Government as a Social Machine featuring Professor Dame Wendy Hall

I blogged today from the Government as a Social Machine forum hosted by ANZSOG and featuring Professor Dame Wendy Hall from the University of Southampton in the UK.



The discussion involved a diverse group of stakeholders from public and private sector organisations and covered the history of the internet and the challenges organisations, particularly governments, and citizens face in adapting to the new knowledge-rich, engagement-rich worked enabled by global real-time distributed communication systems.



Wendy also presented at a NICTA/OKFN event this afternoon, and is presenting at the Semantic Web Conference in Sydney later this week and in Victoria next week at the first Digital Literacy event being held by the Victorian public service (details of most of these events are in my Gov 2.0 calendar to the left).



Wendy opened with a story from before the web, on how no-one predicted the Internet, despite some earlier thinkers, such as Vannevar Bush, who foresaw a memory device (memex) in his brilliant work 'As we may think' in 1945, which contained many of the elements of modern computing systems.



She also discussed Ted Nelson, who coined the terms hypertext and hyperlinks back in the 1960s and Doug Engelbart, who invented the mouse, windows and much of the user interface that we find familiar today. In fact Doug gave the 'mother of all demos' which foresaw modern computers and the web.



Wendy recalled that when she met Tim Berners-Lee at the Hypertext conference in 1991 (which rejected Tim's paper on the web), she thought it was presumptuous that he had named the hypertext system he had invented the 'World-Wide Web', presuming that people around the world would use it.



At the time she didn't think the web was original or breakthrough - "how wrong you can be", she said.



Wendy said that Tim's strategy was to give away the web, making it an open protocol and standard - universally free to use and not controlled by any organisation. She said that otherwise Tim felt that the web would not grow or thrive, but be locked down by political, academic or commercial interests.



She also said that Tim believed that to make the web scale, it had to be able to fail. While many at the time believed that a system which could dead-end, linking to a non-existent page, would turn away users, Tim strategically introduced the '404 error' (which appears when a web page isn't found) to encourage individuals and organisations to build out the web, rather than limit it.



Wendy asked whether we could have built the web another way. She believes that we may have to at some point as the web is only 23 years old, "barely out of nappies".



Wendy also believes that there's many ways to kill or corrupt the web, such as having specific organisations or governments control it - however we don't really know the outcome of these scenarios as we haven't had those experiences yet.



She did ask about what if the Internet disappeared overnight - how would it impact on individuals, organisations, societies, even countries?



The impact of a one-day shutdown of Wikipedia was immense (she said) during the SOPA protest, and there is an increasing risk in some developed nations that blackouts, caused by inadequate electricity supplies, could cause a blackout of information, with people unable to access the information they need to cope with the situation.



Wendy also said that when Tim created the web he understood that it had to include an easy way to write, as well as read, web pages - leading to the development of his first web browser, which was also an editor.



Wendy said that in 1996-8 while the web was growing, the Internet wasn't sufficiently mature for broader use, due to difficulties with slow modems, finding information (pre-Google) and the cost of computers - making categories such as online shopping inconvenient.



However now the technologies have matured Wendy believes that High Streets will disappear. She said that the UK government's decision to sell off the Royal Mail, which was instituted in the Victorian era, is a sign of this change flowing through the system.



Wendy said that years ago she consulted to the Royal Mail, highlighting to them that the new business they needed to dominate was parcel delivery, based on online sales "however they didn't get it".



Wendy also said that "it is very hard to convince the big juggernauts of industry, including government, to change".



She said that, for example, large organisations seem to believe that people will always read books - Wendy believes that yes they will read, but not necessarily books.



She recalled telling biologists years ago that they would be reading papers online. They retorted that the Internet was so slow and computers so heavy that they would never be able to read their papers on the train. Wendy said, "Now, ten years on, biologists are reading their papers on the train using iPads."



Wendy said that Google was inconceivable before the web, and engineers had 'proven' it wasn't possible to quickly index huge amounts of information.



However she said that since Google, the world has changed - and Google is also no longer just a search engine, they are incredibly diverse, "there are at least 2,000 driverless Google cars driving around San Francisco".



Wendy believes that once an organisation has a majority of people using it on a network it becomes very difficult to dislodge. Google, eBay, Facebook and now Twitter are giants, at least in the English-speaking world - different titans exist in China.



Wendy opined that Google may be the James Bond villain of the future - because it knows what you search for, "everyone has searched for something they would not want to be made public". She believes that if Blofeld took over Google they would have something over every politicians.



