 And then we can just do some questions and stuff at the end. Obviously, this is the first time we've done, I think, a remote video talk to LCA. And I wish I was there so much. So thank you all still for coming to my remotely given talk. It will be a good test, I think, for potential future LCA stuff. But so first of all, I should say I'm not here in any official capacity. I'm not speaking for any of the things that I might be perceived to work for. So I'm here in a personal capacity talking about stuff that I care about. So I'll jump across to some slides. I've put these up publicly already. And if anyone has questions, feel free to throw them onto Twitter, onto, you know, at PeerWolf, or just throw them to Ryan. And he can type them into the chat here. We can just do them live afterwards, so whichever way works for you. OK, can you see my slides? All right, so I'll start. I just wanted to start with the concept of government as an API. So a lot of you will get this a lot more intuitively than a lot of people I usually deal with. But it's really, and it is an American picture, so apologies for anyone that doesn't like that. But it's really getting down to the concept that government isn't just a top-down institution or series of institutions that does stuff for people anymore. It's really just part of a network. And if we, as well, if the people that work in government can actually make government work more like a node in a big network of stuff, then the information, the services, the good stuff that government does can actually be consumed by other people and turned into something that could be programmatically used in other applications, in other research, in other tools and fed from other places. But the idea is that starting to move from a top-down hierarchy into just one of the many nodes in the network and becoming a bit more relevant for that, because I think a lot of people in government think, well, government is important, therefore people will come to us, but people don't, they go to where the information is. So if government's not out there and available and accessible, then people will go elsewhere. So I thought I'd start with a couple of challenges that I think are important around why government needs to move towards being like API and where open source standards and data fits into that. But I'll start with a couple of challenges. The first one is that most governments around the world, they're not gonna get more money. It's hard to ensure you've got the right people, let alone getting more people, and it's hard to ensure you've got the right skills. So there's this constant crying out for, can I have more? And then a constant sapping on the wrist of bad kitty, in my opinion. So starting to get an understanding of the fact that you can't necessarily just throw more people money skills at a problem. You need to actually start learning how to do things in a different way, learning how to collaborate, learning how to work with the community, learning how to work across departments, across governments, across the world, with industry, with community groups, to actually solve problems in a more collaborative fashion. It's the only way that government can become more resilient, can become more responsive to rapidly changing expectations of the people that the government's supposed to serve. So it's really important to understand that there is a perceived problem about resources, but there's also a pressure to change how things are done because the old way is not gonna continue really much more. Status quo, I get to hear a lot of people say, you know, but this worked before, and I think that a horse and cart is a cute way of demonstrating that just because it worked before doesn't necessarily mean it's the best way of doing it now. I think that inertia is sometimes hard to move, and it depends on the government, it depends on the level. I mean, I worked in, I guess, the state and territory government level, and I've worked in the federal level, and then the local level in Australia was a whole different one in New Zealand. I think you're pretty lucky. You've got sort of two levels of government, which believe it or not, actually makes life a lot easier because it's exponentially more tricky when you've got three levels than two. But getting to this point of, just because it worked before doesn't mean it's gonna continue to work, I think is fairly important. Another challenge is the culture clash. I was actually having a chat just this morning with a good friend who has been in government for sort of 30 years, but who's very much a sort of one of us. He really does think about things in internet terms, I guess, and with internet culture. But a lot of people who are involved internationally, who see themselves as part of a global community first, and then maybe a company or maybe a national, or maybe, you know, but we don't see ourselves first and foremost as part of a hierarchy. We actually see ourselves as part of a global society, and that's a very, very big change in perspective. So a hierarchical thinking person will tend to go sideways, or they'll escalate an issue, rather than just talk to someone, they'll figure out ways to work within a system, whereas this new breed of people, like us, tend to route around damage. We tend to see something that gets in the way of doing something well as damage, and whether that's technical or social. So, you know, we get around things, we fix stuff, we just figure out how to make it happen, and that's a real culture clash. It can be both good, it can be challenging, but in some ways it's a lot of fun, and that's just the naughty peer coming out, I think, but it