Government in the age of Web 2.0

Now the public sector is well placed to introduce something like this. Because most public sectors, including Queensland's, have central bodies which conduct standardised surveys of employees. And as the Australian Public Service Commission (APSC) notes (2010, p. 19) citing the US Merit Systems Protection Board there is "a significant positive correlation between employee engagement scores and agency performance."

The APSC collects a wealth of data on employee engagement and indeed employee attitudes to innovation and opinions about their own workplaces. It makes that data available to agencies and uses it in its deliberations with them, but releases it in a form that avoids the ruffling of feathers by preventing the disaggregation of the data to reveal individual agency performance.

By contrast America's Office of Personnel Management publishes detailed data from its survey of government employees. And it does so in machine readable form. As a result the non-profit Partnership for Public Service takes the data and displays it on its website BestPlacesToWork.org to enable anyone to rank any of 290 federal agencies in such areas as skills/mission Match, effective Leadership, training and development, satisfaction with pay, family friendly culture and benefits and work/Life balance. And one can get breakdowns of employee satisfaction by gender, race, age and so on. So Windows on Workplaces actually exists in the public sector in the United States.

As BestPlacesToWork.org says on its website:

The rankings provide a mechanism to hold agency leaders accountable for the health of the organizations they run. They also offer a roadmap for better management and provide an early warning sign for agencies in trouble. Had Congress or government leaders paid attention to the 2003 Best Places survey, for example, they would have found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was last in the employee rankings. That was two years before FEMA's inept response to Hurricane Katrina, but at the time, few noticed.

By contrast this is the copyright notice on the Australian Public Service Commission's State of the Service Report (2010, p. ii).

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission by the Commonwealth.

But let me conclude more optimistically. Innovation is always fragile. It's fragile because it usually starts small, and it always starts without entrenched friends. It often unnerves a few and can even cause discomfort and alarm. In this environment one might think is already loaded against it, it must fight its way into the light against a thicket of institutions, regulations, practices and expectations all of which grew and established themselves without any thought for it.

Though it's been slower to emerge than some might have liked, there are signs that Government 2.0 is at least beyond that state of fragility. We know that because for its pioneers it is already becoming an indispensible part of their routine.

In less than three years since I got that e-mail from James Kliemt, the Queensland Police have shown just some of the potential of Government 2.0. It's not been a completely risk free journey, but quite early on it was clear that it had its benefits for its champion. In February this year the Sunday Mail decided to beat up a largely fabricated story about the police mistreating its puppies (will those police stop at nothing?). But now the Police didn't have to take it – like so many have to. They fought back on their Facebook page by outlining the facts to over 200,000 followers. And virtually all the commenters were somewhere between disparaging and disgusted at the paper.

Then in June this year under the heading "Police social media site a disgracebook" the Courier Mail quoted legal experts warning that the site could jeopardise convictions. I was alarmed that that might be enough to kill the site. But the Facebook page had become too valuable. Instead of shut it down the police heightened their vigilance for a period and explained the issues to their Facebook fans and their following quickly fell in behind them.

So, if I might be forgiven a Churchillian cliche, this is not the end or even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning.