Dr Owen Cameron, Program Manager, CCRSPI (Climate Change Research Strategy for Primary Industry) Coordinator, Primary Industry Adaptation Research Network speaking on "New media and NRM policy consultation- meeting, listening and hearing to enhance service delivery" 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 slides for this talk are availabe at:
slideshare.net/greebo/public-sphere-gov-20-owen-cameron

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

Transcription below:

Good morning everyone, first thing to start I'd like to thank Pia for all her help in getting here and I'm actually going to talk about how you actually use new media to align policy objectives with service delivery. And I'm going to try and avoid acronyms and buzz words but I'm sure a few will filter through. Firstly where I wanted to start, if we're talking in the context of national resource management one of the key things that's happened over the last 15 years, has been the emergence of two trend and their impacts on how people can protest, and protest together.

The first one is we're increasingly realising the ability to shared experiences, and I think that can be tracked back to the real conference when a lot of people got together and realised they could share information, and what they would do. We're also seeing the emergence of new media which allows them to translate that data and get it out to new audiences. The impacts of these two trends together in terms of social groups and their interactions with Government, is that it's become faster to identify and communicate failures over service delivery. It's easier to increase your share of voice demanding accountability from Government, and we've got more media outlets looking for new stories and distributing these through new channels.

Right through this talk I'm going to try to give you some practical examples, a quick one here is protesting over dam construction. That's something I worked on about 15 years ago, at the real conference NGOs got together, they realised they had the same concerns, common causes, they were seeing the same policy issues. They shared information, worked with the BBC and made a radio program doing case studies on dam development in a number of countries, and highlighting the same policy issues. The net effect was that it was a more effective protest, they got more participation and they got more reach into the media.

My belief is that these new trends have put us in a position, where we're seeing a new state of accountability. Again, another example, the climate change protests in the city of London and the role of flickr. For those you who are unfamiliar there was a number of protests a few months ago, various protesters were injured, initial reports blamed that on the protest groups. But then out of the blue a most unlikely hero, an investment banker from the US, sent in some content he'd taken on his mobile phone. This changed the nature of media reporting and actually changed Governments position. The initial reports were refuted, and Government agents were held more accountable.

If we think of the flow here, content comes in from CCTV and mobile phones, it's being distributed through the channels of the internet using the flickr medium with specified images. And the net effect on the media is that this content has shifted nature of analysis and forced disclosure. We're seeing a shift where initially technology enabled the state to hold citizens accountable with CCTV being a great example, now citizens in many ways are able to push back, here the mobile phone has been the enabling technology. And my belief is that this enabled accountability is particularly important when we're looking at national resource management, because that's a sector where issues operate across political cycles, jurisdictional boundaries and geophysical boundaries, they are complicated and they don't fit in well with electoral cycles.

The key message I wanted to get across is that Government can either be proactive or it can be reactive. If you want to be proactive, you can think that new ICT media are supporting alignment and alignment greatly enhances our ability to do effective service delivery. Policy design is supported by delivering an ICT strategy where the channels best meet consultation and communication needs. Implementation, effective implementation which is getting pretty close to tot-ology these days, is supported by alignment with an architecture that optimises service delivery in a cost effective manner.

The outcome is that the new ICT media that your all experts in, and I'm trying to use, deliver many opportunities for Government to innovate on service delivery. And again, to keep it simple, this isn't a profound realisation, we can think of business requirements, functional specifications and technical architecture design along the lines of government service or asset need, or preferred policy option and then what architecture supports it. So it's just a way of thinking. In essence we need to see ICT as enabling, how can we use it to shape outcomes and outputs that give us the best policy outcomes for citizens.

Again to be practical I'll try to do three short examples where I think it's going right and one I worked on where it went horribly wrong.

First example, monitoring and planning. Here the service need is a state Government it's under a lot of pressure with housing supply, running up to elections, people desperate to get rental accommodation. The current system for service delivery is to do survey intensive, people intensive work. Looking at what residential and broad acre land is available for housing. Now it went well, it's won awards that approach, so it was seen as effective service delivery. But the data was already five years out of date by the time it was collated, and the housing market changes much more quickly than that. Some of the staff got together and came up with what was a pretty clever, enabling solution.

