Dr Nicholas Gruen is head of the Australian government's Government 2.0 Taskforce, which is in the final stages of a public consultation process. Dr Gruen is due to report his recommendations and findings by December 31. So what are his priorities and how does he answer the sceptics -- not about his taskforce, but about the way government will respond to his findings?
Also, Professor Graeme Turner and why he believes there's been a loss of perspective in the rush to celebrate the democratic potential of Web 2.0.
Listen to or download an extended interview with Dr Nicholas Gruen, chair of the Australian government's Government 2.0 Taskforce.
Lindsay Tanner: Information technologies are transforming the way that governments do business all around the world. They're opening up new possibilities for government to improve transparency, accountability and efficiency of government. In particular, Web 2.0 technologies are delivering new opportunities that governments in many countries are just starting to exploit, and it's really crucial that in Australia we are up there among the leading countries making use of these new opportunities.
Antony Funnell: That's federal finance minister Lindsay Tanner, a few months ago, launching what he's called is Government 2.0 Taskforce. The Taskforce has been holding public seminars around the country and this week they'll finish that stage of their work with a final event in Townsville.
After that, they'll then begin writing a report on the ways in which the Australian government can use the internet and social media to better engage with the public and further open up the process of government. In a few minutes we'll hear from the head of the Taskforce, Dr Nicholas Gruen.
Hello, Antony Funnell here and welcome to Future Tense. Now the two main political figures leading the push for what's often called e-government are Lindsay Tanner, whom we spoke to back in February, and also Labor backbencher Kate Lundy.
While Mr Tanner has his taskforce, Senator Lundy has just conducted a series of Public Sphere events where various interested parties have come together to talk about government and Web 2.0 enabled participation. The ABC's Ryan Egan went along to the last such event to gauge the mood.
Ryan Egan: Are you surprised that there's people from the government trying to bring in people from, say, social media experts, people interested in mobile and all these other spaces, creative industries together to talk about this stuff and how it relates to government policy?
Public Sphere delegate 1: Yes and no. I'm not surprised that they brought in some of those parties. I'm a little surprised and pleased they brought in some social media people, and I'm pleased to see the government being proactive. I mean that's what it's all about. When we've had -- I don't know if I can say this -- 20 years of wilderness, and what I'd really like to see the focus on is -- some of these issues discussed today have been discussed from a long, long time under a different regime, and I think it will be very valuable to actually focus on what are the issues stopping any of those previously raised points actually being brought to fruition.
Public Sphere delegate 2: In terms of sort of big picture stuff about public sphere, I think this is just so exciting. The fact that we actually have this dialogue now that we have ministers such as Carr and Conroy keen to hear the results of this kind of dialogue. You can say with the public, but really more with industry and practitioners who are switched on to this, so it's not just Joe Public as in you know, 'I want to have my say', it's actual consultation, and I think that's what's really interesting here.
Ryan Egan: Finally, what's your impression of these Public Spheres, the events themselves, in terms of the way they use new technology, they use social media to bring in people who may not otherwise be able to make the physical events, but also who may not have otherwise contributed their thoughts before?
Public Sphere delegate 3: Well this is the first one I've attended in person. I have attended virtually through other means before. But today has been a fantastic experience. The technology's not necessarily beeen as stable as it could be, but the camaraderie and the discussion continues, and I think it's really important to explore these things, and it's fantastic that someone's stepping out and doing it. The fact that it'll be available for others to view and read is wonderful.
Antony Funnell: Voices there from the last Public Sphere event held by Senator Kate Lundy. And if you're interested, Ryan Egan from Radio Australia will have an interview with the senator on his TechStream program tomorrow. There's a link on our website.
So, enthusiasm for the Public Sphere events, but what about the Government's 2.0 Taskforce?
Well the general feeling we've detected among those with a passion for online developments, is one of caution. Caution, not because of the make-up of the Taskforce, but because of what they see as the Rudd government's record of not following through on big initiatives.
Among the sceptical is technology and political blogger Stilgherrian.
Stilgherrian: There's enthusiasm building in the Government 2.0 sector. There are a lot of enthusiastic people starting to have meetings, starting to work on Senator Kate Lundy's work at the federal level, and Labor MLC Penny Sharp in New South Wales, and other people around the country, are starting to kick off.
There are going to be expectations that there'll be something really significant to put on the table by Christmas, and yet it's all uncertain. The uncertainties in all this are incredible. We're expecting this group of people to essentially solve all of the problems of Government 2.0 and have this grand road map in just a few months. It's an enormous bullet point list of stuff that they've got to achieve. And now that people are starting to look at it, they're realising we're only at the very early stages of people starting to agree on what the questions might mean, let alone what the answers might look at. And my gut feeling is people are starting to be a bit hesitant about 'Hey, are we actually going to get something of value at the end of this, or is it just another of the Rudd government's talkfests to make it look like we've got something happening but there's no real end result? I mean the Australia 2020 Summit, did we ever get anything really concrete out of that?
Duncan Riley: Look, what they're doing with Government 2.0 is positive. Nicholas Gruen is the right guy for the job, but we hear a lot of rhetoric from the government about how it wants to embrace online and open itself up. But two years down the path and what do we have to show for it?
Antony Funnell: Duncan Riley was another of our guests from last week's program who we quizzed about the Government 2.0 Taskforce while we had the opportunity, and as you can hear, he's also rather sceptical about the issue of government follow-through.
Duncan Riley: Look in saying that Nicholas is the right person for the job, I'm not saying he wasn't stuck, but based on the guidelines and what will happen afterwards, he can only deal with what he was handed. He's very highly thought of in many, many circles, I think given what he has to work with, he's doing a very good job.
That said, the scale of the investigation is far too broad. There's absolutely no commitment from government at all to actually implement the recommendations of the Taskforce, and I think we'll get to the stage where in six months time or twelve months time, I'll be sitting here in the studio again and we'll still be talking about the pipe dreams of the Australian government when it comes to implementing really basic 2.0 principles, and ideas, which certainly our contemporaries in the United States, the United Kingdom, even places like Uzbekistan, I mean they do open blogging now. I could actually rattle off a list of Third World countries or Second World countries which are doing a better job online than the Australian government is. So I'm disappointed. I'm hopeful, but I could be wrong, and I really do hope that I'm wrong, because the Australian government does need to move in this area. But I'm not very hopeful.
So, on that provocative note, let's now go to the head of the Government 2.0 Taskforce Nicholas Gruen for his response to the scepticism.
Nicholas Gruen: Well my response, I suppose my basic response is a kind of straight bat response which is 'Well, that's clearly up to the government what they decide to do', but I think I can give your sceptic a little more comfort than that. And the reason is that the recommendations themselves are not the most important thing here. I've been involved in about eight government inquiries in my life, and usually the recommendations are what really matters.
Now something strange happened in this inquiry, which is that we put out a sort of a -- you know, at a very high level, in a sort of in-principle sense -- we put out the recommendations, if you like, the answers, in our Issues paper right at the start. We know what we have to do, and that is to take the situation that we're in now, where government information is secret, unless a decision is made to release it, and basically reverse that, so that government information is in principle, open, accessible, available, unless there's some good reason for that not to be the case.
Now the government has in some senses signed on to that principle. It's clearly indicated that it's keen on that principle in appointing us, but it's also been co-author of a set of oeCD principles which we reproduced in our Issues paper, which say that.
The hard part is actually getting it to happen. Now some of that will involve recommendations of ours, you know, there are various road blocks, large and small, in the policy area: the way we administer copyright is one such area, there are various others. But really a great deal of this agenda is actually about setting examples, giving people the ability to fail, to try things and for them not to be successful, so that some of the things they do try will be successful. And that's really a cultural agenda as much as a policy agenda. So a large part of our work is to orchestrate the sort of natural enthusiasm that a lot of people have, to put up some competitions, to get some demonstrations going, and that's how we're going about our work.
Antony Funnell: So am I right in saying that this is as much, or you see this Taskforce and its work being as much about educating the government about the sort of cultural change that is needed, as it is about actually informing the public about change?
Nicholas Gruen: Yes, because the government isn't sort of just Kevin Rudd and Lindsay Tanner and those people, it is hundreds of thousands of public servants, and of course it's also the citizenry. One of the things that the internet and what is called Web 2 now makes possible, is a much higher level of collaboration between some sort of central organisation like a large business and its customers, or government and its citizens, and I mean that's one of the things that's going on around the world. People are, to quote the song, doing it for themselves, in all sorts of ways, and it's really tremendously exciting.
