Government in the age of Web 2.0

Whilst the Taskforce sat and several times since, I've had some enjoyable exchanges with one of my favourite institutions – the ABC. I spoke to many people at the ABC about the fabulous wealth of material they have and the ways in which it could be made even more accessible, even more valuable – for instance making their archives available to schools – using the tools of Web 2.0. We spend tens of millions of dollars promoting Australia as a tourist destination to those offshore, and tens more millions broadcasting Australian content into Asia. But the ABC tries to block foreigners' access to iView.

Recently the ABC program Catalyst produced a marvellous segment which explains how Kaggle, a start-up company which I currently chair, hosts international data analysis competitions that have set new benchmarks in the analysis of everything from rating chess players to detecting dark matter in the universe. It was easily the best explanation of what we do. So we asked if we could feature this marvellous video on our website. They preferred not.

Where the ABC produces programs that it seeks to sell offshore or after broadcast to recover some of its production costs, one can at least argue that it needs to act more restrictively than is possible with the open licence we recommended as the default. But the video we were seeking to display on the Kaggle website sits happily on the Catalyst website for all to view.

Ironically at around the same time Channel Ten's 7 pm project produced a story of similar length about a project called Family by Family run by another institution I chair – the Australian Centre for Social Innovation. Though Australian taxpayers didn't pay for the production of the segment, Channel Ten facilitated others using its content by posting it on YouTube and allowing others to embed it on their websites. Why wouldn't they? Yet meanwhile, some sections of the public sector, whose reason for being is to produce public goods seem to be on a work-to-rule campaign, going out of their way to spoil the fun. All for no conceivable benefit to anyone.

I recently chaired a panel during the Melbourne Writers Festival which the ABC filmed. They asked me to sign a statement agreeing to the ABC owning "all rights in all media throughout the world in the Recording." I pointed them to the Taskforce's report and sought something less grandiose.

Once again there was no sensible reason for the ABC to seek such rights. No-one else wanted to beat the ABC to broadcast our panel. And what if they were? I thought it was "our ABC". I sent the relevant person a lengthy email seeking some review but, despite several reminders, have not heard back. You may be intrigued to know that the panel I chaired that the ABC sought exclusive global rights to the broadcast of was on the topic of Open Government.

You might imagine that I am not particularly enamoured of what I'll call the minimalist approach to Government 2.0. This involves an agency getting a Twitter account and if they're really brave, a blog and/or a Facebook page. These functions are typically given to the communications people who will practice their usual arts on them. Their preeminent concerns will be that agency spokespeople stay 'on message' and that the scope for agency embarrassment is minimised.

This reminds me of the response of many manufacturing businesses when they saw the extraordinary achievements of Japanese manufacturers from the late 1970s on, particularly in the car industry.

To simplify somewhat, Western car manufacturers had managers and engineers overseeing the detailed design of products, their constituent sub-assemblies and the processes by which assembly would take place. Employees and suppliers would then implement these designs according to their superiors' instructions.

The Japanese had developed a clearly superior system. Where there had always been clear tradeoffs between quality and cost, Toyota showed how much quality in production could lower cost by minimising errors and delay further down the line and built the platform for further production refinements.

Just in time production and getting things right first time was so important that even junior workers were given the authority to stop the line to prevent errors leaking into the next stage of production. Western business tried many shortcuts to this new industrial nirvana. Alas, things rarely went well. Workers remained terrified of stopping the line and when they did, mayhem and recriminations usually ensued – as Western commonsense had always assumed.

For the Japanese approach was not a single rule or even a collection of them. It was a system that contained its own social theory – which was that workers would perform better in teams, rather than on their own, that they turned up every day preferring to do a good, rather than a bad days work. And so the Japanese system armed teams of workers with information about how well they were performing, funded them to meet in 'quality circles' to endlessly strategise collaborative quality and productivity improvements, involved them in questions of production design and devolved a range of critical production decisions to them.