is something to acknowledge, because when you're trying to deal with people who really want to do the right thing, but they approach the world in quite a different way, you need to be aware of that, and sort of help bring people along a little bit for the ride, or, again, just route around damage. But there's a culture clash going on between and even within governments around the world. There's the concept that government is complex, or governments are complex, and how to make it simple isn't just a matter of, well, you know, just make a rule, or make a law, or legislate, or take money off people, or give money to people, or force something. It's a multi-headed hydra. Just because one department does something, well, it doesn't mean they all do it well, just because one department does something bad doesn't mean they all do it bad. Government and learning how to affect change in government, and I mean, in the public service particular, is a matter of starting to understand that there are loads of different trigger points and leads, and it is like any good sysadmin needs to go and figure out the system with governments and with figuring out how to make government better, we actually need to put some time into figuring out the system if you want to actually make a change. So understanding that it is complex and that we need to figure out ways to make it simple, we can't just expect it to become magically simple, is I think important. I think that a big change, a big challenge of the governments are facing at the moment is the rise of the technology. The fact is that anything you want to implement, and thank you XKCD, but anything you want to implement ends up getting implemented in technology. You end up having your IT department or a tech team or a contractor or a geek sitting down and actually putting into action the thing, the bright idea that you came up with. Now, of course, that's led to a huge disconnect where the IT department's only spoken to at the end of the process, which is way too late, arguably, so we need to pull those skills and pull that discussion into the very early part of how government works, which is a change for government and which is tricky for government because a lot of people in government, particularly people who work on policy, see the work they do as being top of the food chain and the implementation is just those other people, but implementation and policy needs to go hand in hand, otherwise you end up with policy that can't be implemented or implementations that don't support the policy. And I think the other part of that is that there is starting to be a recognition that you need to have, not necessarily just every geek in the room, but you need to have people with technical literacy in the room as part of that planning, very early on and very high up. Changing expectations, I do love this slide, I use it often because I like to remind public servants that people out there, even at this age, probably know better in some cases and we need to respect that, engage with that and support that. But the expectations of the public are changing and will be to change and will always change. And so that's a challenge because people, I think in government, see there's sometimes a problem, but actually it's a real opportunity. If people's expectation is changing, then how do you build a way of doing government that can respond to the change today and to the change tomorrow? Like there's, it's not about building a used design that supports how people want to talk to government today and then just putting that in place over three years. It's a matter of building the building blocks that then support the user designer today and the user designer tomorrow because it's able to be re-consumed by whatever approach you wanna take. But I'll come back to that in a second. But changing expectations is certainly a big challenge, but also a huge opportunity for government to be more resilient, more relevant, more effective. So I thought I'd also just throw in a little bit of Game of Thrones, cause well not. People see government as, you know, this often the clouds, you know, hard to get to single entity that kind of is disconnected from their real lives and their real worlds, right? Government see people almost as, you know, you know, way down the road with a huge cliff and, you know, climbing up just to get in the way and to sort of, you know, why do people not know that government's doing, you know, the best thing for them? And this kind of us versus them, they're on the other side of a moat and we need a big moat full of fire to, so that we can best serve people is, you know, certainly a mentality that I come across quite regularly. So they see, you know, the citizens as very much similar to the Northerners. And then government has, government sees government as just a series of fiefdoms, you know? Each individual one has its own flag, has its own loyalties, its own relationships, its own power structures. And by the way, this map is just a wonder. There's a real problem around people creating fiefdoms. So one of the, and this is a challenge as well, but it's also an opportunity is that government needs to move from hierarchy to appear to appear model, to an understanding that citizens don't care which department you work for, they don't care what level of government you work for, they don't care what country you're in in some cases. Yeah, they want to get access to the services and the information that's relevant to them and they want to get access to it now in a way that's convenient to them, but isn't too creepy. So, you know, moving from hierarchy to peer-to-peer is a big sort of part of this