William Perrin, Secretary of the Power of Information Taskforce speaking on "Gov 2.0 in the UK: Policy and Status" in a prerecorded presentation as part of the proceedings from the Public Sphere event on Government 2.0, hosted by Senator Kate Lundy on the 22nd June 2009.

The rest of the videos from the day are linked from the schedule at:
katelundy.com.au/2009/05/29/public-sphere-2-open-government-policy-and-practice/

All slides are available at:
slideshare.net/event/public-sphere-2-government-20-policy-and-practice

Transcript below:

So good morning Canberra. It may be early morning for you and its early morning for me here in London on Friday when I am recording this piece. And if I look a little bit tired its because I was up until midnight last night helping to crowdsource my Member of Parliaments expenses on the Guardians website, in what is a phenomenal piece of openness in an attempt to counter the large-scale redacting of public information.

And for me personally, this is a vital staging point on a long journey that the British Government has come over the last 3 or 4 years as we move towards what we might call Government 2.0.

This journey began for me back in 2004 when a bunch of highly technical people who would call themselves geeks, approached me when I was working at Downing St and said "look this Prime Minister's Official Spokesman you have who talks to the press everyday, why isn't his stuff more readily available online?" And I said, "Well I think it is. We put it online everyday in a Word document and it has a static Web Address." They got very excited about this. This was in February 2004 I think. They rang me up the next day on on my mobile on Saturday morning and they said "We've been up all night and we've been scraping your Prime Minister's WebSite and we've created a live blog of the Prime Minster's Official Spokesman's feed. This thing we're calling 'Downing St Says'."

So I said to these guys, "Well hang on a minute, just whoa up you know, slow down, because a lot of people aren't going to be happy about this." They said to me "Well, you can't stop us. We've done it now. We just scraped your WebSite and we've created a completely new data product in a sort of Yah Sucks Boo way." And we just had to roll with that. 'DowningStSays.com' was probably the world's first modern-era co-operative MashUp between the Government and third-sector technology experts.

This began for me an investigation of the potential of what we now call Government 2.0. We were able in that example to evidence what the technologies could do. We weren't talking in abstract. We were actually showing people what could be done with these technologies to improve the quality of public information. And as any country goes on a journey towards Government 2.0 that has to be part of what one does. You have to show and demonstrate the benefits to real peoples lives, to openness, to accountability, to scrutiny of these technology products. One must not ever talk in abstracts about semantics or about data formats, or about scraping, or about feeds.

In order to succeed in Government 2.0, to convert people who won't understand the technology, you have to talk in hard examples. In Britain we have found one of the most persuasive arguments for Government 2.0 has been the colossal communities online that people have created off their own bat - perfectly ordinary people in their own living rooms or working from laptops in their own bedrooms - huge communities of hundreds of thousands or millions of people who discuss public policy issues, openly on the web, in hug communities such as NetMums, Wild About Britain, Money Saving Expert, such as They Work for You - where we see very very contentious public policy issues and public policy advice, being discussed live in real-time by people who are actually having problems in their daily lives and helping each other solve those problems.

NetMums, one of our biggest communities here has well over 600,000 members. At one point it was growing at 20,000 new members a month. In that young parents discuss the challenges of parenting - a classic area where the State is normally doling out advice. But in the NetMums' community we can see people giving each other advice, helping each other out - spontaneously, altruistically for free - and creating new types of public information. So the challenge for us in Government is then to say "What is our role in that?" If two people are giving each other bad health advice that will be damaging to a child, shoudl the State intervene in that discussion, how should the State intervene, what are the correct modes of behaviour for us in those forums?

It was communities like NetMums that kicked off for us the strand of work that we call the "Power of Information". Back in 2007 I was the Civil Servant who commissioned that work on behalf of Ministers to actually explore what the potential was for these huge community-generated forums, how the Government should interact with them and also what the potential was for large-scale data manipulation and re-use. That work over the last few years has come to some pretty straightforward answers that are challenging for bureaucracies to adjust to but are common-sense really. We've said to ourselves well Civil Servants of course should intervene or intercede in online discussions if its relevant to delivering their Public policy objectives, but they should do so in a proportionate and measured way, in a professional way, and using the right skills and methods of behaviour that suits their constituents.