Nicholas Gruen: I have to say that is a challenge, yes.
Antony Funnell: But that's likely to be one of the central issues as well, not just cultural change in the government, but also educating the public service that this sort of change is possible and desirable, is that correct?
Nicholas Gruen: Yes, absolutely, and the way you educate the public service is not -- I mean there are lots of things that can be done in terms of the apparatus, there's currently a bunch of interim, I think it's called an 'interim protocol on online engagement for Public Servants', that the Australian Public Service Commission has put out those guidelines. We think those guidelines could be improved, and so does the APSC because they call them 'interim'. So that's the sort of nuts and bolts of policy, but it's really not the story.
The story is what you do when somebody in government, may be fairly junior, maybe not particular junior, starts blogging, they try and do it in a way that's consistent with the various codes of conduct, they put up on a blog all sorts of information about -- do the sorts of things that blogs are so good at, which is sort of answer people's questions, open up a channel for people to say, Yes, have you seen this link? and Look what they're doing in Turkey, or Italy or England or whatever. And let's say that person acquires a certain amount of cachet from this blog, and various senior managers or middle-managers get their noses out of joint. You can see that that blog might be tremendously useful, but in the management culture -- and I'm not just talking about the Public Service, this is typical of large companies generally, large organisations -- these kinds of things are difficult.
Antony Funnell: That's an enormous task, though, isn't it, to put together if you like, an arsenal of examples and of suggestions and recommendations that can be then used by people like Lindsay Tanner the finance minister, to try and change this culture. And given that you've got a finite time for the duration of this Taskforce, that it will be all over at the end of this year, have you had enough time and is your scope simply too broad?
Nicholas Gruen: Well the answers to that are No and Yes. In other words, No, we haven't had enough time, and our scope is too broad. But I'm not against either of those things, because this is an ongoing agenda. This agenda won't be over in five years time; it's a large cultural agenda and you know, it's great that the government is trying to move on it. If people think that we're going to issue the last word on this, and that, you know, within six months of our having issued the report, that it will be mostly done, well I'm sorry. I'm ambitious, but they're mistaken, this will take a long time.
Antony Funnell: Nicholas Gruen, chair of the Government 2.0 Taskforce, thank you very much.
Antony Funnell: And an extended version of that interview is available online.
Out of every one hundred people online, only one per cent become involved in creating content, while another 10 per cent engage in some form of online interaction. That is, asking questions or making suggestions for change.
But the overwhelming majority of us, around 89 per cent, in the words of Chauncey Gardiner, just like to watch.
Antony Funnell: Now the one per cent rule isn't just a bit of fun. It's a principle which many online innovators and developers take notice of.
So if it's correct, what does that mean for e-government or Government 2.0?
Does it mean that no matter what governments or organisations do to promote such concepts, the cold reality is that only a minority of citizens will ever really be interested?
And in a country the size of Australia, are there enough interested people to keep the pressure on government to follow through with change?
I put that last question to futurist and online entrepreneur Ross Dawson.
Ross Dawson: I think that there is a growing interest in that, and I think it is very different in different countries and in different demographics, but absolutely people's interest is growing in participating and having a voice and being able to impact smaller things in the environment in which they live, as well as larger things such as the political parties in power. And I think that trend will accentuate over time, as people get more used to the ideas and the tools provided by participation.
Antony Funnell: Ross Dawson there.
Jeffrey Cole is the director of the Centre for Digital Future at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication.
Dr Cole's Centre has been tracking online trends for the past nine years, both in the United States and further abroad.
He was in Melbourne last week at the invitation of the ARC's Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation based at Swinburne University. So let's hear his perspective on all of this.
Jeffrey Cole: Well we saw even before the internet, we saw Orwell was wrong in 1984. Orwell argued that media was going to be the tool of Big Brother, and what media has done has been to put great power in the hands of individuals. We saw that in Iran, after the contested election when people got into the streets and organised and communicated through Twitter, through social networks, but certainly we've seen lots of examples where governments have been overthrown because of technology. It was true in Spain after the bombing of Madrid when Spain initially lied to its citizens and told them the bombing had occurred from the Basque separatists, ETA, and instead they used these devices to communicate that the government was lying and overthrew the government. We've seen lots of examples of government change, it's not a surprise that in Iran, in Myanmar, when demonstrations occur the government gets threatened, what's the first thing they do? Now they cut internet connections.
