Open Government Archive

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:

1. Work through the tweets in time sequence;
2. Is it a new conversation item (Question, Comment, or answer)
3. If it’s a new topic item, assign it a new ID
4. 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.

The almost daily news reports about the tough worldwide economic situation provide stark stories about the challenges being faced by the worldwide community.  While Canada has not faced the same extreme challenges, the complex nature of the global economy is increasingly influencing us locally.  Over and above the studies confirming why Canada has weathered the storm compared to other nations, there are a fair number of studies looking more broadly at how Canada compares to other nations.  The Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity compared 16 most prosperous regions in North America and found that Ontario finished 15^th and Quebec 16^th.  The 10^th annual report from the Task Force on Competitiveness, Productivity and Economic Progress further determined that the prosperity gap is a productivity gap and the productivity gap is an innovation gap.

                Innovation is top of mind for CEOs, with Forrester reporting that 93% of businesses executives surveyed citing innovation as a top strategic priority.  Unfortunately, not everyone has the same understanding of this priority.  As one of the top 10 overused terms of 2010, there are many different interpretations and perhaps misperceptions of the word “innovation.”  I like the way the Boston Consulting Group characterizes the outcomes of innovation:

• New to the world products or services that create entirely new markets
• New offerings that allow expansion into new customer groups
• New offerings for existing customers
• Incremental changes to existing offerings
• Lower production costs for existing offerings

At times it might seem that innovation speaks only to commercial enterprise, but innovation applies across communities including government.   You can easily restate the outcomes listed above for government as:

• New to the world services or entirely new programs
• New services that broaden engagement to a wider community who don’t normally interact with government
• New services for individuals and businesses who regularly interact with government
• Incremental changes to existing programs and services
• Increasing efficiency in who programs and services are delivered

 Innovation is critical for government for a number of reasons:

1. Talent – Governments are competing with industry for top talent.  Increasingly, new graduates are seeking employers that provide opportunities for innovation. 
2. Efficiency – These tough economic times impact governments as they also look to make every dollar go further.  Innovative approaches allow governments to deliver the same high quality services at a lower resource cost.
3. Competition – Governments are indeed in competition with each other.  Municipalities, provinces and federal governments compete with each other to attract business to their region and create local opportunities.  In delivering their information programs, governments are also in competition with others to capture their audience.  You can easily imagine situations where individuals might seek health, recall, travel advice from foreign nations creating risk not only for the individual but the local government programs as well.
4. Foundation for prosperity – At the Canada Innovation Nation seminar in Waterloo, Tom Jenkins proposed that “Poor productivity in an enabling sector may be leading to poor productivity in other sectors.”  Now Tom was referring to the telecom sector, but I believe that the example remains valid for the other sectors that enable Canadian business.  So sub-optimal productivity in the government sector has the potential to lead to poor productivity in all other sectors.  Fundamentally, our prosperity as a nation depends on Government innovation.

Innovation is the key catalyst to build value as we emerge from these tough economic times.  Government should work to enhance their innovation efforts alongside those occurring in industry.  The nation is depending on it!