However, Wendy said, when used benignly or even for commercial profit, Google is fine. She also believes many other industries are in a similar position of potential control over society.



Wendy also believes that even before the arrival of social networking "we should have known how much people would want to write about themselves, take photos, videos and share, based on what we knew about human psychology and behaviour".



Wendy said there is now an expectation that people can find anything, any knowledge online and if an organisation, product, place or individual doesn't have an online presence "they don't exist." As a result, Wendy believes that the web should be the first way any new entity is introduced or promoted.



Wendy said that while Tim Berners-Lee invented the technology and helps set the standards, we (globally) have created the web. We write the websites, blogs and micro blogs. We make the links and the apps. "The web doesn't have shareholders or owners - we are collectively the creators and custodians of the web."



She said that the web exists because we want it to be there, and it will keep existing as long as we want it to exist, so we all have a responsibility to ensure it is a place we wish to frequent.



When people ask her about issues online, she tells them that we didn't make the streets safer by imposing curfews - similarly we need to create the right culture on the web, not create legal restrictions.



Wendy said that Wikipedia was started as an experiment - even Jimmy Wales didn't believe it would work - however it is now equivalent to 1,900 volumes of an encyclopedia, most of which is very accurate. It has grown its own governance, it wasn't invented ahead of time, a lesson for organisations today.



Wendy also said that YouTube is another giant attractor to the web, the place for storing and sharing videos - now owned by Google.



Wendy believes that if an alien had came to earth a hundred years ago and then returned today they would find everything had changed - except possibly education, which is now being transformed by MOOCs. The first platform for MOOCs has also been bought by Google, which is developing it as an open source platform. She asked "who will be the university of the future? Google."



After the break Wendy took questions, giving a view that while cybersecurity is a risk to society, it is not a risk to the web. She commented that it was an area of high expenditure for the UK government.



She also said, in response to comments at morning tea about people being advised not to trust Wikipedia as a reference, that Wikipedia is at least as trustworthy and accurate as printed encyclopedias, plus it has a faster error correction rate. Plus, she said, we create Wikipedia, so it is what we wish to make it.



Wendy also believes that privacy won't kill the web, young people are growing up with different concepts of privacy and will adapt their approach and the web to suit their values.



However she believes that blackouts, siloisation and/or the end of a level playing field for creating and publishing content would end the web. Wendy said that net neutrality is also important. Without it we would lose the level playing field and commercial or ideological interests could control publishing and access to the web.



One of the crowd has commented that probably government is the biggest risk to the Internet, and Wendy says that she has concerns over legislators making decisions about an ecosystem they do not understand, which can lead to all kinds of unforeseen and undesirable consequences.



Wendy said it is hard to dictate in the web, to get people to use something they don't want to use. To get the network effect requires co-creation, meaning that government must work with communities collaboratively to develop platforms which benefit both.



An ABS representative said that they are now opening up a lot of data through APIs and unleashing developers through GovHacks to co-create new tools and services, however it is still a not insignificant challenge to get people within government to just agree on a common definition for Australia or Sydney, to allow datasets to correlate across agency.



Wendy next talked about Twitter, and how its real-time nature can support, even drive, community movements, "the way bad news spreads now is via Twitter. It is a mechanism for warning people to get out."



She said the interesting thing about Twitter is that it is being co-created, with functions like RT, MT and hashtags invented by the community.



Wendy believes co-creation is critical for the web, not only codesigning systems, but using systems which allow people to add value as they go about their daily interactions, such as via ReCAPTCH and Duolingo.



Wendy then talked about the semantic web, a web of data, saying it was in Tim Berners-Lee's original vision for the Web. However without sufficient data online (she said) we cannot experiment to find out what this will become or create the network effect, where people share and reshape data and create services or new visualisations with it.



She wrote a paper with Tim in 1996 which identified four principles for the Semantic Web, however says that the commercial sector still didn't get open data, hugging it tight.



Then governments began opening data based on discussions with Tim and others, leading to President Obama's declaration and a cascade of open data releases by governments around the world and initiatives like the Open Data Institute.



Wendy used an example of UK prescribing data, how open data allowed the NHS to identify 200 million pounds in savings each year.



Wendy said that while engineers and scientists often think of the web as a technological byproduct of a set of simple standards, it is a socio-technical construct, effectively a 'social machine' co-created through interactions between technology and millions of humans.



The technologies that underpin the web didn't create the web - people did, providing the content, linkages and developing, sharing and using the apps and websites that sit on it. However without the technology the web could also not exist.



Wendy said that social machines start with an incomplete specification that evolves and grows to cover more of the problem via interactions. They achieve participation through local incentives and the network effect, eventually succeeding through a process of rapid trial and error involving subsets of participants.



Wendy is working on understanding social machines through a 'web observatory' at Southhampton University that observes, monitors and classifies social machines as they evolve. She said this will also become an early warning system for detecting new disruptive social machines and identifying the 'tipping points' where they become ubiquitous.



Her group is studying Twitter networks, as well as Wikipedia and YouTube, amongst other services, to understand 'activity pulses' and how they help explain social movements and trends. For example, Wikipedia was a better indicator of a trend around 'Gangnam style' than Google with the trend occurring a month earlier on Wikipedia.



She asked how does Government, potentially the original social machine (as one audience member commented), transform itself to take advantage of digital channels to be a better social machine?



How do governments employ gamification, the network effect and web observatories to develop and deliver better policies and services?



How do we address the challenges of the 24-hr news cycle, election cycles and other factors which make developing and maintaining social machines difficult?



Wendy said she can't help reflecting back on governments from Victorian times, the 19th century, that created amazing long-lasting infrastructure in Britain that still serves the population today. She believes they were amazing social machines and still have lessons to teach us today on how to transform government to address the challenges of the 21st century.

eGov AU

Craig Thomler's personal Gov 2.0 and eGovernment thoughts and speculations from an Australian perspective

Where's Australia's back-up for governments shutting down access to open data?

On a regular basis, around the world, governments rise and fall.



We see this most commonly at local levels - with councils merging and demerging, however it also occurs at a slower rate at state and national levels, with new nations created out of the ruins of older states on a regular basis.



I've been thinking a great deal about this over the last week. Ever since the US Government, the richest and most powerful state in history, told 800,000 staff - about a third of their public service - to stay at home until further notice.



The result of this shutdown hasn't been limited to the shuttering of national parks and monuments, or a reduction in services to the public.



Significant online data sources have also been shutdown, including data.gov and even Census.gov, which can have a major flow-on impact to businesses and the public.



In Australia, where it has been difficult for a hostile opposition to block the Australian Government's budget supply since the events of 1975, we're not really familiar with the notion of governments abruptly shutting down - although we do see frequent mergers and demergers at council level and the appearance and disappearance of agencies at state and federal levels on a regular basis (we lost at least four Australian Government agencies following the last election).



Some of these decisions are taken very quickly, and can have major impacts on businesses reliant on government programs or data.





As the open data revolution progresses more and more companies will come to rely on government data to power their activities with the public. At the same time the public will also come to rely on this data, and the hackers and companies that make use of it, for the services that they use in their normal lives.



So where's the back-up to government if it suddenly shuts down access to its data?

This view appears to be shared by the Sunlight Foundation, whose Eric Mills recently wrote a great post on the topic, Government APIs Aren't A Backup Plan.



In the US not-for-profit civic groups are beginning to replicate data released by government as a risk-mitigation step - such as this great list of non-government government data sources compiled by Code for America: http://forever.codeforamerica.org/Census-API/shutdown-2013.html



In Australia this hasn't happened as yet - but it could, relatively easily.



All it would require is a couple of different cloud-based data storage environments (for redundancy), a good front-end data catalogue and appropriate crawlers and volunteers who source and update data as it is released.



We're already part-way there with the creation of GovPond during the last GovHack. Developed in Perth, originally as a way to locate open data for state-level GovHack participants (from the dark and dusty corners of the internet), GovPond has become a fantastic resource for finding data across the plethora of Australian government data catalogues, without the incredibly messy business of checking each site.



GovPond provides the front-end data catalogue for Australian government - without all the messy politics between and within jurisdictions who each feel the need to have their own 'central' data catalogues and then undermine them by storing open data on agency sites and not listing it centrally.



The second part, cloud-based storage, is already cheaply available and is already used by some government open data sites. For example Data.gov.au made the sensible step of storing data on Amazon's system - overcoming all the security concerns with the simple fact that the data is designed to be publicly accessible.



Other agencies and states have employed a range of approaches - with much of their data still stored on servers they pay significant amounts of money to own (now that's a real waste of government funds where the data is supposed to be publicly available) - however the ability to access low-cost and high resilience cloud storage is definitely there.



The final step is the tough one - coordinating the volunteers and designing the scrapers that find, copy, file and maintain government data from the thousands of government websites across Australia.