new world order. So how do we do this? You know, we've got all these challenges, we've got all these, government's not gonna change fundamentally, you know, in a lot of ways. It's going to continue to be difficult, it's gonna continue to be complex, it's gonna continue to be reasonably large, you know, compared to, you know, a small business. But it needs to change, so how do we do this? So, here's a couple of initial thoughts that I've been having. And I've sort of been writing about this a little bit and having some fun with these ideas and testing my ideas within government, but these are just a couple of initial ways that we might be able to take the horse to water. First of all, we need to recognize that we can't always change the system, we need to figure out how to translate the system. Sometimes we need short-term ways to interact with the current system, the current methods, the current processes, the current ways of doing things in order to move people towards a better way of doing things. That means we need to learn, and this is certainly something that I've, you know, really applied in my work, is learning to translate the language, you know, from understanding how public servants speak, how they're trained, how they're taught, helps you understand how to work with them to do something better, and that's what public servants, believe it or not, are real human beings who are trying to actually do some good stuff. And if you can show them how changing what they're doing will actually do what they want to do better, but often enough they'll do it. A lot of public servants push back on change because they think that change for change's sake is a bad idea, and that's not necessarily a bad tenant, but they don't immediately always understand that what you're suggesting is actually for everyone's benefit. So, and then we can take that from a, you know, translation of culture and languages to also translation of sources and systems. So you might, the amount of time someone has said to me, oh, we can't possibly do that because our system doesn't support it. And maybe the tangerous geek that I am, cool. I'm getting a feedback right now. Great, and now I'm getting... Can you mute me? I might mute you. Yeah? Can you mute yourself? Yeah, but I'm going to mute you though because I'm... Okay, I'm muting you. There we go. Just for a moment. All right, so, so finding ways to translate existing systems is important. So even if your system doesn't support doing something in a particular way, the system is supported by a database or a backend or a, you know, there's usually a programmatic way to talk to a system that may not be through the front door. But if you look at how they interact with their system as a user, there are many ways that you can actually create a translation of system services. Then you've also got encouraging people about why to make a change. You know, is it better? Is it more efficient? Is it more effective? Does it help them in the long run? Does it help them in the short run? And if it doesn't help them at all, then you're going to find it hard to actually encourage people to change. And I'll go through data.gov.au List resistance. This is one of my favorite things. I learned, I forget the name of the concept now, but I briefly did physics at uni and for some reason it really stuck with me this idea of building physical infrastructure that, you know, corrals water into the right way. You know, the same thing applies to livestock and the same thing applies to people, strangely enough. We're not actually that much different from animals as we like to believe, but if you can actually create a system of resistance, which is the path of most technical excellence, people tend to follow it. A quick example is telling people to put their data in data.gov.au doesn't work, never worked. Telling people that, oh, we've got this new finality that if you put your data on data.gov.au in a machine-readable way and by the way we can train you how to do that, it'll automatically build an API for you. And then you can build your apps around it and then you can do this and then you can create a path of least resistance because it's easy to put out machine-readable data than to go and build your own API to your own internal systems means that people tend to follow it. So trying to figure out what those barriers are and dealing with that. I think take personal risk is a big thing in the public service. Everyone wants to push risk away, but, you know, if you as an individual either outside or inside the government are willing to take a little bit of personal risk and actually willing to do stuff of a different way of doing things, I find often enough that'll make a huge difference because people assume it takes a lot of effort and a lot of money and a lot of time to do anything useful. But as we all know, you can do things very quickly and very effectively, really awesomely when you get the right people and skills and ideas in the room. So actually leading the way is a really great way to change perspectives and to get people thinking in new and interesting ways. And even indeed following a better path. I think is important. You don't want to just make the assumption that, hey, this way of doing things is better and here's why. And then forget to continue to prove it because if two years, ten years down the track someone questions it and you can't show that it has actually been beneficial, then it becomes questionable. It becomes contested. So you've got to almost build into your system. What are your metrics, what are your success criteria, what are you actually doing? And I think one of the other ideas that's really