[Osia-members] GovHack (and Open Government) could be more impactful if they learned from Open Source communities

[steve jenkin]

Cameron's “playbook’ idea is exceeding good. I wish it well.

For those playing along at home, a list of Cameron’s recommendations, to make scanning Jack’s comments easier [added below]

> Recommendation 1: We should be clear about the purpose and value of GovHack. We should prominently promote messages like “GovHack aims to contribute to the government’s Innovation Agenda by encouraging and facilitating ingenuity with government’s open data.”
> 
> Recommendation 2: Let’s measure and report on the realised innovation resulting from GovHack. Let’s then assess results and work out ways to improve GovHack’s impact on innovation.
> 
> Recommendation 3: GovHack sponsors’ should aim to realise true value by helping to mature innovative ideas into reality.
> 
> Recommendation 4: Sponsors should consider formally setting up cadetships or project development opportunities as awards.
> 
> Recommendation 5: Government should define a best practices guide for publishing data services, and then follow this guide.
> 
> Recommendation 6: Agencies should measure the usability and usefulness of their datasets, assess and adjust accordingly. GovHack provides an opportunity to measure these metrics.
> 
> Recommendation 7: Let’s build an Open Government Playbook.

I could only find on-line “AGOSP" (Australian Government Online Service Point), not Jack's AGOSSP acronym.


A partial answer to Cameron’s video comments on implementing “Open Govt” principles:

 - there is no direct or measurable reward or benefit to IT workers or managers, so why would they waste time & effort on it?

 - Government agencies are almost universally isolated, iconoclastic silos with limited migration and no contact with other IT Depts and often with other internal IT groups. The frontline troops never get to see things ‘done better’ or experience the benefits of collaboration.

The DTA’s (Digital Transformation Agency) “Principles” are great, they cannot be faulted, but by themselves are just more words.
IMHO, they lack the organisational motivators and processes to create real, lasting change.
A Cultural Change required is to add “Open Source” to the “Nobody ever got fired for buying ….” (IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, ….)
You’ll know the DTA has done its job when its normal practice for frontline staff to first ask “what’s the Open Source product most used for this?"

I’ve yet to see an IT Dept where the staff aren’t frantically busy and don’t feel constantly overloaded.
There’s ‘no time’ to fix things or address “out of scope issues” - they are mostly too busy fighting brushfires to find & fix the flamethrower creating them.

Bringing up topics like “Professionalism”, “Quality” and “Improvement” with workers is only met with groans - they’ve had repeated bad experiences with “Management by Fad” and aren’t interested in anything that gets in the way or slows them in meeting the latest deadline.
“Quality” is often confused with “massive bureaucratic processes” and used to beat-up on people or to shift blame. (“you signed off on this, you’re at fault not me”)

A wider view:

For 10-15 years, I was “parachuted in” to these environments and developed a personal process described in “Digging Out” (Turning around challenged Technical Projects/Environments) if anyone is interested.

If you think these problems are limited to Government, or any level of Government, you’re wrong.
This is right across the Industry.

I found the worst dysfunction in the private sector, both large and small.
Increasingly we’re seeing businesses fail, including large Enterprises, because of their I.T.
Either directly like “OneTel” where the billing system lost call-records leading to massive unbilled ‘receivables’ & collapse,
or like TNT, which eviscerated its I.T. Dept and destroyed the operational efficiency & capacity of its core business units, spiralling down to collapse.

The worst example I saw of I.T. Systems problems was a not-for-profit of 40-50 people. The next step for them was complete failure and they were close: there was a 2 day outage (no work by anyone in the org) because a single drive failed on a critical system, which was also out of support, that wasn’t noticed or replaced in over six months. There no in-house expertise in that O/S nor any rebuild/recover documentation, nor a useful bare-metal recovery image.

regards
steve jenkin


> On 19 Aug 2017, at 17:48, Jack Burton <jack at saosce.com.au> wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 2017-08-19 at 07:45 +1000, Cameron Shorter wrote: 
>> Hi guys,
>> 
>> I attended the recent GovHack event and have written an article about it 
>> which has been published. I've suggested that  GovHack and Open 
>> Government could be more impactful (rather than just busy) if they drew 
>> some lessons from Open Source:
>> 
>> http://www.themandarin.com.au/82472-making-govhack-open-government-more-impactful/
> 
> Thanks Cameron for pointing that out to everyone. You raise some very
> good points in the article.

R1: We should be clear about the purpose and value of GovHack.

R2: Let’s measure and report on the realised innovation resulting from GovHack. 

R3: GovHack sponsors’ should aim to realise true value by helping to mature innovative ideas into reality.

R4: Sponsors should consider formally setting up cadetships or project development opportunities as awards.

> Your first four recommendations in particular should make a substantial
> difference to GovHack itself (#1 to quantity of participants, the next
> three to quality of outcomes), if implemented.
> 

R5: Government should define a best practices guide for publishing data services, and then follow this guide.

> I'm in two minds about your R5 -- personally I see benefit, rather than
> detriment, in diversity of APIs (including protocols & standards for
> data access), as healthy competition tends to foster innovation (and
> whilst the goal is clearly to encourage innovation in the use of open
> data, why not foster innovation in how it's published too?) ... but I
> agree with you 100% on the importance of having clear documentation for
> them.
> 

R 6: Agencies should measure the usability and usefulness of their datasets, assess and adjust accordingly. 

R 7: Let’s build an Open Government Playbook.

> Whilst more general in scope, your R6 & R7 are well worth pursuing too.
> 
> It's interesting to note the overlap in part between your R7 (in
> relation to open government specifically) and some of the comments that
> Carl & I made in our submission to PM&C in January (in relation to
> software in government generally -- see sections 2.1, 4.1 & 5.2 and
> recs 2, 9 & 11).
> 
> Clearly it's high time to replace the ageing (and rather toothless)
> AGOSSP -- and I don't see any reason why its replacement could not
> speak to community based initiatives like GovHack, along the lines you
> suggest, in addition to embodying some of the procurement policy &
> process reforms that Carl & I suggested.
> 
> Always good to see AU FOSS industry players making sensible
> recommendations on improving government's approach to FOSS, open
> standards & open data -- keep up the good work!
> 
> Regards,
> 
> 
> -- 
> Jack Burton FACS CP <jack at saosce.com.au>
> --
> Director, Saosce Pty Ltd (OSIA Member #50)
> Company Secretary, Safecoms Cyber Security Pty Ltd
> --
> 
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--
Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA

stevej098 at gmail.com
http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin