. This works very well for Google. Google give their people 20% play time and pretty much all of their most successful products have come out of that. Have come out of their people actually being given a chance to play. Okay so other things we can do iterative policy is one of my little bandwagon that I'm starting to jump on. The idea that the way that we create policy at the moment generally is relatively static. We build the policy and then we leave it in place for 10 years or until it dies. If we take an approach that says in the first case we're more collaborative in the way that we develop policy as I was describing before but then this is where it gets kind of tricky. On an ongoing basis, okay what can we measure out of this policy? How do we define success of this policy? What are we learning on an ongoing basis through the implementation of this policy? Let's put just, it doesn't need to be a huge amount of bureaucracy but let's just make it so that the people implementing it are able to feed back suggestions to the people maintaining it and actually keep it as a live document and on an ongoing basis feed those lessons learned back into the policy so that policy can adapt to new circumstances and new opportunities and new issues. A very very basic practical example of this was in the Queensland Government with their social media approach with Facebook and what they found was that they had a team of people and every day the people would be briefed on okay here's what's happening, here are the ways to deal with things and if there's anything outside of this scope send it to me. So everyone was given a lot of freedom to actually just participate online within a particular scope and with the responsibility of being representative of the Queensland Police and every day there would be fringe cases that went up to the manager and every day that manager would deal with those fringe cases and then document how to deal with those fringe cases and then feed that back into the team. So every day the team was being upskilled into how to deal with more and more complex cases. This idea of that's a very very small version of what I'm talking about but this idea of iterative policy means that we might have a chance where even the absolutely worst developed policy in the history of policies can turn into a good policy within a short period of time if you build into place the capacity for the policy to iteratively adapt according to the outcomes of what the policy is or isn't achieving. Hopefully that makes a small amount of sense, I'll move on. I guess that and there's also a huge amount of development for skills within the public service, a huge amount of requirement for this. We have online engagement I've mentioned but data analysis and data visualization policy, the development of things like APIs and automation skills are all really really important in being able to really take advantage of this space. There is a huge culture and generation change coming in the federal public service at the moment. I think it's something like 50% of their senior executive service are retiring in the next five years. That's a fairly huge generation change that's coming in and there's been a lot of changes from a policy perspective and a cultural perspective even just in the last four years. There's a lot of pressure from the top now around online engagement, around big data, around different ways to do policy. They just launched an APS policy visualization network which already has three or four hundred members of people across the federal public service who are looking at completely different ways of doing policy and doing data stuff which is quite fascinating. Of course the Gov2 task force, even though that was four years ago, a lot of the outcomes and recommendations of that have really started filtering into and filtering down into departments and agencies across the federal government. Very, very interesting. What's the role of open source in all of this? I know I haven't got too much more time but in the first case there's a lot of technologies we can obviously tap and very good technologies. One of the benefits of using an open source technology is that you're not locked into a particular vendor and I see this time and time again where someone says this is a great product, it serves exactly what we need and then the moment you want to change something it costs a bomb. What happens if something happens to the company? What happens if the company doesn't actually fulfill their service obligations? Well you've got nowhere to go because you've got that one product and only that one company supports it. At least with open source you've got the opportunity to say well actually there is an open market for supporting this and so we can go to somebody else if our support company doesn't fulfill our obligations or sorry, our requirements. You'll hear a lot more about the benefits of technology itself but the ones I want to focus on is methodologies. So the methodologies of collaborative development that spans every traditional barrier to collaboration and communication and entry and stuff. There's a lot we can learn about the methodologies of doing open source development. There are still people that do software development in the world and it still amazes me that anyone would do this who write a bit of code and then they put into a zip file and they email it and they don't even version control it in a lot of cases. There's so much we can learn from good code development and good vision management as well which sort of brings me to the culture. The culture of sharing and mutual benefit through enlightened self-interest is a really good culture. If you can actually align people's motivations with your policy goal you've got a better chance of your policy goals being sustainable and being successful. So tapping into the culture I think of open source is a very handy thing and I think it's interesting to note that open source is really just part of the continuum. We sort of started with