Government 2.0 – how it relates to Archives 2.0

Adrian Cunningham

Government 2.0 Policy Agenda

• Commitment to pro-disclosure, transparency, citizen engagement & integrity in public administration

• FOI/RTI reforms – Information Commissioners + proactive release of information via ‘publication’

• Encourage reuse of public sector information as an enabler of innovation and economic growth

• Model: UK Power of Information Taskforce http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/reports/power_of_information.aspx

Government 2.0 Taskforce, 2009

• Chair: Dr Nicholas Gruen,

• Economist and blogger

Taskforce Terms of Reference• Make Govt information more accessible and usable –

pro-disclosure culture

• Make Govt more consultative, participatory & transparent

• Build a culture of online innovation in Govt

• Promote collaboration across agencies

• Identify policies and frameworks to assist the Information Commissioner

• Identify/trial demonstrator initiatives

Main Taskforce Issues

• Encouraging/enabling citizen engagement [including recordkeeping challenges]

• Opening access and reuse of public sector information [PSI broadly defined to include public cultural collections]

• Focus on overcoming cultural, economic, legal and administrative barriers to adoption (ie. not technical)

Issues Paper: OECD Principles for PSI

• Open regimes of access to and reuse of PSI

• Availability of information asset lists

• Ensuring quality and integrity of information

• Long term preservation of information

• Minimise copyright & pricing barriers

• Use best practices

Issues Paper: Key Issues• Fostering a culture of openness and online engagement

in what is usually a risk averse culture that must comply with public service values and codes of conduct

• Open licensing regimes – eg. Creative Commons

• The Semantic Web or Web 3.0 (and metadata)

• Open standards and data formats

• Privacy, security & risk management

• Recordkeeping challenges

• Copyright Administration

Projects Sponsored by Taskforce• Economic value of PSI for cultural institutions

• Enhancing the discoverability and accessibility of PSI

• Early leadership in the Semantic web

• Identifying barriers in agencies to Web 2.0 take-up

• Whole of Government information publication scheme

• Copyright and intellectual property issues

• Online engagement guidance & Web 2.0 toolkit

• Preservation of Web 2.0 content + recordkeeping issues

• Govt 2.0 governance and institutions

Three Laws of Open Govt Data

1. If it can’t be spidered or indexed, it doesn’t exist

2. If it isn’t available in open and machine readable format, it can’t engage

3. If a legal framework doesn’t allow it to be repurposed, it doesn’t empower

[Source : David Eaves’ blog]

Key Recommendations• #6: Make PSI open, accessible & reusable

• #7: Copyright issues

• #8: Information publication scheme

• #12: ‘Definition of a Commonwealth Record’– Records & 3rd party social networking sites– Use of endorsed records and IM standards

Why does Govt 2.0 matter to us?

• Web 2.0 needs content (in context) – and we have loads of hidden and under-exploited content just waiting to be liberated and used for public good purposes.

• For public sector information to be openly available it firstly has to be properly created, described, managed and maintained.

• Govt 2.0 promises to drive a rediscovery of long-undervalued skills in information management, authenticity, integrity, contextualisation and discovery – these are our core skills.

Sounds good, but what about Archives 2.0?

• Is it a brave new world, hype or the end of the world as we know it?!

• Web 2.0 is all about being open, engaged, interactive, democratic, collaborative and user-generated content

• Traditional archives are all about being closed, authoritative/authoritarian and staffed by ‘God-archivists’ – users are instinctively mistrusted (sweeping generalisation!)

• So we have a potential culture clash – do we embrace Archives 2.0 and reinvent ourselves to seize the opportunities, or do we cling desperately to our old professional certainties and become irrelevant?

Eric Ketelaar has proposed the ‘peoples archives’

• Instead of being ignored, marginalised and irrelevant, Web 2.0 and Archives 2.0 should be the making of archives/records professionals

• Revolutionising access to, use & appreciation of archives• Recognising that everyone is a recordkeeper – everyone has

stories to tell and preserve• Strategically aligning ourselves with the push to greater

government openness, transparency and accountability (eg. UK OPSI part of TNA; USA OGIS part of NARA)

• Applying our skills to the challenge of Web 2.0 recordmaking and recordkeeping

Liberating Heritage Collections

• Digitisation (including funding models)• Discovery metadata, including user-tagging – and

making our metadata harvestable by search engines• Crowdsourcing user-contributed content• Archival ‘mashups’• Engaging with user communities• Copyright issues (risk m’gment – eg. ‘orphan works’)• Privacy issues (risk management)• Losing control or building value through collaboration?• Crowdsourcing appraisal processes?

Capturing and preserving the evidence of Government 2.0

• Good information and records management is a prerequisite for effective ongoing access to PSI

• In a world of mashups, wikis and information repurposing there is a need to ensure accurate and authentic ‘original’ records as a guarantee against misuse

• Need to reassert some fundamental principles, while also reinventing many of our practices and mindsets

• Know your recordkeeping requirements and who is responsible; use open standards; and manage for technological obsolescence

Conclusions

• This is both a daunting and an exciting time, the challenges of Web2.0 recordkeeping are considerable and expectations of us are higher than ever – if we don’t meet these expectations we risk becoming irrelevant.

• If we seize the opportunities using our unique skills, we stand on the threshold of a new and more relevant professional mission.

• We hold the keys to unlocking the latent information wealth of the nation – are we brave enough to use those keys for better governance and a better society?

Final Thought

• Is Jenkinson’s ‘physical and moral defence of the record’ still a valid archival mission in the age of Archives 2.0?