Some of this work has been done. Volunteers compiled GovPond and adding tools that check currency is very possible within the context of the site. Many government open data sites have moved to standard platforms like CKAN, which simplify copying and maintenance of data (although the vast bulk of available government data still sits outside these platforms).



Much remains to be done. There needs to be some structure or organisation that commits itself to recruiting, supporting and empowering these volunteers, sourcing the funds necessary to pay for data storage and some technical tools to maintain data.



There needs to be leadership from within the open data community - beyond the leadership that already exists (and is largely committed to other goals).



Finally there needs to be the interest and willingness within the broader Australian public and business community to support this approach. This interest will grow as government data becomes more mission-critical for certain businesses and for the public, making it logical for them to invest in ensuring that the data remains available to them when they need it.



When it comes to open data, the public, companies and even government agencies need access to the data - they don't need the data to necessarily be held in government hands.



As we move through the process of releasing more data and it becomes more valuable to the community, the ability for a single public servant, politician or party to suddenly cut-off access to a dataset, series or service, becomes more of a risk for the community.



As a result there will be a rising interest in having an Australian back-up to government holding open data - possibly many back-ups, stored in a peer-based approach across many servers redundantly to prevent its destruction or loss of access.



In the US they're there now - seeking to build alternatives to government data storage, as governments are no longer stable and reliable custodians of data. In Australia it's unlikely to be far away.

eGov AU

Craig Thomler's personal Gov 2.0 and eGovernment thoughts and speculations from an Australian perspective

Appropriate use of LinkedIn in politics? Should there be a social media electioneering blackout prior to elections?

Yesterday I received the following message from a Linkedin contact:



Dear LinkedIn Friend

I hope you may be able to help me…

Over the coming weeks the Joondalup community will decide who will lead their City for the next four years when Local Government elections are held via postal vote. All electors residing within the City of Joondalup will receive their ballot paper from Wednesday 2 October and I am seeking support to be re-elected as Joondalup Mayor.

It has been an honour and privilege to serve the Joondalup community, working hard over the past seven years to build an effective Council team that has restored stability and credibility to the City of Joondalup.

Under my leadership as Joondalup Mayor, the City has matured into a vibrant, prosperous and liveable City with a connected and engaged community. This fact was recognised in 2011 when the City of Joondalup was named the World’s Most Liveable City at the UN-endorsed International Awards for Liveable Communities. 

If you are a resident of the City of Joondalup, I am seeking your personal support. If you don't live in the City of Joondalup but have family, friends and community networks in the City (suburbs listed below), I would be grateful if you were able to support me by forwarding this email and encourage them to vote for Troy Pickard as Joondalup Mayor.

I would appreciate your support to be re-elected as Joondalup Mayor so we can build on our successes and make the City of Joondalup an even better place to live.

Yours

Troy

PS – I apologise in advance if I have offended you by emailing this election material.


Troy Pickard
Mayoral Candidate
2013 City of Joondalup Election



I wondered whether people felt this was an appropriate use of LinkedIn - and what the consequences would be as more politicians began using LinkedIn in this fashion, and marshalling their network of supporters to make similar appeals to their networks.



I do recall receiving a similar message prior to the federal election campaign - however at federal level it would be a small and fairly targeted impost on people every three or so years.



Piling state and local elections on top of that, given the non-geographic nature of LinkedIn, could result in people receiving multiple copies of this type of appeal on a weekly basis.



So it raises a question for me - there's often an election advertising blackout period imposed on candidates in the week prior to an election, maybe this type of approach needs to be extended to social media as well.



Or perhaps we need a way to choose whether to opt-in to (or out of) political messaging on social channels, or even a total blackout on political campaigning via social networks.



Of course there's a position that people opt-in by friending or following certain accounts or people. If you follow a politician you can expect to receive political messages.



However what if you simply follow professional peers and friends - people who are not already politicians - who then take up politics, or become major supporters of a particular political cause?



You may have personal and professional reasons to remain connected, but simply not want to receive the political messages they start sending.



Can there be some way on social networks to temporarily screen out the unwanted material?

eGov AU

Craig Thomler's personal Gov 2.0 and eGovernment thoughts and speculations from an Australian perspective

Should councils run their mayor's social accounts or agencies their Minister's?

It is rare but not unheard off for Mayors (or other Councillors) to ask council officials to run their Facebook, Twitter or other social media accounts - or for State or Federal Ministers to ask agencies to run their social accounts for them.



