Recently I had the privilege of attending a Gov2.0 taskforce round table.  ‘Gov 2.0’ sounds all iphone’ish doesn’t it?

Take the visionary steam power of what America is doing by opening up as many government services as possible via the web ( for the greater benefit of the community) and combine that with Australia’s National Broadband Network buzz and ‘Gov 2.0’ is our national problem.  Oops… I mean opportunity.

Please excuse my optimism slurs.  I’m from the private sector.

Vision. That’s what Barack Obama seems to have.  Issues.  That’s what we Aussies see, and particularly Tasmanians, if the recent Hobart chapter of the round tables was anything to go by.

In front of us right now is a massive opportunity to be a smarter, kinder, more connected community from government down.  Words and promises I’ve heard from many politicians in the last 2 years.

According to the gov2.net.au website its taskforce work falls into two streams.

The first relates to:

“increasing the openness of government through making public sector information more widely available to promote transparency, innovation and value adding to government information.”

The second stream:

“is concerned with encouraging online engagement with the aim of drawing in the information, knowledge, perspectives, resources and even, where possible, the active collaboration of anyone wishing to contribute to public life.”

Great! This is the stuff of dreams and is music to the ears of every web professional in the country.  But why are Tasmanians struggling with this?  Why did the round table focus so much on the issues and dangers of opening up data rather than looking for value creation?

I’ve been spruiking the benefits of opening up data systems in previous editorials and hopefully you remember views I’ve shared from visionary web leaders about the value that can be realised from mashing up data from various sources and extracting value for the community.

Let’s solve health problems, predict trends in viral movements, gain intelligence in financial decision making, improve access to services… don’t laugh, but the classic example is the issue of Google not knowing where our public toilets are in our country!

Why can’t we get this data out?

Commercial concerns about owning data sets and ‘they’re mine – you can’t have them unless you pay me’ stack up against internal issues resulting in organisations being too politically hamstrung to work out how to even open the door.  Add to these two hurdles what I’m calling a ‘cultural cringe to an open and connected world’.

Where is this cringe the worst?  At the risk of invoking a covert operation to assassinate yours truly I’ll put my hand up and say ‘at the heart of state government’.  It’s often all too hard and not within mandate or budget to have such a vision.

Thankfully the national taskforce has been led by visionary people and their function is not just to provide a report but to ‘fund initiatives and incentives which may achieve or demonstrate how to accomplish government 2.0 objectives.’

Unfortunately I guess our pessimistic Tasmanian stance in front of the taskforce means there won’t be many good pitches for concept projects and Tasmania may miss out on showing off our shiny new NBN roll out before the rest of the country stands up and capitalises on it.

Where are our Tasmanian internet thought leaders?

Who will drive the culture shift needed to embrace open data sets and create value in our new web future?

Anybody want to join me in a gov2.0 project pitch?