permeated certainly the federal government in Australia and I'm seeing it all around the place is this idea of putting the citizen at the center of how we do stuff. This is interesting because even though it does lead to, it can lead to all kinds of different outcomes, if everyone starts with the idea that what we do should benefit the citizen then that becomes a single tenet that everyone can agree on. Someone else might bring to the table reusable, re-consumable modular systems development so that we can better adapt our front-end systems to support the citizen. Someone else might bring to the table user-centered design so that we can actually design an experience and a journey based on what a person actually needs as opposed to what an individual department thinks that people should have. So it becomes a nice idea that brings everyone together. I'm going to keep flicking back here in chat that I get wrong and make sure I've got the timing right. So in terms of how this all relates to open data, open source and open standards I have found and I've sort of spoken about this in a couple of forums now but my background in open source and with our community has been key to any and all of the successes that I've had and that I continue to have with my working in Australian governments partly because of for a whole bunch of reasons but I'll go through a couple of ways that these things actually build the building blocks for the future of government doing stuff. So first of all it presents some ways to improve how government does tech. If government has to look at open source options then it means you're less likely to just pre-choose a particular product and then only be limited to that product meaning you actually have to look across different products doing things in different solutions. If open standards are actually prioritised you've got a better chance of interoperability if open data is prioritised you've got a better chance of sharing knowledge and sharing information and multiple people using the same sources of truth than everyone just going and inventing their own. This concept of building on the shoulders of giants which is so intuitive to all of us because of our background and our participation in the community getting this idea of thinking globally is again natural for all of us. All of us see ourselves as part of a global movement a global community of people which is then split down into a whole bunch of individual projects but we actually see ourselves as global citizens in a lot of cases as opposed to someone who is limited by the physical confines of their desk. So we build on the shoulders of giants and getting this mentality into government of building on the shoulders of giants of working globally is really important which brings us to collaboration. The open source community in particular has been exceptional at showing what a balance between competition and collaboration can mean. In government people tend to compete for funding and tend to then try to say well this is why we should have all the funding and it's often treated like a zero sum game. If you can actually identify areas that you can collaborate on in order to get better outcomes better tools to get better implementation, better consistency all that kind of good stuff and at the same time compete on what they actually need to compete on then you actually get a more healthy approach and then when you get that idea of collaboration across departments then you start to also be able to get the idea of collaborating across governments across jurisdictions across with the private sector with community organisations to get rid of those artificial barriers and they are completely artificial that have I guess historically stopped people from going out and working with other people. We are actually all people we are actually all just one part of a huge network of nodes each one of us a node regardless of who we work for or where we work from. Anyway Fourthly modular and interoperable design so getting away from huge behemoth systems that do one thing and moving towards I guess Unix design all of us tend to do. What is the best tool for the job and then you get the best tools for the job to work with each other and that way you can switch out different tools as things improve or get or new ideas come along or new technologies emerge or whatever. So rather than spending five years creating a mobile policy create a way to deliver mobile services but also create that same infrastructure might be able to be used for wearable computing in the future or for whatever comes after that. Really getting into better interoperability and better modular design is I think pretty critical. Exposing data and APIs as a service I think everyone gets that but what that leads to is matchable government the idea an individual department or indeed jurisdiction may not be able to actually provide the best service for a citizen for a particular thing. But if a citizen can themselves actually pull together the different services the different data, the different stuff across government they can actually solve their own itch. I think JFDI is a pretty key building block for the future of government rather than creating new itches or what I have just called dancing with mosquitoes actually identifying the problem solving the problem not building a policy for a policy or a work group to solve governance, whatever actually getting out there and solving problems is what will take us towards the future. If you spend three years coming up with a plan then your plan is probably out of date before you even have a chance to implement it. Meritocracy I think is an important