GovHack Ideas
Is your head brimful of ideas, and want to encourage others? Then suggest some hack ideas here.
- Wordpress, and other blogging system Government 2.0 plugins
- Automatic speech to text conversion of ABC radio programs (and other audio), with crowd sourced editing
- Extreme make over of the Australian Law Reform Commission website
- use foursquare or similar to encourage positive social behaviour (e.g. Public Transport use)
- add your own suggestions here - who knows someone may just build them!
Does lobbying work?
- http://lobbyists.pmc.gov.au/lobbyistsregister/index.cfm
- https://www.tenders.gov.au/?event=public.CNSON.search
- http://abr.business.gov.au/content.aspx?page=XMLWebService
Determine if how many lobbyist clients are getting government contracts and what value. Flag anything contracted to a company that is doing lots of lobbying.
This will probably show nothing because the real juice comes from related parties. If only ASIC data wasn't paywalled you could find contracts awarded to associates of clients of lobbyists...
Maybe we could just have a lobbyist calender for each minister?
Visualisation of what the government does
In order for citizens to engage effectively with gov, they need access to the range of the government's activity. It would be great to be able to browse (rather than search) the full set of government activities via a visualisation – a view that shows us government functions as a whole, and enables us to explore the component parts and then link through to relevant web-based material.
This is a complex undertaking (especially if it includes state and local government tiers) but in the spirit of agility could begin simply. Useful starting points (data sets) might include:
- Agency data from the National Archives (the administrative history of the Australian Government)
- Administrative Arrangements Orders – which Minister is responsible for what (eg see Wordle tagcloud)
- AGIFT functions
- Section 51 of the Constitution (Legislative powers of the Parliament – although this would need to take into account all the subsequent legislation, amendments, repeals etc)
- AGLS metadata? AGIMO data that feeds into the search engine at http://australia.gov.au/
- other data sets and taxonomies?
The idea of focussing on .gov activities is good. One suggestion re: inquiries. Perhaps we could have a listing of all (three layers of .gov) inquiries; here. http://www.australia.gov.au/have-your-say/public-consultations Of course it would be great to think that one day we might have govs who collaborated in their inquiries, but that's pushing it.