They used GIS data and custom algorithms which were based on the ones the American intelligence agencies used to spot terrorist camps, and they used that to assess the shape of blocks across the metropolitan area. They ran computer programs cross referencing that with postcode and title data, that enabled and estimate of the type of housing blocks and they could turn that data around over night, which meant the Government was getting up to date information on housing stock that could better enhance what they did in the planning system. The Government didn't actually have a desire to support that approach so the staff have left and have set up their own Company. But it was pretty clever.

The second example I'm going to give you is where ICT can enable entrepreneurial innovation. We take the example of African communities, they've typically got little access to credit and finance and they've got poor ICT infrastructure. They're trying to start and operate businesses over large distances. The enabling solution here was pretty simple, it was the use of mobile wireless telephony to give us a step change on the use of ICT infrastructure. Which removed the policy debate around how do we establish expensive fixed networks. This new technology was well aligned with delivery of e-Commerce services and the emergence of micro financing initiatives. So what we're seeing is alignment enabling us to change the nature of what Government tries to do. With the result of a rapid growth in commercial activity, diversity in services and products. And that initiative has been and is continuing to be supported by multi lateral organisations and corporate donors.

Third example, Oranisational design. Again I'll try and avoid too many buzz words. It's establishment of a new statutory authority and state Government. Service need, we have an election year, senior Government Ministers have publicly committed that a new statutory authority will commence operations in five months. For the public servants among you that's about as close to a non negotiable service need as we ever get. The authority was being setup to facilitate and speed up development in designated growth areas. Areas of land where people wanted to see rapid planning, rapid development of housing and this was to be done through working closely with developers, councils and stakeholders. There were a set of issues facing that service need, the state Government operated off Lotus Notes, it had a shared service arrangement that was being setup but they had not ongoing costings. So the project managers couldn't say how much it would cost to use their services into the future, or how much the support services would be. The new authority had a limited budget, and again those of us who are familiar with legislation, whenever you're setting up an authority you have to actually have a proper budget, you can't say we might have some costs in the future. Stakeholders were time and cash poor, and were somewhat skeptical and planning is process intensive, it has a lot of data and large outputs. In terms of how this was done, ICT design was setup to enable staff efficiency, high end computers were put in, multiple printers to remove redundancy, it was designed to enable operational efficiency. The architecture for the corporate entity had high speed cabling and fast networks, it was designed to enable
stakeholder buy in. Outlook was used which meant there were minimal interface for the stakeholders and Government borne the interfacing costs. The authority opened on time and the stakeholders were happy.

So in terms of conclusions, I just wanted to make two conclusions. Effective alignment means you need consultation and communication when you're doing design. Pushing content onto people isn't the same as communication, if we think about broadband and the bush, not everybody can access the complex systems you're selling. If you want to get the message out there think about that when you design the channel and not everyone has time to access it. Water trading is great, the theory is everybody logs in and trades, but a lot of farmers don't have the time to do it. And secondly even with alignment, you've got to make sure that you maintain an ongoing relationship with your stakeholders. If you lose control over the content and channel it is a serious risk for service delivery. ICT path dependency can compromise your ongoing delivery.

A really quick example, I worked with a number of companies in the International oil and gas sector, they were looking at their ability to maintain control, discharge their governance obligations through the mechanisms that communicated with shareholders. In the late 90's there was a lot of outsourcing, they had to operate across regulatory frameworks. The net effect of all this is that it was impossible for them to meet their legal and regulatory requirements, because the IT systems couldn't be aligned. The companies spoke to the regulators, this was all sorted out behind the scenes. But in the short run it impeded their ability to communicate with their stakeholders and continue to discharge on the obligations they had to their shareholders. So it's not just about how you design it now, it's how you design into the future. But the opportunites are there, you definitely have the skills and techniques to enhance alignment, it's just to make sure it fits with policy.

Thank you.