Now you see it online now you don't

Then there's this strange but true story Minister backs 'error' explanation by Michael West in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald about the Australian Securities and Investment Commission purging hundreds of exemption orders relating to filing company reports from its public database-apparently because details posted for at least seven years were not meant to be made publicly available.

While Irish eyes are prying, who's looking at the public record?

i111.photobucket.com/albums/n136/irisheyes97/..

Staying in the North Atlantic and with digital information for a moment, John Lee in FOI'd again for Irish Central, details the exploits of Gavin Sheridan who is using FOI and the internet to open up to scrutiny and publicise aspects of Irish government operations that haven't seen much of the light of day. Sheridan and colleague Mark Coughlan, as their The Story website proclaims, are "dedicated to sharing documents, combing and combining data and promoting transparency in public life: an experiment in journalism and crowdsourcing hoping to shed light on the government. If you’re spending the Irish taxpayers’ money, you’re on the radar." And they're making a dollar somehow as well.

Journalists everywhere obviously trawl the public record and find newsworthy bits as government agencies at all levels use the internet to publish more information than ever-Anna Patty's front pager today based on information from the government's Building the Education Revolution website is a case in point. However the mind set in some quarters is still that there's no story if information isn't secret or confidential, and of course it's true governments aren't in the habit of (intentionally) volunteering bad or embarassing news. The "citizen journalist" out there in the Blogosphere helps uncover some gems in many areas as well.  Open Australia has done a great job to bring debate in our Federal Parliament into more sunlight, and recently in getting an updated version of the Register of Interests online. Gov 2.0  may deliver on its promise of much more of this.

Even before Tasmania, NSW and the Commonwealth follow Queensland into the mandatory proactive publication era, who knows what a forensic eye like Sheridan's might bring to light after, for starters, close examination of:

The above mentioned Open Australia Register of Interests of Federal Parliamentarians.

Anything still to be gleaned from My School.


The Queensland Cabinet Documents webpage.

Queensland Government agency  registers of gifts or benefits of more than $150 which must be published as part of an agency’s publication scheme each quarter.  Here's the Department of the Premier and Cabinet  Register-for others see these publication schemes.

South Australian members of parliament travel reports.
   
Commonwealth Government Grants.

While I'm told we have a long way to go in this area, the Therapeutic Goods Administration AusPAR website, which says it "provides information about the evaluation of a prescription medicine and the considerations that led the TGA to approve or not approve an application."

Despite a good going over already of Defence contracts by Linton Besser of the Sydney Morning Herald, contract notes of other agencies published on the Austender website.

NSW Food Authority Penalty Notice list of eateries issued with a breach notice for failure to comply with food hygiene standards.

NSW Department of Health Monthly Hospital Performance Reports.


I'm sure there are plenty of other underexplored caches out there, so happy to add to this list - even happier if some of you sift all this to find the bits the rest of us deserve to know.

Much deserved recognition for AustLII

Congratulations to the Australasian Legal Information Institute on winning the award from the Internet domain name administrators for Australia and New Zealand for the best openness initiative for Austlii , the online legal public library service.  AustLII won on the basis of best practice for free access, high usage- close to a million hits a day- and for being a model adopted by others. It's an invaluable resource, in my case for legislation and court and tribunal decisions.

Google releases government requests data

Google's Government Requests Tool  launched on 20 April provides information about requests for user data or content removal received from government agencies or arising from court orders around the world. In the last six months o f last year Australian government agencies made 155 requests for information including 17 for remove all or some information:14 from You Tube, and 1 each from Blogger and Geo and a web search. Google complied fully or partially with 52%. No other details. Has anyone asked Canberra about the requests for user data? Australian numbers for removal are small in comparison to Brazil, Germany, India (many arising from defamation suits) and the US.

Google states the release is a first step in providing more transparency about efforts at web censorship, noting many requests are entirely legitimate for example for removal of child pxxxography.

