Canada’s Open Government Consultations

I finally got around to providing my input to the Canadian Federal Government’s Open Government Consultation. If you haven’t taken the time to provide your thoughts yet, I encourage you to take a few minutes and complete the simple online survey. You should also let your friends know as well, since I’ve found that there are quite a few people that don’t know about the important consultations that the Government of Canada conducts. The 2010 consultations on the Digital Economy provide great case in point. As I travelled across Canada speaking with business leaders, the vast majority (really almost all) were unaware of the consultations. This isn’t a criticism. Just an observation that despite the outreach, either the business leaders weren’t reached or they felt that the consultations didn’t apply to them. This is unfortunate since we know that the digital economy affects us all. It is understandably difficult to do big advertising campaign for every consultation process, especially with the large number of activities that are underway at any one time (see http://www.consultingcanadians.gc.ca/ ).

It’s really cool to see the government look to innovative approaches to interact with constituents. While sometimes things don’t always go as smoothly as planned with Trolls and Freeps creeping in from time to time and even some unfortunate design issues that could impact the outcomes, we should applaud the risk taking that is being done. The Open Government consultations broke new ground again as Treasury Board Secretariat hosted a tweet chat on Dec 15. Unfortunately I found myself on a plane at that time (when am I not on a plane? I get my Super Elite the hard way. By segments!) Since I couldn’t be there, I decided to try find out what was said, what questions were asked and how many people were engaged. It was great to see that TBS published transcripts of the discussions in English and French. Unfortunately the transcript was a little hard to follow in its strict sequential format, so I thought I would try to make it more usable.

Using the VMHI2S parser (very manual, human intensive, 2 screen), I set to work on the English transcript. I took the comments and threw them into Excel. After a bit of manipulation I managed to get the transcript into a usable form. I deleted almost all of the RTs since almost all of them didn’t include any *new* or additional information. I then transcribed the stream to a new spreadsheet with the following logic:

Work through the tweets in time sequence;
Is it a new conversation item (Question, Comment, or answer)
If it’s a new topic item, assign it a new ID
If it’s a response or comment to an existing item, transcribe it in sequence after the original.

(Note that it was sometimes difficult to connect comments, questions and answers – any errors / omissions are unintentional. The transcript could also have some holes in it (I think it might have missed a few posts early on)

After a little time (OK, far too much time), I ended up with this spreadsheet version of the English discussion called Open Gov Q&A sorted . (here it is in .csv right click to save locally)

Looking at the stream in this form really allows you to get a sense of the accomplishment that the tweet chat represents. While twitter does have its limitations for a fulsome discussion (as some people pointed out), there was some useful back and forth. I think we all need to consider the pace of the activities in the office at TBS. From the English stream there were almost 150 unique discussion items. That’s over 3 discussion items every minute. Each item needs to be read, considered and potentially answered in a very short time. As you can see from the stream, some questions were more on topic than others. There was some soapboxing, only a little yelling and not too much trolling. I’ll let you decide what’s what

When all was said and done you’ll find that many responses were lightning fast (within minutes of the comment or question) and that the responses were thoughtful and conversational. The combined @SCT_Canada and @TBS_Canada posts were around one per minute (44 posts). A quick look at the community shows predominantly Canadian Tweeters, with a couple of posts from south of the border. Of course you can download the file(s) and parse it on those items of greatest interest to you.