Hacker Culture from the 60s, went to open source there was the open knowledge explosion with Wikipedia and now we've got this whole open government movement. Of course next will be the open open movement. I look forward to everyone joining in on the open movement. It's all part of a bigger picture and if you actually look back at the history of and what's brought us up to the open government gov2o scene, I think it's interesting to see where that's going to go. The idea of a highly connected and empowered and a motivated community that can effectively solve problems faster than ever before and more effectively than ever before is something that we need to tap into as government. So I guess my final thought for you is, and then we'll do some questions, but who here has heard of the term singularity? It's the same people who've done all the tech and stuff. For everyone else there's this term being bandied around called singularity and for a lot of people it's like the mecca of geeks. It's used to describe pretty much anything from the machines taking over and humanity finally being wiped out, terminated style, through to cyborgs. It's used to describe a lot of things. What it actually means as a definition is a little bit more interesting. It means that the distance between things is reduced to nothing. So whether it's your device and you, and I mean right now my device is separate from me, wearable computing takes it to the next level embedded computing takes it to the next level. I'll give you just one other body hacking example because it is so fascinating. I knew of a woman who embedded a tiny little sphere, metal sphere into the tip of her finger, which had mercury and a free floating magnet inside. So what that means is that the free floating magnet spins according to the megahertz of the frequency around her. Here's what's fascinating. That is a completely alien thing to have in your body. Completely alien. The thing that is detecting is completely alien. But her brain, because it's such fascinating organs is actually adapted to new input. Let that, let, think about that. Our brain's actually adapted to completely new and completely foreign input. She was able to accurately detect different frequencies after not having it in even all that long. Unfortunately then the iron actually eroded out of the casing and it shattered and she had to have emergency surgery. But apart from that the fact that our brains can actually adapt to new input is that's not all that far away. They've already been able to start 3D printing kidneys and new organs and stuff. We're not going to have waiting lists for organs in the next 20, 30 years. It's a very, very interesting time we're going into. Singularity is about the reduction of space in between things. Whether it's your device and you or whether it's two people or whether it's two devices it's about reducing the distance in between. So I guess what I put to you is that what we're hitting and what we're heading towards now is effectively a democracy singularity where the distance between citizens and the system has reduced quite significantly. And even though a lot of people within the public service think that they're on the inside pushing people outside of the walls of the castle and outside of the moat, the fact is that the people who have already put the drawbridge down have walked through and they're sitting on your bunk bed looking at you saying what now. All of the traditional sort of defensive perspective of us versus them is not the case anymore. We're all part of the one society and government will do best by engaging with that and actually working towards a more collaborative approach to serving the best interests of citizens in the 21st century. So from that rather bizarre note I will actually finish up and I just want to finish up by saying that in my new role working for the Australian government, chief technology officer and working on Gov 2.0 and once I've had a little bit more time to actually catch up with the ridiculously low amount of sleep I've had for the past seven weeks organizing so Tim Berners-Lee, then I look forward to having more cogent and sensible conversations with all of you. So thank you very much. So yell. So if you can yell and then hear from the recording can you repeat the questions? Sure. Okay so the question is about how people have managed online policies online. So there's actually a lot of case studies of this around the world. I'll actually give you an example from my experience and then I'll give you another example. So from my experience I was involved in a bunch of consultations where we said which were just straight consultations not collaborative policy development itself but where we had a policy that needed to be consulted on and we did it using both online and offline mechanisms. So we developed in my previous job I think that we called the public sphere methodology and interestingly and retrospectively I was able to realize that it was actually a mapping of pretty much how successful open source projects work regardless and successful online communities work because I've been on various online communities for about 15 years so it was good to sort of tap into that experience but it basically starts like this. You say okay well what's the problem you're trying to solve because you want to give people something meaningful. You don't just want to say hey what do you reckon because that's meaningless and mildly disrespectful in a lot of ways. You say okay what's a very specific problem. You then research that community. Where do they meet? Like who are the community leaders, who are the organizations the stakeholders all those kinds of things but beyond that where are the one to many mechanisms for that community? Is it a newsletter? Is it a Twitter hashtag? Is it a conference that they all go to once a year? Is it a particular mailing list? Where are the one to many mechanisms that you can actually engage with people in that community? Then what you do is having sort of