We also regularly receive requests from law enforcement agencies to hand over private user data. Again, the vast majority of these requests are valid and the information needed is for legitimate criminal investigations. However, data about these activities historically has not been broadly available. We believe that greater transparency will lead to less censorship

On political speech Google adds:

In our experience over the years a very small percentage of content removal requests from governments have centered on political speech, but often those requests are the ones that spark the most vigorous debate within Google. We have complied with some of those requests if, for instance, the material violated our own content policies. But for others, we didn’t. For example, in Argentina, a federal prosecutor claimed that information about him and his wife (a federal judge) had been posted for analysis on two political blogs and asked that we remove them. We removed a portion of one of the blogs for revealing private information about the judge, but otherwise did not comply. We also received a demand in late 2009 from a Canadian politician for the removal of a blog criticizing his policies. Again, we declined to remove the blog, because it did not violate our policies.

There’s a question mark on the world map for content removal requests from China- Chinese officials consider censorship demands as state secrets, so Google (who terminated its joint venture there because of government intrusion) politely says it cannot disclose that information at this time.

On a China related topic, my morning read at the moment in Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post today reports China shut down all anonymous comments on major news and business websites last year, and plans a real name identification system to prevent anonymous communication on websites, discussion groups and mobile telephones. Wang Chen, chief of the State Council Information Office reportedly told the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress one of the aims was to "keep harmful overseas information" from appearing on domestic websites. Wang is also reported to have said China now has more than 400 million internet users, so the finger in the dyke faces challenging times.

Australia 5th in e-government

Those who like me regularly struggle to find what they want from government websites or do business with a government agency on the internet will be interested to see that Australia came in fifth out of 198 countries surveyed in a report on e-government by Darrell West of the Brookings Institution in Washington.

At the top of the list were South Korea, Taiwan, the United States, Singapore, and Canada. Just behind us were Germany, Ireland, Dominica, Brazil and Malaysia, and at the other end of the spectrum, Tuvalu, Mauritania, Guinea, Congo, Comoros, Macedonia, Kiribati, Samoa and Tanzania who barely have a web presence.

Its not clear what websites were examined, how many (apparently less than 10 in each country), or even what level of government. Websites were evaluated for the presence of various features dealing with information availability, service delivery and public access. The Australian sites rated high on many indicators but poorly on security policy, disability access, access in foreign languages and evidence of regular updating and maintenance.

My pet beefs are the limited and poorly organised information about policy research and government decision making, and the lack of tools to assist in finding out what information of potential interest might exist.Oh,and the pathetic search capabilities on the NSW Government website that is supposed to provide access to information about government contracts. See my comments last July.

The following are the topic headings for issues that West suggests governments should address:

"Government websites frequently presented access problems, both at the level of the initial search and the internal navigation- the level of accessibility must be improved.To facilitate broader access, web designers should make government websites available in other relevant languages. To encourage citizen use of online government, website maintenance needs to be improved across the board .The organization of many government websites was problematic with so much information crammed onto their pages that it inevitably led to user confusion. Government websites which present a great deal of dense information could be improved by personalization, which would help to remove clutter.Several basic changes to the layout of government websites such as uniformity could improve organization."

Openness and collaboration in responding to public policy challenges

Further to the comment here on Sunday about the public good of information sharing, anyone interested in pushing culture change in government in the direction of greater openness and increased citizen participation should snap up a container load of "Wikinomics:How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything" by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams.

Some at the 2020 Summit were leading the charge on this one.Will ministers and public service leaders follow?

From the introduction:

"Leaders must think differently about how to compete and be profitable, and embrace a new art and science of collaboration we call wikinomics. This is more than open source, social networking, so-called crowdsourcing, smart mobs, crowd wisdom, or other ideas that touch upon the subject. Rather, we are talking about deep changes in the structure and modus operandi of the corporation and our economy, based on new competitive principles such as openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally."

To Google or not to Google?

Given other privacy challenges, Google's new "web history" option may not be such a big deal (or am I just getting complacent here) but we won't be able to say that privacy advocates here and elsewhere, didn't warn us of the dangers. The Sydney Morning Herald Mashup also has some interesting comments from concerned (and not so concerned) readers.