Senior Consultant Darren Sharp was interviewed by Federal News Radio (Washington DC) to discuss the outcomes of Collabforge's Online Engagement Review of the Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce.

You can listen to the audio here:

A great many governments across the globe are looking at what Government 2.0 can do for them.

Recently Australia's federal government commissioned a company called Collabforge to look at how well the Government 2.0 Taskforce was doing when it came to engaging with the public and being more transparent.

Darren Sharp is a Senior Consultant with Collabforge, an Australian-based company providing world-leading expertise in Web strategy & IT development for Government 2.0.

He said one of the most surprising aspects of the project had to do with the degree to which the government was willing to experiment and try new things.

"This is a government-backed inquiry happening in Australia. It was really the first time that something of this nature and scale was actually willing to embrace the whole new world of Web 2.0 and start to really use these participatory tools." He said the process demonstrated a greater degree of transparency, which meant members of the taskforce began engaging members of the public like never before.

"So, you have this really sort of candid interaction that occurred, which we haven't really ever seen before in democracies anywhere. It's really sort of an interesting time -- the transparency, the willingness for the various people that are involved to engage with the public and to really seek public input and to consult widely with various members of the community to ensure that we have better outcomes."

The government wasn't just reaching out, however; Sharp said important lessons were learned from taskforce blog posts.

"The Government 2.0 Taskforce members are all really quite well respected members of Australian industry and the cultural sector and non-profit sector. So, there was a really wide range of views that were put forward and the level of commentary that took place in the posts was also of a really high quality. So, the blog itself, I think, was a huge success.

" One of the most important lessons learned had to do with having a clearly defined strategy in the first place. Sharp said this is important because of the huge investment made by the public, and everyone else involved, online. "A lot of network value is generated on behalf of community participants -- public groups are generated and social connections are made. A huge amount of knowledge is transferred and developed. It's important to look at, when these government inquiries come to an end -- as this Taskforce has -- to look at how to either close that community off or transition it to another environment."

He said now that the Taskforce has ceased, members of the groups are looking at a transition strategy so they can implement and build on what they learned. "[We have talked about] actually building a Government 2.0 community of practice in order to maintain the level of interest and community cohesion that we've seen as the federal government now reviews the findings of the Taskforce's final report. Longer term, we were arguing for a sustainable pathway, which would then [help] the government potentially develop . . . a whole of Australian government community of practice, which would then be dedicated to actually implementing government 2.0 work in a secure environment."

Another hope would be to link federal governments across the world together. Sharp said, with increased globalization, in a way this is already occurring. "The fact [is] that we're all now, as a global community, facing incredibly important challenges related to climate change and all sorts of other issues. There are so many areas where governments can operate at a supra-national level to try and come together to resolve various crises, whether it's the global financial crisis or the climate crisis. There are also huge opportunities for agencies like the International Monetary Fund, the World Health Organization and the U.N. So, it's not just governments, it's also these international bodies that have the potential to be using these collaborative tools in new ways to engage with governments and others to generate better solutions to some of these enormous challenges we face as a global society."

Read the Final Report here (PDF)