Zachary Zeus from Bizcubed speaking on "Open Tools for Open Government" 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 available at:
slideshare.net/greebo/public-sphere-gov-20-zachary-zeus
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:
Kate Lundy: These are two very short presentations. I have said it before we couldn't have done this today without our sponsors. Ad-Aware is one of them I'd now like to introduce another one of our sponsors, BizCubed's Zachary Zeus, who is going to talk about open tools for open government as well.
Zachary Zeus: Good afternoon, my name is Zachary Zeus. I am the managing director of BizCubed we are also an open sourced advocate in delivering information to people around government and businesses in Australia. We are the premier provider of analytics and reporting tools to like I said government and businesses. We are very proud to sponsor the event today. It's very exciting to see so many people, so many interested parties, it’s very exciting for us to see that.
I am going to talk more about, I am going to give a little bit of background about why I became interested in open tools. I was doing a big change management project for a large financial services company. It was a three year project. We shifted the social, we shifted the method of which responsibility for compliance issues in a financial services company, uh, was uh, executed. We got to the end of this very long, expensive project and we were very successful. We had a very positive, ah a marginal ROI and what happened at the end of it was we wanted to disseminate this information out every Monday morning because that’s when our sales managers reviewed this data. What we found was that the venders we had used to provide the framework for the information told us oh that’s going to be another seven figures a year to deliver that information on Mondays. Well we went no. We hired somebody in our data centre and moved on. But from that experience I became very interested in open tools and not getting locked in.
One of the things we have talked about is information and the change that is coming about that this Government 2.0 Forum is sort of going to help create around Australia and societies. We are living in a very exciting time. Ultimately it's about collecting, collaborating and protecting. I think that is something that came up in Senator Tanners discussion is we need to make sure that private information, individuals information is appropriate. So collecting, collaborating, protecting and then delivering information back out to constituents. And delivering it in a way that is to the right person, at the right time and in the right manner.
One of the things I would like to talk about is avoiding success penalties. So if we do the hard work of collecting, collaborating, delivering and protecting information, if we do that hard work and that's really where the hard work is, ultimately people will start to use this. People will start to want to engage with us and engage in these activities and if we choose tools that are not are not open and are not collaborative in nature we are going to face some of these success penalties I talked about at the beginning of the talk.
I have kept this talk very short because there is a lot to get through today. So one of the things I like about the open tools is that you don't get those same success penalties that you get with some of the other big venders. So when I talk about open tools, I talk about collaborative, community supportive but also commercially supportive. You do need to have businesses behind this because if people have an interest in making these things work they will actually work. Just straight community things don't tend to work.
A couple of other points. Also very much standards based. Open standards based so that as the technology grows and evolves over time you don’t get stuck with a set of information. And if you choose tools that are, as I said, standards based, community based and are commercially supportive, it will allow the hard work that I talked about of collecting and collaborating on information to be widely distributed and you will get the benefits of that success.
Thanks very much. Have a great event.