This can raise challenges for council staff and public servants - where may this cross the line from apolitically to political?



From my perspective this is a matter where a council or agency needs to draw a clear line between the position and person of an elected official.



There's no issue with a council running social media accounts for the Office of the Mayor, or for an agency running the social media account for a Prime Minister or Minister where that account is the respective property of the council or government and is used to post factual and non-partisan information.



However if these accounts are to be held in the name of a particular office holder - an individual politician - or are to be used for political or electoral posts,  there's no way a council or agency can run these accounts without damaging its reputation for being apolitical.



In these cases, where a Mayor or Minister asks for social media accounts that they intend to use in a personal and/or political manner, councils and agencies have to be prepared to step up and say no.



I know of a few cases across Australia where this hasn't happened - the area is still too new, and some public officials do not yet fully comprehend the difference between apolitical and political social media accounts.



The media has also been slow to grasp the distinction and hasn't yet called many public organisations to account for inappropriate operation of Councillor or Ministerial social media accounts, although I have begun getting calls from journalists who are interested in learning which are the right questions to ask.



This is another good reason why senior public officials need to be across the risks and opportunities that arise from social media. Knowing when to say no to a Mayor or Minister to protect the reputation and apolitical standing of their council or agency is part of their job.

eGov AU

Craig Thomler's personal Gov 2.0 and eGovernment thoughts and speculations from an Australian perspective

What does the election of a Coalition government in Australia mean for federal Government 2.0 and open data efforts?

As I've blogged previously, when state governments in Australia have changed ruling parties there's often been a temporary hiatus in Government 2.0 and open data activity, if not a series of backsteps - however in almost every case the trend towards greater digitalisation, engagement and openness has resumes.



With the transition from a Labor to Coalition Australian Government the question social media and Government 2.0 practitioners in Commonwealth agencies will be asking is what is their likely future under the new government?



The new Prime Minister has made it very clear that his infrastructure focus is on roads and that he has a very limited understanding of the value and importance of digital channels. The Coalition was also extremely sparing in its use of social media throughout the campaign, preferring to slip under the radar and avoid risk rather than engage with it (and their lesson in winning the election is that this approach wasn't a negative).



I'm also yet to receive any response from Malcolm Turnbull or other Coalition parliamentarians in relation to my questions about their policy position on Government 2.0, open data or membership in the Open Government Partnership - even when Peter Timmins from Open and Shut personally contacted a number of members also seeking a response.



Fortunately there's at least some light at the end of this tunnel.



The Coalition released its egovernment and the digital economy policy platform on Monday 2 September. Amongst a range of topics from NBN to cloud computing, the platform states that the Coalition will release a policy to 'accelerate Government 2.0 efforts to engage online, make agencies transparent and provide expanded access to useful public sector data'



The platform indicates that the Coalition will be taking a 'digital by default' approach, similar to the 'digital first' approach that was beginning to be adopted by the last Labor Government,

Designate the Internet as the default way to interact with users, other than for defined exceptions. We will look to establish a Digital Service Standard and Digital Design Guide, modelled on the UK equivalents, to ensure consistent design of current and future services.

Also modelled on part of the UK approach, the Coalition also outlined an aim to "Seek to ensure every Government interaction that occurs more than 50,000 times per year can be achieved online by 2017."



While slightly less ambitious that Labor's goals, this is a pragmatic approach to prioritising high-frequency transactions for digitalisation - although it is worth noting that there's no evidence this would provide significant cost-efficiencies. Sometimes it is better to prioritise lower frequency, but higher transactional cost services for digitalisation to gain experience in the process, realise cost-savings and as 'quick wins' as they can often be digitalised much faster.



The Coalition has also flagged an interest in mobile service delivery. While no specific goals for making services mobile-ready were outlined in the policy platform, it did go so far as to require agencies to report what proportion of their digital services are not mobile accessible from 2015.



This is encouraging, but potentially misleading. An agency with hundreds of low-use services may find it far more difficult and expensive than an agency with a few high-use services to deliver and report a high proportion of mobile accessible services.



Equally 'mobile accessible' can easily manipulated to mean different things - I can access many services via the web browser on my tablet and smartphone which are still essentially unusable on these devices due to factors including poor design, form complexity, or the requirement for a human conversation to explain specific requirements (hard to call a service desk while using a smartphone to complete the online form).



The 'digital inbox' concept sounds like a great idea in theory, however its practical value depends on how well it is implemented. In fact this is the perfect project to have a start-up develop, free of the bureaucratic constraints of government.



