The inquiry is a great place to prototype ways technology can help make gov more civilized. It’s also a good place to prototype the practices this kind of technology stack implies, and the mental models it eventually demands.

Some things that spring to mind in response to the conversation here include:

Social Objects – in one sense the suggestion here is to framework inquiry submissions as social objects, so here’s some things I’ve found helpful wrt that:

Social Net­works are built around Social Objects, not vice versa. The lat­ter act as “nodes”. The nodes appear before the net­work does.

- Hugh Macleod

How well does the potential object yield itself to breaking it down to structured data?
…
How much social gravitational pull does the object have? Complex social objects offer a lot of handles for discussion.

- Jyri Engeström

so – like we were discussing yesterday, maybe you can find a way to get an inquiry to prototype this kind of citizen interaction.. I know I’d certainly be interested to see what kind of behaviours, practices and beliefs were uncovered, challenged and created

I just got this email from the Henry Review – I’m a subscriber to their email service.

The following information has been released by Australia’s Future Tax System Review Panel:

Search function:
Australia’s Future Tax System Review website has a new search function. This function allows you to search all submissions, publications, speeches and papers on the website.

So plaudits to the review and its team. It would be nice to think we had something to do with this, but if not, perhaps even more plaudits are in order.

But the fact is that the internet is a very open place. After some early worrying about free speech in moderation debates (I’m talking about the private blog I contribute to – ClubTroppo) I’ve never bothered about the free speech argument very much in the private blogosphere – because people can have their say anywhere. With ‘official’ things the issue needs to be taken more seriously and would be here. But even so, it’s nice to know that if somone opts out of having comments activated on their submission on a government blog site, anyone, anywhere can set up a comments thread and comment away.

Btw, Stephen, I noticed you commenting on the lack of nested responses on this blog a while back. Ran into the same problem and investigated. The blog was set to three levels, and is now set to seven . It can go to ten if necessary. Then, as your comments slowly march off the right hand side of your screen you run out of nesting capability – unless you want to write your own WordPress plugin.

There should be an opt-out choice. Although that’s likely to draw questions about why things aren’t open… We can’t win all these arguments though – compromise is what gets us through.

I think openness has the potential to result in more consideration in submissions. Again, time will tell.

The two risks I see with mandating that all submissions will be available for comments from others are; this could sometimes politicise the discussion, and; it may reduce the number of submissions received where people are uncomfortable with the notion of having their submission critiqued, due to risk of embarrassment.

In the interests of not reducing the level of submissions, I’d suggest that an opt-in or opt-out process would produce the best overall outcome – but there’s pros and cons to all approaches.

Of course there may be parties who might see tactical advantage in erecting barriers to public discussion, who may therefore refuse permission if it was sought. My point is not that there is some ‘implicit’ or ‘constructive’ permission, rather that the very idea that permission of any kind is required does violence to the essential premise of a public process: that it be public.

Our trend towards a permission culture is pernicious. It adds transaction costs that makes it impossible to scale common-sense to Web 2.0, and unless overcome will derail any attempt at Gov 2.0 — hence my concern at this otherwise inconsequential issue.