It's Census (data) day!

Today at 11:30am the ABS releases the first tranche of the 2011 Census's data - including the core demographics.

How is this Gov 2.0 related? There's a number of ways.

First, this is the first time the majority of Census data will be released, from day one, under a Creative Commons license as open data for reuse. This means that statisticians and interested people (like myself) will be able to download and crunch a lot of the information to find out interesting stuff.

Second, this is the first time the Census release is being announced via social media - with the @2011Census account leading the way, and a number of people already Tweeting using the #2011Census hashtag.

Third, there's a lot of data in the Census that will inform Gov 2.0 efforts. Population demographics, media usage and other data is all useful in building business cases and uncovering opportunities to use new media more effectively.

Fourth, this is the first Census in Australia to have a significant proportion of the data collected online. While the ABS did use a pilot eCensus system for last Census, this time online was a primary collection network for household data.

Finally we're likely to see some very interesting apps, infographics and maps using Census data in ways that were never before possible. These will emerge from the ABS, from other agencies and from the community and commercial sector.

To give an idea of what might come out of this, below is an interesting pre-Census infographic created by McCrindle Research to show Australia's place in the world.


McCrindle Research | Know the Times

Modelling open data - new visualisation from recently released BOM data

The Bureau of Meteorology has released new data for reuse under Creative Commons licensing, ahead of the upcoming GovHack in Canberra next week, and Mark Hatcher has used it to model 153 years of Sydney weather in a short video (image to right).

The higher the temperatures, the warmer the colours.

This is a good example of how data can be reused by the public to provide different insights or perspectives into topics - providing evidence to inform different viewpoints.

These public mashups could then potentially be re-adopted (crowdsourced) and shared by governments, where they offer new insights, to better communicate with and engage the community or staff.

Of course there are technical smarts involved in this type of modelling, however tools such as ManyEyes, Visual.ly, Infogr.am and Piktochart make it easy for individuals with no technical training to create interesting views from raw data.

These tools can even be used by government agencies to model their own data - useful both for public engagement and internal engagement with staff or management. Though note it is important to only create infographics from publicly available data as the processing may be done in the cloud!

Mark's complete (41 second) video of his visualisation is below. If viewing it at work I suggest turning down the sound so as to not distract colleagues.





UPDATE:
I've received a clarification as to what data was new - and it's actually new functionality.  You can now download 'all years of data' in a single file, for daily rainfall, temp and solar exposure - hat tip to Jim Birch.

This improvement makes it much easier to produce mashups like Mark's above.

Standardising content across government (or why does every agency have a different privacy policy?)

Every government website serves a different purpose and a different audience, however there are also standard content every site must have and legislation and standardised policies they must follow.

This includes content such as a privacy policy, legal disclaimer,  terms of use, accessibility statement, copyright, social media channels, contact page, information publication (FOI) pages and so on. It also includes the navigational structure and internal ordering of pages and the web addresses to access this content (such as for 'about us' pages).

So is there a case to standardise the templates and/or content of these pages and where to find them in websites across government?

I think so.

From an audience perspective, there is a strong case to do so. Citizens often use multiple government websites and it makes their experience more streamlined and efficient if they can find what they need in a consistent place (such as www.agency.gov.au/privacy), written in a consistent format and, where possible, using identical or near identical language.

It would also save money and time. Rather than having to write and seek legal approval for the full page content (such as for privacy information), only agency-specific parts would need writing or approval. Websites could be established more rapidly using the standard content pages and lawyers could focus on higher value tasks.

To put a number on the current cost of individually creating standard, if you assume it cost, in time and effort, around $500 to develop a privacy policy and that there are around 941 government websites (according to Government's online info offensive a flop), it would have cost up to $470,500 for individual privacy policies for all sites. Multiple this by the number of potentially standardisable pages and the millions begin adding up.

Standardisation could even minimise legal risks. It removes a potential point of failure from agencies who are not resourced or have the expertise to create appropriate policies and expose themselves to greater risks - such as over poorly written legal disclaimers which leave them open to being sued by citizens.

In some cases it may be possible to use the same standard text, with a few optional inclusions or agency-specific variations - such as for privacy policies, disclaimers, accessibility statements, terms of use, and similar standard pages.

In other cases it won't be possible to use the same content (such as for 'about us' pages), however the location and structure of the page can be similar - still providing public benefits.

Let's take privacy policies specifically for a moment.There's incredible diversity of privacy policies across Australian Government websites, although they are all subject to the same legislation (the Privacy Act 1988) and largely cover the same topics (with some variation in detail).

While this is good for lawyers, who get to write or review these policies, it may not be as good for citizens - who need to contend with different policies when they seek to register for updates or services.

Many government privacy policies are reviewed rarely, due to time and resource constraints, which may place agencies at risk where the use of new tools (such as Youtube, Slideshare and Scribd) to embed or manipulate content within agency sites can expose users unknowingly to the privacy conditions of third party sites (see how we handled these in myregion's privacy policy with an extendable third party section).

So, how would government go about standardisation? Although effectively a single entity, the government functions as a group of agencies who set their own policies and manage their own risks.

With the existence and role of AGIMO, and the WebGuide, there is a central forum for providing model content to reflect the minimum standard agencies must meet. There are mandatory guidelines for agencies, such as for privacy, however limited guidance on how to meet it. A standard privacy policy could be included and promoted as a base for other agencies to work from, or even provided as an inclusion for sites who wanted to have a policy which was centrally maintained and auto-updated.

Alternatively web managers across government could work together, through a service such as GovDex, to create and maintain standard pages using a wiki-based approach. This would allow for a consistently improving standard and garner grassroots buy-in, plus leverage the skills of the most experienced web masters.

There's undoubtably other ways to move towards standardised pages, even simply within an agency, which itself can be a struggle for those with many websites and decentralised web management.


Regardless of the method selected, the case should receive consideration. Does government really need hundreds of versions of what is standard content, or only a few?


Examples of government privacy policies (spot the similarities and differences):

• http://health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/privacy_security.htm
• http://www.immi.gov.au/functional/privacy.htm
• http://www.ag.gov.au/Pages/Disclaimers/Privacystatement.aspx
• http://www.dpmc.gov.au/privacy.cfm
• http://daff.gov.au/about/privacy
• http://www.deewr.gov.au/Pages/Privacy.aspx
• http://www.centrelink.gov.au/internet/internet.nsf/legal/privacy.htm?OpenDocument&nav=footer