So we know the power in dissent, the power in giving power into the hands of individuals. Barack Obama took social networking and the ability to communicate with supporters to a new level, and actually included them in his campaign, raised more -- the amazing thing about Obama is he raised more money than any candidate who ever ran for office, but more compelling, he did it with small donations from vast numbers of people. So Obama rewrote the rules to the point where the Republican Party was just scared beyond belief, because they don't really understand these techniques. I can assure you there was more education of social networking going on in America among Republicans than anything we've ever seen, and they're going to come back with a vengeance. We'll see if they understand it truly. But the social networking, Obama being the most significant major candidate, really has changed politics, and every piece of it.
Antony Funnell: So does your research indicate that there is a growing understanding within societies of the usefulness of the internet and social media for the political process, for keeping things honest?
Jeffrey Cole: In America, and I don't think it's a question we ask in Australia, but in America, we see now that two-thirds of internet users feel they're gaining political power through the web, not just knowledge, but actually gaining power. The ability to influence or have some role. Now those numbers are always highest after an election. They'll go down a little bit in between elections, but it really has become a device that has changed the entire political process.
Antony Funnell: Jeffrey Cole, with quite an amazing statistic there. But does that really tell us much about the willingness of ordinary people, ordinary citizens, to use Web 2.0 applications to meaningfully engage in the political process?
After all, that two-thirds figure only applies to people who are already internet users.
I think it's fair to say that all of our guests on today's program so far believe they will. But our next guest has significant doubts.
Professor Graeme Turner is the director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. He's by no means a Luddite when it comes to the benefits of new media, but he believes there's been a loss of perspective in the rush to celebrate the democratic potential of Web 2.0.
Graeme Turner: I think what happen is that people who are watching what's happening in the expansion of consumer choice and the multiplication of formats of delivery of media, there's a kind of excitement that moves away from looking at what's actually happening at the moment to immediately predicting the future. Most of these people have got no credentials to predict the future, you know, the people who work in media or cultural studies or technology studies or whatever. And I guess what happens is there's a kind of aspirational rhetoric that gets built up, and people lose the distinction between what they hope will happen and what actually might happen in terms of judging from the evidence that's out there.
So for instance, you'll have somebody say that the net is outstripping television as a medium. Well I can't think of a single way in which you would want to demonstrate that, where you have to say that's simply not true. It's a rhetorical claim to point to the importance of this admittedly interesting new development, but it just loses touch with reality.
Antony Funnell: And in terms of Web 2.0's influence on the democratic process, and people's participation in the democratic process, you're saying that's also vastly overstated?
Graeme Turner: I think that an awful lot of this rhetoric comes from the US, from people who are in very privileged positions, have access to the web and are able to use it, and they're used to be heard. Most of the people we hear from didn't gain their voices through the internet; they had voices already as columnists in the newspapers or as journalists, or whatever. And so there's a sense that they've expanded the reach that they have.
But the idea that this is an absolutely democratic movement where you're actually going to see everybody, the whole of a democracy utter their thoughts via the web and be listened to (and that's the crucial one; you know, it's one thing to say something, it's another thing to be heard), I think that's just unrealistic. You know, when you look at who is on the net and who is able to speak and who is listening, it's a pretty small fraction, and if you look globally, I think there's a real danger that accounts of changes to the democratic function of the media emanate from a kind of Anglo-American centre, and what they do is normatise the idea of western affluence. It ignores that the rest of the world is without access to a telephone, let alone a computer.
Antony Funnell: You're very interested in user-generated content. I did an interview last year with Henry Jenkins from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had been looking at YouTube, at the service YouTube, and one of his findings was that far from being broad in terms of the sort of people who put content up on YouTube, that user-generated content on YouTube was really very much from young white males. That fits in very much with what you're saying here doesn't it?
