Dr Owen Cameron, Program Manager, CCRSPI (Climate Change Research Strategy for Primary Industry) Coordinator, Primary Industry Adaptation Research Network speaking on "New media and NRM policy consultation- meeting, listening and hearing to enhance service delivery" as part of the proceedings from the Public Sphere event on Government 2.0, hosted by Senator Kate Lundy on the 22nd June 2009. The slides for this talk are availabe at: http://www.slideshare.net/greebo/public-sphere-gov-20-owen-cameron The rest of the videos from the day are linked from the schedule at: http://www.katelundy.com.au/2009/05/29/public-sphere-2-open-government-policy-and-practice/ All slides are available at: slideshare.net/event/public-sphere-2-government-20-policy-and-practice Transcription below: Good morning everyone, first thing to start I'd like to thank Pia for all her help in getting here and I'm actually going to talk about how you actually use new media to align policy objectives with service delivery. And I'm going to try and avoid acronyms and buzz words but I'm sure a few will filter through. Firstly where I wanted to start, if we're talking in the context of national resource management one of the key things that's happened over the last 15 years, has been the emergence of two trend and their impacts on how people can protest, and protest together. The first one is we're increasingly realising the ability to shared experiences, and I think that can be tracked back to the real conference when a lot of people got together and realised they could share information, and what they would do. We're also seeing the emergence of new media which allows them to translate that data and get it out to new audiences. The impacts of these two trends together in terms of social groups and their interactions with Government, is that it's become faster to identify and communicate failures over service delivery. It's easier to increase your share of voice demanding accountability from Government, and we've got more media outlets looking for new stories and distributing these through new channels. Right through this talk I'm going to try to give you some practical examples, a quick one here is protesting over dam construction. That's something I worked on about 15 years ago, at the real conference NGOs got together, they realised they had the same concerns, common causes, they were seeing the same policy issues. They shared information, worked with the BBC and made a radio program doing case studies on dam development in a number of countries, and highlighting the same policy issues. The net effect was that it was a more effective protest, they got more participation and they got more reach into the media. My belief is that these new trends have put us in a position, where we're seeing a new state of accountability. Again, another example, the climate change protests in the city of London and the role of flickr. For those you who are unfamiliar there was a number of protests a few months ago, various protesters were injured, initial reports blamed that on the protest groups. But then out of the blue a most unlikely hero, an investment banker from the US, sent in some content he'd taken on his mobile phone. This changed the nature of media reporting and actually changed Governments position. The initial reports were refuted, and Government agents were held more accountable. If we think of the flow here, content comes in from CCTV and mobile phones, it's being distributed through the channels of the internet using the flickr medium with specified images. And the net effect on the media is that this content has shifted nature of analysis and forced disclosure. We're seeing a shift where initially technology enabled the state to hold citizens accountable with CCTV being a great example, now citizens in many ways are able to push back, here the mobile phone has been the enabling technology. And my belief is that this enabled accountability is particularly important when we're looking at national resource management, because that's a sector where issues operate across political cycles, jurisdictional boundaries and geophysical boundaries, they are complicated and they don't fit in well with electoral cycles. The key message I wanted to get across is that Government can either be proactive or it can be reactive. If you want to be proactive, you can think that new ICT media are supporting alignment and alignment greatly enhances our ability to do effective service delivery. Policy design is supported by delivering an ICT strategy where the channels best meet consultation and communication needs. Implementation, effective implementation which is getting pretty close to tot-ology these days, is supported by alignment with an architecture that optimises service delivery in a cost effective manner. The outcome is that the new ICT media that your all experts in, and I'm trying to use, deliver many opportunities for Government to inno