one. I think to some degree that exists it exists at least in principle in a lot of governments but really learning from that idea that it's not just about rising through the ranks but rather it's about who's right for that particular task and has the right skills at that time taking more project approach to solving problems rather than a hierarchical approach and starting to let people shine for their natural skills regardless of what level they are in a hierarchy. You might have the lowest level in public service but they might be brilliant at something and should be able to work on it. They shouldn't be sort of forced to go through 10 years of promotions before they get to work on something they're actually good at. And finally, and this is a big one for me is actual technical excellence not just aiming for what will get the job done but actually valuing cleverness as a core tenant. This is what I like to call the hacker ethos and all of us get that right. But bringing the hacker ethos in the government looking at actually valuing technical excellence, valuing cleverness, valuing cool ways of solving tricky, wicked problems is something that appeals from a policy sense to people in government but it hasn't really got into the technical mentality in government. So I think that's a clear building block for the future to make sure that what government does is actually awesome and not just good enough. A bit of an example for you is DataGov.au. Obviously I've been walking the talk. I haven't just been talking about this stuff. When I came to this project DataGov.au had been running for two years was launched with a great amount and so now I'm sort of putting my I guess my work hat on a little bit but no I'm putting my phone. So when I took on DataGov.au it wasn't doing very much. We very quickly established a very small team and we looked at what was happening around the world, what was happening in Australia and we started from the principle that is open data actually good for government, for the people, for anyone. Not because we didn't believe but because we wanted to test the hypothesis a little bit. So we started looking at where does it work, where doesn't it work, who is it good for and what we found is that by identifying ways that open data actually helps agencies themselves it made it a lot more of interest to agencies to do open data. If you can show an agency if you can show a government department this will help you as well as being useful to the community as well as being useful to the private sector. This will actually help you. It really changed the way they do things. So we took a fairly iterative approach we took a creating a path of least resistance but highest technical excellence approach that I was talking about before and we created something which is highly functional and really useful for data users and data publishers and made it so that government can actually consume its own data in better ways than it ever has before. So we went from 500 data sets to 5200 data sets. There's now 5 state and territory data portals although there was one at the same time the national and Victorian data portal started around the same time initially but now we've got one federal, 5 states and a couple of local government portals and we're all in the process trying to figure out how to share the information about those data sets to make it easy to have no wrong door in but I guess where I'm getting at is we figured out what worked, we made it easy for departments to publish, really easy to publish we showed them the value to them in publishing as well as understanding what the value is to the public and we turned around the entire narrative around open data from one of retrospective compliance which is always a pain to this is actually how to do future stuff better, this is how to engage and this is how to create better stuff this is how your department can actually be better and it's been a real shift, it's been really good I can come back to and answer any questions specifically about data cover you but just a couple of examples so we took this model I won't go into this in great length but the whole idea is to make all government data programmatically accessible full discovery across them all or at least all government data that's possible to be publicly accessible if you don't want your personal Medicare records publicly available or anything crazy like that but the more data we can make discoverable, programmably accessible and all that kind of stuff, the easier it is for people to play with it lots of portals around also in New Zealand, sorry I didn't have New Zealand on this particular slide because I just ran out of time but there's some great work happening in New Zealand around this too, there's a whole bunch of links here to case studies and documentation that's in the slides that you can check out at your leisure but for me personally to see 100 years of patent and IP data released on data cover you that, I mean I remember 10 years ago trying to do analysis on what patents existed, what patents were in the grace period and being able to understand well what if I can identify prior art on a patent before it becomes formalized so that we can actually avoid problems into the future there's some really amazing data that's available now that just wasn't available even a couple of years ago so it's worth having a look at and encouraging and getting involved lots of functionality, we do lots of stuff all of our stats and everything's public whatever, there's monthly or bimonthly progress updates so you can check those out and we put up case studies and such and there's a public data request site so