Graeme Turner: Yes well that's certainly what the research is telling us, and they're usually young white males in America, and so it's a pretty narrow demographic. There's actually a very interesting book written by Matthew Hindman called The Myth of Digital Democracy, and he doesn't look at YouTube but he looks at the demographic of blogging, and sees who does the blogging and who produces the material, and he finds it's pretty much the kind of thing that Henry Jenkins is talking about. He finds that it's a geeky end of the young white American market who produces this material and gets excited about it, and often they're the people who have access to the media and they're the people who get interviewed about these future developments.
So it's got a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy feel about it from time to time, that you do want to stand back and say and say Whoa, hang on, we're not looking at massive shifts across the world yet, and there's no reason to think that the content that you're going to generate in your living room is going to rival the content that Hollywood produces industrially.
Antony Funnell: You point out in your chapter that even in the United States television is on the rise, viewing of television has been on the rise for a couple of years now, despite I suppose what most of us would think from hearing the argument about traditional media versus new media. You would assume that television was very much on a steep decline.
Graeme Turner: Yes, it's complicated, because broadcast television is on decline in the US. Less than half the US audience now watch broadcast television. But they do watch cable, and the massive increase, it's something like 40% in the last six months or so, the massive increase is in time-shifted television. People are buying DVRs and they're able to time-shift, so they're still watching television, they're just not watching it when it's programmed. So what's probably happening is that we're moving away from television as a menu of legislated choices, it's becoming customised and personalised, and so our mode of consumption is becoming more customised and personalised. That doesn't necessarily translate to a democratic politics, you know, there's a long way to go to that, and it doesn't necessarily translate to the producers of television being located in living rooms, rather than in production studios.
Antony Funnell: OK. Now I'm going to criticise my own profession here, but I guess we could expect that many journalists might get carried away with what you call this digital optimism, and perhaps as you say, you know, commentators who are involved with social media who perhaps have a vested interested. But you're also very highly critical, as you mentioned earlier, of academics, people in, say, media studies. What's in it for them? Why have they put aside their scepticism, their natural scepticism, their natural academic interest and pursued this digital optimism?
Graeme Turner: That's a little harder to answer. I mean I can only guess really. I think that academic views on new media have really been at the cutting edge of any view about new media, and I think the kind of traditional difference between media industries and the academy has tended to collapse I suppose. So that suddenly people who used to be told by the media 'We don't want your point of view, we're not interested because it's too academic', are actually being approached by the media and being asked for their point of view.
So you actually have a very strange alignment between the kind of media studies academic community and the media community, which have always had differences of opinion and differences of interest. I think that's changed, so there's a bit of an alignment between those two sectors, and both of them want to see new media become this democratic Utopia for different reasons. I mean one sector wants to do that because they think they can make money out of it, but the other wants it because of a kind of idealism about what the media can be, a criticism of what the media is now and the sense that the new media provide opportunities that didn't exist before to make the media more democratic in terms of how it's produced and how it's consumed.
Antony Funnell: One of the things that interests me in the chapter from your forthcoming book is that you say that in the US at least, there is a liberal bias in the blogosphere, which you say probably maximises the likely socio-political benefits and minimises the possible deficits. Could I get you to explain on that a little bit more?
Graeme Turner: What I was talking about there is that the blogosphere isn't one particular political spectrum. I mean there's a kind of assumption that the blogosphere is going to be left and critical. Well, it depends where you go. In the UK the blogosphere tends to be dominated by conservatives, in the US by liberals. And so the argument I suppose is that the fact that you're getting this kind of liberal, critical and pro-democratic bias in the blogosphere makes it productive. I think you look at the full context in the US, you've got to include an incredibly right-wing talk-radiosphere, running against the blogosphere, so I suppose you can argue that there's a political benefit from having a larger number of voices on the left than there used to be, getting the larger audience than they used to get.
Antony Funnell: Graeme Turner, from the University of Queensland. And on our website you'll find details of a seminar he's presenting next month on Digital Optimism. And his forthcoming book will be out in 2010.
Now before I depart, I should also mention that we've put the extended version of our interview with Jeffrey Cole online. In it, Mr Cole talks about his Centre's research into media trends, user-generated content and much, much more. That's a special feature online at our website.
Thanks as always to my co-producer, Andrew Davies and to Peter McMurray for our technical assistance.
Graeme Turner's seminar at the University of Queensland.