• Home
• About this Site
• Contact Us
• RSS Feeds
• eGovRC Toolbar

Help & Print

Help Print

Resize Text

Categories, RSS and More

Putting People at the Centre - Providing Better Community Engagement and More Effective Democracy

Strategies

• Giving people access to competing sources of information and analysis
• Creating opportunities for community consultation and debate
• Improving opportunities for policy discussion
• Protecting personal privacy

Giving People Access To Competing Sources Of Information And Analysis

Better information networks can reduce the high cost of keeping people informed, increase the community's level of trust in traditional institutions (including government and the media), and allow people to access information tailored to their needs— free of noise and manipulation.

eGovernment will make it much easier for citizens to obtain full, up-to-date information about government activities. More importantly, it will give people the tools to collect and manage information from disparate sources.

Many of these tools exist already; however, they are expensive, poorly integrated and difficult to use. Government action to promote the development of these tools may be required not only to strengthen democracy, but also because the private sector is unlikely to invest in them until their commercial potential has been demonstrated.

These tools might include:

• search engines, metadata interpreters and text analysers — these need to be optimised for discovering, collecting and ordering information according to user-defined criteria;
• storage and retrieval systems that support easy archiving and the creation of contextual links between information with little investment by the user;
• intelligent software agents that can automate the discovery, contextual linking, storage and retrieval of information;
• citizen relationship management systems and other forms of push technology; and
• feedback mechanisms that allow users to talk back to information holders, both to ask questions and correct errors.

Creating Opportunities For Community Consultation And Debate

Public policy is determined by the Government after extensive debate — in public sector forums, among Ministers, on the floor of Parliament — and consultation with interest groups which have themselves debated the issues at length.

While this process of continuous intellectual challenge and debate is essential to our democracy, individual citizens have limited chances to take part— they must either form and communicate a view in isolation or join an interest group.

eGovernment can change that by removing barriers to these processes and providing the mechanisms for individual citizens (and government and interest groups) to come together, examine proposals and exchange views.

Improving Opportunities For Policy Discussion

As well as facilitating input on government initiatives, information networks and communications technologies can be used to support policy discussions initiated by citizens themselves. The Victorian Government will continue to investigate options for online policy discussion through initiatives such as the 2001 pilot Have Your Say, which could include:

• more moderated bulletin boards and newsgroups;
• direct web- and email-based avenues to elected representatives; and
• electronic petitions, polls and surveys.

The Government's job will be to establish the infrastructure and guidelines, encourage participation and respond to questions — but not to dictate the direction of debate. The aim should be to involve ordinary Victorians and promote discussion of their interests and concerns — however local and specific they may be.

Protecting Personal Privacy

Governments must honour and protect the privacy of their citizens. This is a fundamental point that has been recently encapsulated in laws here and overseas. The advantage of these laws for citizens is obvious but they also provide governments and other organisations that collect personal information with a framework for the acceptable use and transfer of personal information. In this way, privacy laws should be used to enable greater information flow rather than hinder it.

Whilst technology developments constantly expand the opportunities to collect and misuse personal information, they also increase the ability to protect it. Governments have a responsibility to investigate and adopt privacy-enhancing technologies as part of the eGovernment agenda.

Likewise, citizens should be encouraged to exercise greater control over their own privacy with:

• education initiatives to help citizens improve the security of information held by other parties, including government;
• investigation of options for interaction with government that preserve anonymity; and
• cryptographic and authentication tools (including digital signatures) to help citizens improve the security of their communications and the information they hold themselves.

The appointment of the Victorian Privacy Commissioner in 2001, and the commencement of privacy laws in the State, should increase productive privacy debate and accelerate development of these tools.

Last updated: 20 October 2011

Search, Login and Options