Undermining FOI and Open Government

The primary purpose of this post was (and still is), to provide an update on my freedom of information request to Comcare, the Australian Public Service Commission and there Australian Taxation Office. My request concerned the monitoring of OZloop and was quite detailed. If you haven't read it already, you might like to do so …

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The purpose of this post is to provide a further update my post entitled FOI Update : The Pro Disclosure Culture of the Australian Taxation Office.

 

In the interest of being open about freedom of information requests it is appropriate to share what appears to be the emerging position of the Taxation Office concerning the request to release the results of…

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Yesterday President Barack Obama launched the Open Government Partnership.



Fantastic for sure >>> http://www.opengovpartnership.org/



And great to see Australia represented by our Information Commissioner, John McMillan.



So momentum is clearly building.



Now imagine, if you will, that this means that government is progressing at 70 kilometres per hour. Now imagine that public service departments… Continue

So the push is on for proactive freedom of information in the the APS.



The primary means by which the community will access information released under FOI is via the web. Which means we need to attend to design and avoid the trap of simply publishing link farms. We should also, I suggest, have a consistent design across all APS agencies. To do otherwise is a recipe for confusion.



I have had a look around the place and have found a great example courtesy of the U.K Ministry… Continue

A key part of the amendments to Australia's Freedom of Information Act is the Information Publication Scheme. The scheme also contains categories of information under the umbrella Optional Information.

 

This got me thinking and so I posed the following questions to some of my colleagues:

What information do we currently not publish on the internet…

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In my post on The public service in a Wikileaks world I ended by suggesting that what was needed was not just the usual Australian Public Service notion of reform, but a renaissance. So what I will do over the next week is put together the building blocks of that idea. I intend doing so by adding to…

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This post started life on the blog set up by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner to seek comment on information policy. Pay the OAIC blog a visit. They are eager for people to contribute.

 

In terms of creating a pro-disclosure and pro-innovation culture across the public service I have expressed the view that a secure and anonymous facility for public servants to disclose information concerning the…

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As a result of putting up posts on this topic I have compiled and added to the three posts in order to provide a discussion paper for people to use as they wish. It has been a bit of a journey.

 

This purpose of the paper is to explore the work of Wikileaks, the ideas of Julian Assange and identify the implications for the public service.

 

 

The impact of social media technologies, the changing expectations of citizens, as well as attempts to reform the…

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In my first post on the issues raised by the Wikileaks phenomenon I stated that,

 

"Taking all that into account it is not a long bow to draw to say that the public service needs to start to consider how it is going to operate in a much more open world. Yes, many would argue we have come a fair way. For example, with the declaration of open government. However, how open is open…

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To begin to understand the significance of Wikileaks for the public service we need to understand the dynamic at work. It is all to easy to fall into the trap of simply taking one side or the other - which pretty well sums of the behaviour of the institutional players so far.

 

And what better way to do that than look at some of what has been said.

 

“To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have…

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Like many people I have been following the work of Wikileaks. In particular I've been doing a lot of research to get my head around the ideas of Julian Assange. You might like to check out Swedish Television's Jesper Huor and Bosse Lindquist rough-cut of the first in-depth documentary on WikiLeaks and the people behind it. WikiRebels: The Documentary | WikiLeaks & Julian Assange

 

In a lot of what…

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