By Adam Coleman

The Federal Government has launched a taskforce to investigate web 2.0's ability to make government more transparent and increase community engagement.

At the launch, Minister for Finance and Regulation, Lindsay Tanner announced the government’s plans to “harness the power of the World Wide Web to enhance open, transparent government; and to work towards government that makes the best use of the skills and knowledge of its citizenry”.

“Web 2.0 has turned the Internet from a broadcast medium into a platform for collaboration,” he said.

“That collaboration can occur between large firms and small, between individuals and firms and it should also occur between citizens and their government.”

The taskforce will be chaired by the CEO of Lateral Economics, Dr Nicholas Gruen, who concedes that governments have typically been slow at adopting the technology.

“Governments must operate through large bureaucracies. And those bureaucracies are subject to panoply of ‘due process’ requirements. They must be fair and be seen to be fair,” he said.

“They live in fear of having their activities, whether sensible or less so, being misrepresented in the heat of political battle and reported on by a media that is hungry for engaging stories to tell.

“As the law currently stands, a public servant risks imprisonment for disclosing government information without authority to do so. So it’s no surprise that governments have been relatively slow to take up Web 2.0.”

Dr Gruen said the two basic roles of the taskforce are to let “as much information as the public sector funds as possible go free on the Internet, to be used in all sorts of ways that we can’t anticipate”.

“The other task of course is to try and use the new ways in which people are using the web to really enrich the way governments govern and the way governments collaborate with citizens of Australia.”

Minister Tanner said the Taskforce will play a pivotal role in the Government’s Freedom of Information (FOI) reform agenda.

“It will help to drive a change in the way the bureaucracy has traditionally understood FOI from a ‘pull model’, where government information is only disclosed in response to FOI requests, to a ‘push model’ whereby government information is routinely and proactively made available in anticipation of demand.”

The Taskforce will advise the Government on how to:

• make government information more accessible and usable;
• establish a pro-disclosure culture around non-sensitive public sector information;
• maximise the extent to which government utilises the views, knowledge and resources of the general community; and
• build a culture of online innovation within Government to ensure that it is open to the possibilities created by new collaborative technologies, and uses them to advance its ambition to continually improve the way it operates.

US President Obama made online engagement a theme of his election campaign and is now refashioning the way US government agencies make data available online.

In the United Kingdom the Brown Government’s Power of Information Taskforce has recommended sweeping reforms to how the civil service publishes, manages and engages with information.

The Australian Taskforce’s first action has set up an online competition to design the banner and logo of the taskforce’s blog.