Senator Kate Lundy opened the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Conference 2009 in Sydney with a paper titles Geosptial: The Lifeblood of Data.
The paper is notable for its detailing of three policy premises or principles that Senator Lundy deems as essential for a move toward Gov2.0 and an ‘open government.
The first principle is ‘Citizen centric services’ – which she defines as a focus on improving or perhaps duplexing the interface between citizens and government. This was a critical recommendation of the governments Gov2.0 Taskforce which started to look beyond a service paradigm in governance toward thinking governance itself as interface between dtatasets, communities, neighbours, service providers.
The second Pillar is an Open and Transparent Government – Senator Lundy argues that access to information and a willingness to harness the ‘wisdom of the crowd’. While not discussed here the Gov2.0 taskforce used wordpress with digress.it commenting plug-in and wiki’s to allows discussion documents to serve actual discussion with a wider group of stakeholders than would otherwise have been possible or likely.
The Third Pillar is described as ‘Innovation Facilitation’ by which the senator espouses the provision of open access to datasets that are structured and published according to open standards and made available through open formats and API’s. The emphasis here is less on industrial innovation that enabling access to, exploration of, and open use of governmental information in a way that might all the idea of government as interface rather than service to prosper.
The paper goes on to outline some technical requirements necessary to achieve these aims – most notable of these is perhaps a call stop ‘ reinventing the wheel’ – a novel idea suggesting a move away from ‘turn key’ service provision to an enabled public governance.
The paper also announces the work of the Office of Spatial Data Management in opening datasets.