Having previously worked on CSAOnline, which allowed Child Support clients to access their letters from the agency online indefinitely via a secure logon, I recognise that some government approaches to developing digital services can be poorly tuned to delivering on customer needs - costing far more and taking far longer than comparative start-up development cycles.



The Coalition policy section on 'Government 2.0 and Big Data' seems oddly named and reflects a very narrow view of Gov 2.0 as meaning open data and 'tech stuff', whereas most of the international Gov 2.0 community takes the broader view of Government 2.0 being about transforming how governments and citizens interact with the aid of new tools and techniques enabled by digital channels.



The section essentially focuses on having AGIMO ask communities and businesses which data should be made open - something they already do (albeit in a low-key way) and advocating support for public-private partnership proposals from industry and researchers to use big data for public benefit. There doesn't appear to be a budget attached to this latter approach, so what the statement "The highest return proposals will be supported to proof-of-concept and beyond" means is anyone's guess.



The Coalition policy doesn't discuss how the government will or should use social and other digital channels to develop policy, shape services, engage and empower citizens, or provide any guidance as to whether events and approaches to encourage and support civic use of open data will continue to be supported.



Overall it has a very transactional 'government as vending machine' view - which is good as far as it goes (creating efficiencies is valuable) - but doesn't consider the participatory democracy aspects of Government 2.0, where digital channels can be used to support and build democratic engagement, reduce the risks of government getting policies and services wrong and introduce more ideas and analysis to 'black-box' agency processes.



We live in a world where the experts don't all live within the walls of an agency - or an ideological group - and this hasn't been reflected in either the construction or policy instruments outlines in the Coalition policy.



For all these flaws and concerns, at least the Coalition has policies in this area, and overall it isn't worse (if not much better) than Labor's policies.



As the policy platform hits the 'road' of practical governance I am sure there will be a rising interest in how digital channels can support the Coalition's goals in government, and agencies will continue using social channels for communication, customer service, engagement and other purposes.



On that basis I don't expect much slowdown in Government 2.0 progress under the Coalition, although we are unlikely to see an acceleration (as the US did under Obama and the UK under Cameron).



Ultimately Government 2.0 is not an ideological topic - it is about effective governance - there's enormous opportunities in Australia for both conservative and progressive politicians to use the bandwagon to improve government in this country, if they are willing to step onboard.

eGov AU

Craig Thomler's personal Gov 2.0 and eGovernment thoughts and speculations from an Australian perspective

How Australia compares on the basis of voter participation and invalid (donkey) votes

We hear a great deal about the number of people in Australia that are of voting age, but haven't registered to vote, however we don't hear a lot about how Australia compares to the rest of the world in this regard.



I sought out some data from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) to compare Australia with the rest of the world, to see how well we had been doing in electoral participation - which provides some indication of how engaged citizens are with government.



IDEA has data on national elections since 1945 for about 235 countries. This is available online as tables (such as this one) as well as downloadable custom files (through this interface) and great quick snapshots - though there's no datafeeds or APIs available.



As such it took only a short time for me to download the data, plug it into a Google Fusion table and produce the below map and charts.



This shows that Australia is amongst the roughly 18% of nations which have compulsory voting for their parliaments.









Australia also compares well in terms of voter turnout, sitting close to the top of the list (6th as below - mouseover the graph for details) based on the latest election results (looking at the period from 2009-2013), despite being one of our lowest turnouts since World War II.









Our invalid voting rate has been creeping up, particularly since 1984, and is now amongst the top 30 in the world in their last election (looking at the period from 2009-2013) - see close to far right on the chart below. This indicates a growing disillusionment with existing political parties, but hardly one which is fatal to our system.









Finally, below is a view of the entire world based on voter turnout in their last election (looking at the period from 2009-2013) - click on the coloured dots for a run-down of the voting statistics for each country, based on their latest parliamentary elections.

(larger version here)









Based on this data Australia remains a highly politically engaged state, although we've been in decline for around 30 years.



It would be nice to see Australian governments turn around this trend, reversing the decline in engaged voters and improving civic participation at all levels.



Certainly there's lots of good effort underway to engage citizens more actively in government, although this may be being undermined by increasing disillusionment with the way politics is being played.



The answer might be a rethink of politics, rather than a rethink of government - although this would need to be driven by some very courageous politicians.

eGov AU

Craig Thomler's personal Gov 2.0 and eGovernment thoughts and speculations from an Australian perspective