An invitation to Edit > Remix > Improve Project 8

In what felt like a blink of an eye, the Federal Government’s Gov 2.0 Taskforce appeared in June last year, made its investigations and then had wrapped up by December just as quickly as it had started. From a local government perspective, you might well have ignored the whole process – particularly if you focus on the aspects of the Taskforce’s terms of reference that were really all about the changes required within the federal public service.

However, the Taskforce has actually left us with a useful legacy and has opened the door for discussion about issues, such as our ability to access to public sector information, that will have an impact at all levels of government over the longer term. The outputs from the Taskforce, including its own report and those from the 17 projects they commissioned or sponsored have all been released into the public domain.

What about right here, right now?

Of course, if you work in local government, the future is one thing: while we wait for what might happen, you are caught up with delivering services to communities and managing local issues right now, right?

If you are looking for immediate impact, take a look at PlanningAlerts.org.au, a Taskforce funded project that is up and running right now. The PlanningAlerts.org.au site is operated by a charity, the OpenAustralia Foundation, and if your council isn’t yet included in this service check out how you can get involved or make it easy for other volunteers to help.

If you are looking for another project that has immediate application, also have a look at the Taskforce Project 8, which created a series of practical resources to provide guidance to government agencies using Web 2.0 tools and provided a recommendation for a toolkit of Web 2.0 technologies.

Like all the other Taskforce projects, these materials have been published under a Creative Common Attribution 2.5 Australia license. This means you are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt this work.

In fact, as one of the primary authors behind the Project 8 guide, I would really like to encourage the Local Government Web Network community to take advantage of the Creative Commons licensing by asking you to download them and start to ‘remix’ them so they become more relevant to your situation.

While the Project 8 materials are geared towards federal agencies, much of the information, issues discussed and the overall approach it outlines is still relevant to all levels of government.  The Project 8 Online Engagement Guidelines report covers:

• A structured approach to designing an online engagement;
• A how-to for community management;
• Roles, competencies and policies to support online engagement; and
• A set of use cases and some model examples.

What needs to be remixed?

So what remixing is needed to make Project 8 useful to people working in local government? I would suggest the following areas:

1. We need to remix the Online Engagement Framework it describes, to make sure if fits how local government works.
2. We need to share ideas for different use cases, model examples and real examples about online engagement for local government, to help demonstrate how Government 2.0 can be achieved in practice.
3. We need to share information about Web 2.0 technologies – what works, what doesn’t work and the pitfalls to avoid when they are applied to local government.

In a way, I hope the guidelines are as much a way to start a conversation about Government 2.0 in local government and to provide a vehicle for knowledge sharing, as they are a pretty document to print out and stick on the shelf.

Can you guess which I’d prefer?

About me: I’m a senior consultant with Headshift (Twitter and Blog). You can follow me on Twitter or my own blog.