We found though that Civil Servants did not take easily to taking part publicly in large-scale online discussions. What we were advocating essentially went against their direction for the last 15 years, direction of travel in Government comms. A direction of travel that suggested that the number of Civil Servants who speak publicly, or Public Servants who speak publicly, shoudl be quite highly constrained into formal, highly professional press functions. This was a very rational approach when the Government was faced with only a relatively small number of media outlets, but it's an approach that's increasingly hard to maintain in a world where there are millions of media outlets - where every citizen is essentially their own media outlet. So we found quite strong cultural challenges to Civil Servants engaging in online discussions freely and spontaneously and professionally.

We also in the UK, apart from having these very, very large discussion forums, which are not unique. I'm sure they exist in Australia as well. We know they exist in America, France, Germany and Scandinavia. The UK is also very lucky to have a remarkably talented band of web entrepreneurs, social web entrepreneurs, who are extremely highly skilled in their use of data. So, if anyone were to look at TheyWorkForYou.com, WriteToThem.com or WhatDoTheyKnow.com you will find an organisation called My Society that has made enormous strides in taking publicly available data and information and representing it in a way that works brilliantly on the web. They took in the case of Parliament remarkably obtuse and hard to access Parliamentary publishing of Hansard, the official record of the debates in the House, and turned it into something that is a joy to use, that is incredibly easy to search, that is more user-oriented than the 19th Century traditions that our Parliament was using.

That gave us another example that we could use in Government to communicate to people what the benefits of data-mashing. Rather than talking obtusely about this re-purposing of data we were able to show clearly and in a way that politicians understood, what the potential for this data re-use was. During the course of this power of information journey in which we involved Tom Steinberg, one of the founders of My Society and Tom Loosemore, another My Society member, we have come to the point where the debate has advanced out of, what you might call - if you'll forgive the phrase - Geek Corner, into the mainstream of political debate where the Prime Minister himself, Gordon Brown, leader of the Opposition David Cameron, are both talking in strongly positive terms about the merits of these kinds of data transparency. Tom Steinberg even features in a book written by the Prime Minister just before he came to power.

That has allowed us to take further and greater steps by constantly demonstrating the potential of these things, be engaging experts to give us advice for the Power of Information Task Force. We have most recently been able to engage Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Founder of the World Wide Web in Britain, to lead a fantastic strand of work on a product that we will probably call data.co.uk where Public Sector data is uniformly presented online in a way that it can be re-purposed.

This goes back to where I started this message. Last night I was up crowdsourcing The Guardians re-publishing of MPs expenses. It wasn't just me doing it. Within a matter of hours The Guardian had managed to capture data about several tens of thousands of documents through sheer user effort. Unpaid People. Their model of journalism was fundamentally different to that of the newspaper that had previously published, the expenses claims, The Daily Telegraph. The Telegraph used, in a brilliant piece of journalism, used a traditional investigative method. They piled up the data for themselves and teams of their journalists poured through it over many weeks. But The Guardian has gone in a completely different direction. It has piled up the data and made it publicly available and asked its readers and interested parties to sort through the data for them.

This presents a very exciting future for the Public Sector and for Government. It's an exciting future, but like any exciting thing it's challenging as well and in part, frightening. We're talking about a future of far greater openness and far greater transparency than we've ever known before. And that will at times be uncomfortable. But we think in the UK with the Power of Information work which is freely available online, and you're very welcome to Google it up, I've spoken to Lindsay Tanners people about it, I've spoken to a number of Australian Government officials about it who have been here and via Cisco's teleprescence service. We think in the Power of Information report we have set out a set of ground rules where any bureaucracy, or any Government who follows them, will help them prepare for this exciting and challenging future of greater openness, greater scrutiny, greater accountability and greater workforce participation. We are absolutely confident in the UK that if we pursue the trends that are emerging in Government 2.0 we will lead to better Government that is far more open, that is far more accountable, that is far more responsive to peoples needs. But most importantly, it will be a Government that will keep up with peoples expectations in a modern media age.

So I hope you have a good day. You've got some fantastic speakers there, one or two of whom I've met. I'm delighted to see you've got Headshift in the room. I'm very pleased to see you've got Cisco talking as well - a very, very enlightened company in this area. I hope you have a good day and I hope to see you indeed in the UK soon.