gatewatching

You’ll remember that at the time I had a few things to say on Gatewatching.org about last December’s government consultation blog trial by the Department of Broadband, Communication, and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) last year - and a quote from my blog post back then even made it into the federal government’s report discussing the “Digital Economy” blog and other participatory initiatives - while a little earlier and before taking on his current position at the University of Wollongong, Jason was involved in developing GetUp!’s Project Democracy site which provides a social media platform enabling users to track the work of Australia’s federal senators.

Jason and I have now joined forces for a paper I’ll present at the 2009 Conference on Electronic Democracy in Vienna; titled “Citizen Consultation from Above and Below: The Australian Perspective”, we’re discussing the various approaches (top-down, bottom-up) to citizen consultation which are evident in these examples as well as in more general attempts by politicians to use the affordances of Web 2.0 technologies to engage with constituents. In advance of the conference, I’ve now posted up the paper and Powerpoint over at snurb.info.

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citizen journalism, government, journalism citizen journalism, consultation, Digital Economy blog, EDEM 2009, Future of Journalism 2009, government, myHeimat, Project Democracy

It’s been less than a fortnight since the federal government’s Department of Broadband, Communication, and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) - perhaps best known at the moment for its attempt to filter the Internet (boo) and its hardline stance against the corporate thugs at Telstra (yay) - launched its Digital Economy consultation blog. Foreshadowed in a number of earlier publications (in particular, a recommendation to trial blogs in the Australian Government Information Management Office’s report on online consultation with citizens, concluding a thought process begun under the previous mob, and Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner’s post on his blog in The Age), the blog was introduced in a guest post by Tanner - and that post alone has generated more than 750 on-site comments to date.

So, as far as community involvement and consultation is concerned, the DBCDE blog can be seen as a success - it constitutes a new venue for the still all-too-rare direct online citizen feedback to a sitting government. That said, a majority of comments on the initial blog posts appeared to deal with those two hot-button issues - Internet filtering and Telstra’s exclusion from the broadband tendering process -, quite regardless of the blog posts’ topics themselves, and that’s a significant problem. If the point of this blog is to engage in a bit of crowdsourcing, harvesting some of the better ideas put forward by commenters on the blog, and in return perhaps also harnessing satisfied participants as virtual marketers for the government’s policies, then so far it’s not yet achieving its purpose.

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Steven Conroy, blogging, broadband, government Australia, blogging, broadband, community, consultation, DBCDE, e-democracy, government, Stephen Conroy, Steven Conroy