at that point having a bit of a skeleton plan of how you're going to go about this policy consultation you actually engage some of those thought leaders even ones that maybe disagree with you look we're about to look you know we'd like to launch this consultation we want to get the community's input we'd love for you to look over this and tell us what you think about the language about what we're trying to achieve about any further background you can give us all that kind of stuff and what happens is that they help you tweak your language because if your language is wrong when you first launch it will turn people off and because people are so saturated by information if you don't make the right impression in the very first instance then they won't engage with your consultation and the more barriers to entry which includes language to your consultation then the more extreme a perspective you'll get because you'll turn off all the people the moderates so to speak it'll only be the people who are super wanting to get involved. I won't go through the whole methodology but basically it went right through to having a final beautifully crowdsourced and analyzed and forensically contextualized piece of policy feedback that then goes back to the people developing the policy. The next stage is to actually develop it collaboratively which is one of the stages I'm actually looking at doing a collaborative policy development just in the next probably three months or so so they'll be worth keeping in eye but there's been legislation of different countries that has actually been crowdsourced they've put it into systems such as amusingly github where they say to people here's our current draft of legislation or here's what we're trying to achieve put up your draft and then they actually work with people to create the right language and such. There's a lot of case studies I can put a bunch of them on the blog if you like. Sure. The question is about how the industry can actually help advance these sort of goals around government as API and such and get those sort of contracts. So it actually touches upon a point which I actually forgot to go into, it was in my notes about procurement. It's an interesting, in Australia there's actually policy at the moment that some of you may not know which basically says that every government department, federal government department in every tender request that they put out there has to include in the tender request what have you considered open source. Now what happens is there's actually a person who sits not too far from me who watches every OS tender as it comes out and any tender that doesn't have that clause he calls them up and says why haven't you met your procurement guideline obligation. So he's now got 100% compliance which is a lot of work actually but he's done pretty well. But the thing is that you can have we can set in place the conditions where we're trying to encourage a particular, not a particular solution but we're trying to encourage diversity in the solutions that come out so that we can actually have a reasonable spread of things that we can assess. But if no one puts the solution in then we've only got the other solutions to choose from. So part of it is actually just going for tenders and actually being part of the game. There's a guy called Don Easter who's the IT supplier advocate for the Australian federal government who works in the Department of Innovation and his entire job is to look at the processes for the IT industry with government and try to streamline them and try to make them easier. Things have become a lot easier like the DCAS, the data center as a service panel for federal government is something that's a reasonably low barrier for companies to join and basically departments and agencies wanting to procure anything up to the value of ADK can go through that very, very simply. It's trying to simplify the capacity to actually procure things and I know it's only ADK but it's for a lot of projects that's actually quite handy. So part of it is just being in the game, part of it is understanding what government is trying to achieve and part of it is actually presenting those innovative approaches and going and presenting to government saying, if you do it in the way that your tender request is stipulating then you are locking yourselves into another 10 years where you're not going to be able to move because they don't necessarily know that. And you're also going to remember the people that are running the procurement are the procurement policy people who are not the strategic people. So actually getting in and talking to the strategic people in departments and saying well what are you trying to achieve and how can we help you with the information you need to make sure that your procurement processes are actually mapping your policy goals so to speak. And again that's getting that bridge between business and IT closed because at the moment business comes up with the idea they either make their IT do it or they go out to tender but there's not the connection around what will these procurement processes lead to in the long term. The UK government put in place a really interesting thing where they said that as part of a tender response you had to say what your exit cost for your solution was. That's a fascinating one because when you start looking at things like SharePoint the exit cost is actually quite high because it has a dependency upon a number of things. So if you are on SharePoint and you want to move to something else it's actually quite a difficult thing to extract so yeah it's interesting. I think there's a lot of work that can be done in procurement policy and that's now the domain of the department I work for so it's going to be interesting to look into that myself. Cool okay thanks. I don't know about you guys but I took an enormous man away and obviously the key message is go to your geeks and if you're a geek good luck. And congratulations to Pee on her new role so let's thank her once again.