Stepping into the Commons

After a long day in the office of my government employer, as I sit listening to Triple J streaming online, reading Anabel Crabb’s gargantuan speech on the Drum and contemplating the shoe throwing incident on Q&A that left The Australian again denigrating the use of twitter I find myself thanking my lucky stars that I live in such a fantastic and open country. In my humble opinion, the ABC is the greatest provider of old media services and its amazing, innovative and cutting edge use of new media sits it apart from all the other media providers in Australia. Possibly the only media organisation to surpass it is the BBC and I am sure if there were a contest it would be a close run thing. But what more could the ABC do to jump to the next level? What could (and should) a government funded media organisation do to really give the people what they want?

Annabel Crabb, herself a recipient of some of those taxpayer funded dollars, talks of free information in her speech for the AN Smith Memorial Lecture at the University of Melbourne. She seems to be less than impressed by the conundrum faced by journos the world over and offers some wonderfully concocted advice and some fascinating insights into her world. I believe her dream of “an end to the old media new media wars”  is being well fought by her employer the ABC and praise be to them.

Can I offer some advice too, Annabel? Your dream may come sooner if the ABC was to embrace the Government 2.0 Taskforce advice for government organisations to use Creative Commons licensing. Incidentally, (as I am sure you are aware) your speech was published verbatim on The Australian website moments after it was posted on The Drum (or perhaps simultaneously, it is hard to tell) I wonder what copyright arrangements were made for that process to occur. Was the content licensed through a prior arrangement or was there some laborious process to make it happen? I am not for a moment suggesting any wrong doings or dodgy dealings, merely musing on the IP of your speech and what processes made it available in two places so soon after the speech was completed. My point being that it would have all been so much easier if you added a CC BY licence to the end of your work. Just a thought….

The ABC’s Q&A program has lead the way with infusing old media with new media resulting in mixed and often polarised attitudes (as well as the occasional shoe throwing) just like the rest of the program. The Australian is no big fan that’s for sure but only because they are not brave enough to mix it with the new media types, (look at the lack of comment opportunity on the page deriding the Q&A Twitter stream). Certainly I (an avid Twitter user) have often wondered at the usefulness of those tweets aired on the program but according to Peter McEvoy the blend has only served to increase the ratings and the sheer volume of tweets containing the #QandA tag go a long way to support the argument. It has been argued that you couldn’t copyright a tweet but I wonder if there is copyright to be had in the aggregation of those Q&A tweets. If so, does Auntie own the copyright? Q&A are happy to use CC licensed images for their Mashups so why not provide some back?

Auntie is experimenting with Open Access ideas as evidenced in the ABC Open Beta and some dabbling on the BTN site but by and large it is the standard Copyright Notice that you come up with on most ABC web iterations. If the ABC starts to get on board the Creative Commons wave I think that Annabel Crabb will be closer to at least one of her dreams, the ABC will smash the BBC in that contest, and people will get what they really want but what Annabel thinks doesn’t exist: valuable free content.

• The Government 2.0 Steering Group | AGIMO Blog The AGIMO blog is the official mouthpiece for Government 2.0 in Australia. This article details the Steering Group members responsible for championing the recommendations of the Government 2.0 Taskforce. Although not the most interesting of posts on the AGIMO blog this article is nevertheless quite important in terms of Government 2.0 take up in Australia because it is the first major article after the caretaker period of the recent national election and it contains links to Steering Group meeting summaries for the first time which is a good step towards transparency.

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You pay taxes right? Rates too I bet. You like spending money don’t you. You love just throwing all your hard earned cash into a big pot to get squandered by those public servants who sit on their backsides all day doing nothing. Seeing your money wasted on marketing campaigns for services you will never need and paying for research that has already been completed elsewhere for something you don’t care about makes you happy as a proverbial wallowing pig. Best of all you love how when you want to borrow one of those marketing images or get some of the resultant information you have paid for you need to jump through dozens of red-taped hoops to get to it only to find out you can’t reuse it because of copyright. OK maybe I am being just a little over dramatic here but let’s face it; Creative Commons and Open Data in Government potentially effects everyone who is a tax payer.

When a council employee chooses to buy an image for use on the website rather than use a free image licensed under CC they are using your money. When they contract a photographer to take a photo and publish it under a copyright license they are using your money and they are preventing you from using it. When a government department creates a database on crime statistics in your area your money puts the bits and bytes on the hard drive you paid for and you can’t use it because you can’t get to it and you wouldn’t know what to do with it if you could because it is in some machine only readable format.

By expanding the information sharing opportunities in government and opening up the information which governments and councils are gathering, government employees have the potential to gain more than they would ever lose by attempting to retain their intellectual property.

As a taxpayer (or ratepayer when we are talking local government) you should take the time to consider some of the reasons why CC should be adopted as the default licensing model for government organisations. You should that is unless you like throwing your money away.

Share your information, share your images and videos and content, share this blog post and come back regularly for updates, links and thoughts on CC and open data in (Australian) Government.

• Welcome to the Government 2.0 Taskforce | Government 2.0 Taskforce Doctor Nicholas Gruen was responsible for the Government 2.0 taskforce and wrote this historic post with embedded video of himself and the then Minister Lindsay Tanner. The post and video combined launched the Government 2.0 Taskforce and subsequently attracted over eighty comments from active members of the Australian web2.0 community. Many comments were vocally supporting the Taskforce but many were also cautious about the Government’s agenda for being in and driving departments toward the Web2.0 space.
• CC & Government Guide: using creative commons 2.5 Australia Licenses on Government Copyright Materials This referenced article by three of the leading minds in Australia in support of Creative Commons (CC) is targeted at existing and intending CC users and copyright owners in the Australian Government sector. Supported by links to important CC documents and definitions, the document is more than a how to guide. It provides useful flowchart images for effective license selection and highlights many of the legal and intellectual property issues and requirements that government organisations face when entering the CC space.
• Open data, democracy and public sector reform Presented here as a series of connected chapters and sections for the purposes of facilitating paragraph by paragraph commentary, this thesis, written for a Masters of Science dissertation by Tim Davies, forms a cohesive and well referenced document. The ideas presented and discussed hone in on effective and innovative implementations of Open Government Data but also broadly refer to wide reaching implications that require further and closer inspection. Although the document has attracted few comments, the potential for comment offered by presenting in the digress.it platform is much higher and easier to achieve than if the document was presented only in .pdf form.
• Gurstein’s Community Informatics Blog This blog by Michael Gurstein provides well balanced an informed commentary as well as insightful views on Community Informatics and the use of Open Data throughout the world. Gurstein's posts are well written and often attract comment from interesting and informed contemporaries and contain links to quality information including referenced articles and government papers. The tagline of the blog is “enabling and empowering communities with information and communications technologies” and this is largely the focus of blog posts however there is often parallel lines between Community Informatics and the use of Open Data and this is touched on often in the commentary.
• We’re in open government’s beta period. Extending and analyzing the conversations from Gov 2.0 Summit. A recap of the Government 2.0 summit 2010 by Alex Howard and containing extensive links and video footage of presentations at the conference. The article looks closely at the statements made by presenters and keynote speakers and analyses the underlying issues surrounding the hot topics at the conference. The author who is well regarded and prolific on the subject of Government 2.0 topics, addresses some of the pitfalls that the Government 2.0 initiative is now falling into highlighting some key areas for concern around transparency, data clarity and secrecy.

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