people can request stuff we put up budget stuff I won't go into that into great detail but what was clever there is we've got lots and lots and lots and lots of documents from government that were not machine readable so we created some machine readable we extracted and published some machine readable data from that which then got turned into cool stuff like the open budget or budget dollars or a whole bunch of other budget community driven projects sometimes we're seeing data published by an agency which then gets picked up by someone turned into an application so the ABC in Australia created an interactive tool to look at social security payments which is based on a quarterly updated aggregated data publishing by that agency and again you just wouldn't have seen this kind of stuff a year or two ago happening as a regular thing and finally I guess around this stuff is we're really starting to encourage and to start seeing now the idea of building into systems opened by design so drawing that line in the sand and starting to build in proactive publishing but also interoperability reuse around different systems that are in government it's only early days but it's really quite encouraging to start to see change in this space the final point I guess I want to make here is government has a lot of bits that are useful to people some of those bits are data some of its services, APIs information about departments about offices there's lots and lots of stuff that is useful if we can identify and make all of those individual bits available to people easily in a way they can discover and search and then consume then we have all the bits you have all the Lego bits and then you can make a spaceship today you can make a pirate ship tomorrow you can make a ninja cave the next day you can actually do stuff but until we have it's going to take a little bit of time but I think we're already on the path of creating that pile of Lego in the lounge room that we can start building stuff with so finally I guess because I think there's probably time for questions now for future years here it's already widely distributed I tend to say that a lot it's obviously riffing off Gibson so thank you Gibson but it is already widely distributed government moves slower than other institutions than other parts of society so government's learning to be part of our world and this is our world and government's having some success with that and it's coming along the path it won't move as fast as we wanted to but it's going to move faster than it expects itself to and that's been really funny I have people say oh I can't believe how much you've achieved in 18 months and I'm like really I was hoping to do at least three times this amount but so governments are coming on the journey and that's really exciting but so some of the challenges I guess for out there you know looking at how to collaborate looking at how to design and lead and this is the last one really here is something I try to tell my tell other public servants make sure you actually have fun with this stuff because you know if it's not fun then we won't do it really so looking at stuff leading, designing, working collaboratively and making sure we continue to have fun and then we'll be able to do some really good stuff so what I might do is open up some questions I've got a whole bunch of blog posts I've put up recently around collaboration around policy, around a whole bunch of stuff that will only be of interest to you if you're the sort of person that's probably come to this talk but it might be of interest to a bunch of you anyway so can I recommend checking that out and I should probably jump to some questions so hold on, let me turn off your muti bits I think you're still muted hold on Ryan, can you unmute yourself okay, cool cool I I well I figured allowing for about ten minutes of just sort of discussions I'm sure there'll be a lot of questions around this kind of stuff so over to you guys, thank you very much I can still see cool so now that we've got data.gov.au and like GovCMS is coming online where to next sorry so you're asking what's the relationship between data.gov.au and GovCMS no it's just the government is now sorry so now the government is opening up data and is actually migrating the federal sites to Drupal where can we really go to next, where's going to be the next sort of big thing that we can sort of push government into open or using open technologies and such yeah cool it's a really good I think some of that comes to so first of all there's some stuff I just can't talk about right now that I want to but I can't so some of that you know might come up soon I think I actually think that even though we've started on the path of data and we've started on the path of you know web has certainly been a massive game changer for open source in government because simply a lot of the web tools sorry a lot of the open source web tools are just outshined that a lot of their competitors very very quickly over the last sort of 5 or 10 years so that's been a real game changer for us but there's still a big challenge in a lot of the traditional IT departments because in a lot of cases the web teams are completely separate from the IT departments and I actually feel for IT departments because IT departments have had too little money to do core services for a long time and are really struggling and it's hard for them to change and it's hard for them to get new money or new people or new skills and all that kind of stuff so I actually think that we need to spend a little bit of time trying to engage with and trying to support and trying to change the culture of and practices of IT departments and there's a whole bunch of ways we could do that I mean we have some of the best DevOps people in the world in our community arguably the best and so trying to bring some of those DevOps ideas into government I think would be really cool but there's also that masterful government thing so getting government websites on to GovCMS is still a whole bunch of websites right getting government data on to data.gov.au it makes both of those things a bit more programmatically accessible but it doesn't still solve problems so what are actual problems we need to solve and how do we solve it across jurisdictions you know if you want to pay you know your rates or you want to find out your health if you want to understanding problems that we can solve across government and coming up with cool ways to solve them I think is important and I think the other thing that Open Source is really helpful for government is looking at translation things so looking at how to do the plumbing between systems between sources between APIs to actually make stuff usable and mashable and that kind of stuff I think is really handy so mashable I think there's a lot of opportunities and there's a bunch more work to do but sysadmin and BAU sort of stuff in governments is definitely also a big challenge does that give you a bit of an idea yeah okay okay bye can you hear us Pia? it's worse now alright so I'm just gonna sorry there was one other question from the room and then I should probably do some questions from Twitter hello, Dale has kind of responded to something I tweeted about you said that she's keen to know the answers to Open Data Inquiry does it forward societies and the evidence for and against so I know you've got some stories where you have put the data out and it has led to good things perhaps you could tell us about give us a concrete example sure okay cool so for starters I think that there are specific and broad benefits of open data specifically specific benefits for society specific benefits for departments and then where they cross I'll actually start with government because I think that that gives some of the benefits for society as well I guess the core reasons why Open Data is helping departments and government well the public service specifically is first of all it's it is actually cheaper than publishing on their own websites in some cases and developing their own APIs on their own systems where they need API access to their data so rather than taking your internal database trying to provide an API in order to feed your own application or website that you have to publish any more because it's part of your normal work if you throw the data and data over you and set up a way to automatically update that and we've got a number of departments doing that now and then you know they can just leverage it as free infrastructure so saving money some of it's around saving time a lot of departments have to publish data anyway for parliamentary reasons for public reasons for freedom of information for media reasons and so by putting it on data govAU or putting it up publicly anywhere they can say to people rather than having to go and extract it and make it available every time they get a request they can just say here's the URL go check it out so it actually makes people a bit more efficient and that's quite useful there's some other benefits around sharing data so rather than every department having to collect the amount of effort it takes to share data between departments is not small doing anything between departments can be quite complex you know sometimes people want to put in place an MOU or an NDA or another TLA and a whole bunch of bureaucracy just to talk to each other so in some cases actually sharing the data publicly is less effort and you get the benefit of everyone getting access to it rather than just sharing it between two departments and with all the traditional models and share it but there's just a couple personally I think that there's also then a accountability benefit if the data about your contracts which is publicly available in Australia is publicly available at least everything over 10K is publicly available in Australia then it makes people think just that little bit extra about what they're spending money on because it is going to be publicly accountable it is going to be publicly available I think that small level of accountability quite large for some people is good because it describes better discipline better behaviours, better practices and I think that has a benefit to both public service and to the public benefits to society I think a lot of these are actually quite obvious in some ways but we have a lot of case studies that we're starting in the early days we just got things done we didn't actually have time to do a lot of documentation but we've tried more case studies recently we're starting to collect more now a lot more now but things like the budget was quite interesting when we were buying federal budget last year for the first time ever they published the papers every year I think they published the papers for but it actually wasn't driven from us strangely enough I mean obviously we push for that kind of stuff but it is actually a symptom of a changing perspective which is quite good but here's what we did we specifically went and spoke to journalists and we specifically went and spoke to budget data users from the community that we knew of and we published anything and said look not promising anything because we can't but if we could publish budget data what would you prioritize and then they gave us like their top list and then we got most of that stuff published right all the