Peter McEvoy, Executive Producer of Q&A speaking on "Old media/New media – tools for political engagement" 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/

Transcript below:

I am here to canvas and ask for your assistance for what we do at QandA, I want to talk about partnerships between old and new media. I was first asked to take on the role for setting up discussion program back in 2007. It wasn't something that filled me with joy because I don't generally like discussion programs - don't tell anyone outside the room. The call to be involved came while I happened to be studying in Oxford - it was 2007, and I was very excited by some of the things I was seeing, in particular things that my society was involved in - I was becoming addicted to the theyworkforyou website. And so when I came to think about what sort of program QandA should be - although QandA has a lot of similarities to other discussion programs that have existed here in australia and other parts of the world - my initial starting point for the program together was in fact a website - theyworkforyou - some of the features for that website migrated pretty quickly to the website that now existed for QandA. I had been too hear Mysociety's Tom Steinberg talk about web20 - one of the ideas he put up which I found very useful was to talk about the difference between accelerators and toolmakers. Accelerators are people who provide you with more blogs, more opinions, more newspapers, more celebrities. Toolmakers are people who set about providing users with tools so they can organise themselves and access information. The toolmakers at mysociety were involved in a lot of interesting projects that I found fascinating. Projects like pledgebank, where people can organise themselves together to donate money or do a working bee at their local park. Tools that allow people to find out what their local MP is doing, to contact their MP. Tools that allow people to organise themselves more effectively as citizens - thats the kernel and the model for what QandA's about. From QandA's point of view, rather then being a television program that we later on added a website too - it was a television program that really had it origins in things that were already happening on the web in sites like theyworkforyou. Some people expressed doubts about whether Australians would be interested in being involved in a project like QandA - people wondered if Australians were engaged enough, educated enough, articulate enough - things like that might work in England but here in Australia are people really interested in politics, am glad to say that that has been comprehensively, proved wrong, QandA has been a great success in television terms, it regularly attracts more then half a million people in the sort of five city rating terms that most tv programs are judged and that several hundred thousand people each week are looking at a live debate between politicians and opinions makers , a debate that they can be engaged in, they can ask questions, they can set the agenda for, and making that program a success, not only people who watch tv, but the enormous number of people who want to come and be in the audience and have the opportunity to ask live questions, the people who want to send us questions, whether they want to upload videos, send us web questions, sms questions, they want to send us satirical videos - they want to be engaged in all sorts of different ways - basically the principle we have tried to follow is to open ourselves to as many of those opportunities as we can, we also been attracting a growing twitter commentary on the program, we managed to multiply that very quickly by putting up a hash tag, and so a thousand people a week or more are giving there live commentary on whats going on on the program. From the start I have been keen to build relationships and collaborations with citizens who share our interest in encouraging political participation in new media, and I was very excited to find that when I came back to australia, the ideas of mysociety were already here, people were already working on reformatting that open source software, through open australia to set up a similar project here. So that the enormous amount of information that is at the aph.gov.au website which is almost impossible to navigate as anyone who has ever logged onto it would know, is now being reformatted in a a way that is far more useful for ordinary citizens, so I am very glad that I have been working on a collaboration with open australia since before the program started. One thing though that I think we need to recognise amidst all our enthusiasm for new digital media, is that there still is a mass media out there, and it still has a great significance, for example Kevin Rudd, Malcolm Turnball, Wayne Swan and Godwin Grech all realised today, the mass media has a mass impact, so its very important that people from the mass media, people like myself, look to new media for new tools and new possibilities that we can provide for our audiences, but also that the people in the new media look for collaborations that they can arrive at with mass media to take advantage of the strength and ooomph and the impact that mass media has. I think that old and new media are most effective when that collaborate together. And let me just cite one quick british example thats going on at the moment, people might know that mysociety and theyworkforyou had an important role in the initial push for transparency about british MP's expenses over in the UK, they were pushing only buts its something that really didn't take off, the sky didn't actually fall in at westminster until the mainstream media took that up, because they were able to get hold of those expenses and work through them and release them in bits and pieces and create the MP expenses scandal we have all witnessed in the UK in recent weeks. Now we are coming to situation where that information is going back out to volunteers to work on because the british has released scans of all the paper copies of the expenses information which is impossible to work with and search through and so the guardian has set up a crowd sourcing journalism project where they are publishing all 471 153 pages of this scanned documents and inviting their readers and users to go through these documents looking for interesting facts - when I checked a little while ago there were still 291 743 pages that hadn't been checked so theres and opportunity to get involved if you'd like to. Now Mark Scott hasn't authorised me to make any mega deals today or authorise any crowd source projects here but I can tell you that in my particular corner of the ABC in television public affairs we are very interested in collaborating with clever people who have bright ideas who about how Australians could become more involved in their political process. I think encouraging active citizenship is absolutely core business for the ABC and if you have got an idea about the way we can use the web, the way that we can use twitter, an application, a way that open sourced projects can be somehow married with what we are doing at QandA or a way we can do our website better or anything I'd love hear from you - I'll be around here for the rest of the afternoon - thankyou very much and if you have any questions I'll be glad to take them now too.