Government 2.0: Epic Fail

Daniel Filan | August 18, 2009

This, and the Government 2.0 taskforce, is part of the Government’s movement to enter the electronic era. It wants to use modern web features like forums and blogs to get online and to try to connect more with us. Problem is it’s failing miserably.

 

Let’s take the Australian Youth Forum, which aims to be the voice of youth, which it defines as people aged 15-24.

 

How many people in that age group actually know about this Australian Youth Forum? It’s targeted at me, and I’d never heard of it until I started researching this piece. Obviously the Government’s outreach isn’t working.

 

Are the ideas actually going to be implemented? The site says that the proposals will be “taken into consideration in the context of Australian Government policy development”. What does this really mean? Not much. It’s not a guarantee, it’s not a commitment, it’s not anything.

 

Finally, why is the whole site itself only targeted to one small sector of the Australian community? Why not the Australian not-quite-young-but-definitely-not-middle-aged forum? The Australian middle-aged-but-not-admitting-it forum? The Australian Old forum?

 

But at least this website actually involves the Australian people telling their opinions to our government. It could be worse – it could be the Prime Minister’s Blog. Kevin Rudd, the prolific blogger with two whole posts under his name, has decided that he needs another medium in which to pour out the government line on health care and climate change.

 

On that site, you can read insightful comments including a claim that 50% of the population don’t believe in anthropogenic climate change, and that this means that the government should not legislate to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

 

Evidently, these are the best uses that the government can find for ‘Web 2.0’. But when I read them, I realise how absolutely, unfailingly, mind-numbingly boring it all is. What does the government want to do with all of this? Make sure the public knows how dull our political systems really are? The government isn’t using technology as well as it can.

 

We doesn’t need more blather from our government; we’ve already had enough of that via every other medium. What the public needs is real interaction with their government, some way of talking to them about the big issues.

 

The Australian Youth Forum does have a bit of citizen-government interaction, but it’s not enough: there should be a discussion forum like most ones on the internet where the electorate and their elected officials can discuss important issues and have their voices heard.

 

Due to the potential interest factor, this could really work. Take Fail Blog – a site with amusing pictures of stupidity and incompetence. This site is visited by 0.1% of internet users. This is 200 times the visitors of pm.gov.au, and 5,000 times the visitors of youth.gov.au, the home site of the Australian Youth Forum. Why is it so much more popular? People have a reason to go there apart from some vague sense of civic duty.

 

The challenge for any government is how to harness our interest to achieve the sorts of participation levels of popular blogs and forums when the material they have to play with is essentially dry and boring to most of us, whilst still being serious and relevant.

 

A government forum that allowed anyone to post any policy idea they wanted, as long as it wasn’t  offensive, might begin to establish genuine communication with the people; one of the most important aspects of democracy.

 

Until then, we’ll be stuck with the Kevin07 Twitter account and a government wondering why it’s so out of touch.