portfolio budget statements, documents and a whole bunch of tables from that people wanted to see and by prioritizing that we were then able to ask them afterwards okay how much time did that save you because you didn't have to go and screen scrape this is how much time it saved journalists and the public and we're able to with some confidence extract that out here's how much actual time it saved and here's how much time we think it might have saved across the economy but then we were also able to say this is the first time ever the government itself has had access to that data so then we can actually compare what agencies say or departments say they spend against what they actually spend in the central budget system so it created an internal benefit there as well so we try to find case studies and then document them and we put that case study up on the blog and there's a bunch of others up on the blog as well that show actual benefits and we're about to put in place over the next I guess six months or so there's a bunch of projects going on right now but one project we want to do is add a metadata field data sets that says how much time or effort has publishing this data set saved you to a department and in some cases it will be zero it will be $30,000 or three days a month or one day a year or in some cases we've got like two weeks of effort to save by just pushing data on data to go to the EU every quarter for some of the data sets we were playing with and by collecting that even though it would probably only be a minority of data sets that that affects it'll start to get a growing over time picture of how much time and money open data is actually saving benefits to the society I mean there's heaps of benefits around people being able to build businesses around about accountability about holding the government to account and holding public service to account and I'm running out of time. Next question. We've got time for one more question. Hi Pear I'll try and do it quick. I have had interactions with government and I'm hoping ours are similar enough that you could answer this question my interactions have for example been in the wake of the Christchurch earthquake open source community formed to do things and more recently some of us trying to get metadata attached to Hansard and in both times we've struggled we only get one real meeting with government we don't get to follow up and do this and then do this like you mentioned you asked in this question in this question I don't get that as a citizen I most get one meeting and I'm really struggling to to get them to maybe respect is maybe the wrong word they definitely can't review me as that person climbing up that tower to come get them and I'm wondering if you had advice on how to do that initial and eventually only communication that I have with the person who can give me the data that I'm seeking. And there's a couple of answers to that and it is challenging a lot of times from the outside because particularly from the outside the machine of formal media communications and public relations gets in the way of gigs cooking for gigs if you can actually go and talk to the people that actually do the thing it becomes a lot easier but often oftentimes it gets I guess seen through the lens of public relations which makes it very very tricky because then it becomes why are they asking how are they going to use this for a while. I think in some cases going in and helping solve the problem is a good start and saying look this is how you currently do things here's how you could do it which would make this better for you and better for us and more consumable and stuff but going in the solution that's a problem I think is key it's one of the pieces of advice my boss actually gave me when I first came in always come with a solution that's the problem there's lots of problems and you can battle problems but if you come forward with a solution often enough people you're talking to are going to be more receptive. A multi pronged attack I think is important in building your allies talking to multiple people in multiple ways and always and this is actually really important that knowing as it can be and believe me it's more annoying for me than it will be for most of you even though you're coming from the outside always being positive always being polite always being respectful always saying oh yeah that's really great but here's how we can do it better and here's why we should do it this way because it's very easy to get angry and say oh why why but understanding why they're coming from the perspective they're coming from important to help them do it better and for me the way I've started doing this I've actually gone and started doing study what is the approach to policy making that traditional public servants take and by learning that even though it's certainly wrong in my view I now know how they think so it means I can talk to them with their language in a better way so it takes more effort on our part the people who want to make change it's always going to be almost on our heads to actually make that difference but yeah if you want to make change then you've got to take on that responsibility unfortunately but fortunately and keep in mind that if you don't take on that effort then other people with pretty stupid ideas will take on that effort and so we need to be in there and get your allies and use your allies and even do what I did go and work with the government and try and change it from the inside The video of time now The video of time now so thank you very much and I've got a little present for you and we'll figure out some way of getting it to you Thank you Bye