The Blog Stump

Do you have an idea for using government information that you’d love to have but you can’t get now? Would you like to win $5,000 for your favorite nonprofit? Well, all you have to do is come up with a
great idea for the nonprofit sector to use government information to make the world a better place. The contest details are below.
Who’s behind this? The Gov 2.0 Task Force, appointed by the Australian Government.
What’s Gov 2.0? It’s about governments being more open with information and using social media to communicate with the public, so they are more accountable.
So how does this contest work? The Taskforce will select the best idea(s) for using public sector information in a nonprofit/charity setting and award a cash donation of $5,000 to the charity/not-for-profit organisation of the winner’s choice.
What happens after that? The winner(s) (or their nominated not-for-profit organisation) will get help from Connecting Up Australia to scope their idea as a project proposal to the Taskforce.
What does that mean? It means that your idea may get funding from the Gov 2.0 Project Fund to be put into action.
How long have we got? You’ve got until Friday 30 October, so hurry. But don’t panic, you just need to generate the idea at this stage, but you’ll need to provide some broad details to allow the Task Force to make a decision.
What sort of government information are you talking about? Have a look here for some ideas of what’s already out there. But we’re really looking for great ideas about government information that the nonprofit sector could use to make a difference. We’ve also included a light-hearted example to kick-start your brain-storming but the only limit is your imagination.
What other smart ideas for Gov 2.0 have others thought of, just to get us started?  Check out some of these ideas  for a bit of inspiration
OK, we have an idea – how do we enter? Go to the Idea Scale site, sign up, and then submit your idea.
While you’re there, you can vote on other people’s ideas as well.
Don’t forget, the contest closes Friday 30 October, so get your skates on!

Andrew Denton brought us that ironic song in 1992 to satirise one of the more depressing aspects of our occasional cringe factor as a nation. Having returned from there on my most recent trip, there are many reasons to feel envious of our cousins across the ditch but I’ll mention a nonprofit sector one here. While we as a nation have mucked around for years playing ‘will we-won’t we’ on some sort of industry regulator/support mechanism, the Kiwis have just got on and done it with their Charities Commission - Komihana Kaupapa Atawhai . Yes, it lacks perfection, like most things in life, and its progress has been slower than many had hoped. However, now they’ve broken the back of the major registration phase they are looking to do some very progressive things with that data and look at how they can support the sector more effectively. I know our Productivity Commission people have been over for a chat. Let’s hope they were listening well. After all, gee, if we can’t beat New Zealand ….

There’s some potentially great work emanating from the Gov 2.0 Task Force .

According to its website:

“The Taskforce is made up of policy and technical experts and entrepreneurs from government, business, academia, and cultural institutions. Its work falls into two streams. The first relates to increasing the openness of government through making public sector information more widely available to promote transparency, innovation and value adding to government information. The second stream is concerned with encouraging online engagement with the aim of drawing in the information, knowledge, perspectives, resources and even, where possible, the active collaboration of anyone wishing to contribute to public life.Importantly, the Taskforce will not just provide advice. It will be able to fund initiatives and incentives which may achieve or demonstrate how to accomplish government 2.0 objectives.”

Disclosure statement: My organisation, Connecting Up Australia, may bid for projects within the fund initiatives and one of the Task Force members, Lisa Harvey, is a member of our Board.

Well, Senator Conroy has finally unveiled his “Digital Economy Future Direction Paper” and (surprise, surprise) not a single mention of the nonprofit sector in 103 pages.

He calls this a ‘roadmap for Australia’s Digital Economy Future’ but for the nonprofit and charity sector it’s simply a dry gulch. In over 100 pages the nonprofit sector, employer of over 600,000 Australians, gets not a single mention. We can only assume that Senator Conroy and the Government don’t regard Australia’s 700,000 nonprofits, of whom 35,000 are employers, as worthy of any consideration.

We see digital capacity programs for government, for business, for education and seemingly every other interest group and no doubt all very worthy. We see $43b to build a national broadband network. But we don’t see a single cent for a sector that accounts for over 3% of Australia’s GDP. Before the last election Senator Conroy told the nonprofit sector he supported their technology aspirations. Instead we have seen this Government systematically disengage itself from the sector from the moment it came to power and that’s simply not good enough.

These are the organisations that care for children, support the unemployed, look after the aged, protect the environment, run thousands of sports clubs and offer services in all the other areas that hold our society together. When volunteer hours are included, they contribute more to Australia’s GDP than the mining industry. Yet the Government obviously sees them as totally unworthy of participating in the digital revolution.

The Australian Government put its toe into the water of online transparency last week with an interesting development called Gov 2.0 . According to its website, “The Taskforce will advise Government on structural barriers that prevent, and policies to promote, greater information disclosure, digital innovation and online engagement including the division of responsibilities for, and overall coordination of, these issues within government.”

It’s even going to have a few bob to chuck around via its Project Fund .

Great to see some familar faces on the Task Force , including 3 of the speakers at Connecting Up o9: Lisa Harvey, Martin Stewart-Weeks, and Alan Noble, although obviously the bulk are public servants charged with actually implementing the ambitious agenda set for them.

And therein lies the rub. All of us have seen Federal and State Governments turn FOI policies into Freedom FROM Information when the going gets tough. Let’s hope Gov 2.0 doesn’t fall at the first firewall. We will watch with interest, as I’m sure our US collegaues will be watching Data.gov , a similar inititative emerging from the Obama administration.

In October 2008, we invited Australian charities and nonprofits to take part in a survey similar to one we conducted as a part of the NNIC project in 2006. Once again we had a fantastic response, with over 1,000 organisations of all sizes and from all over Australia logging on to record their information. A very special thank you to all of those who took time out of your busy working lives to complete the survey. And once again it was a pleasure to work with Digital Business Insights and utilize their survey methodologies and benchmark tools.

 Briefly, the survey has found that Australia’s charities and nonprofit organisations are missing out on opportunities presented by the social web and are unhappy with software that does not meet their needs. Those that have  embraced the digital future are experiencing gains in productivity but some still face major challenges.

Those organisations who are ‘ahead of the game’ are using online banking and purchasing more than they were two years ago when we last surveyed. They are also taking up internet-based phone systems, raising more funds online, and adopting some new software. However, they are not moving towards improved Customer/Member Relationship Management (CRM) systems or significantly participating in the ‘social web’ revolution via sites such as Facebook, blogs, RSS feeds, and mobile technologies. This is worrying because it risks not engaging the next generation of donors, volunteers, employees, sponsors and supporters.

Those ‘behind the game’ seem content to stay there and deliver ‘business as usual’. While that may be appropriate in some specialised circumstances, the increasing trend toward lower levels of support from government and increasing reliance on public fund-raising, corporate sponsorship, and private philanthropy will mean these organisations will find it increasingly difficult to get on anyone’s radar when they need support.

 The survey outcomes throw out a real challenge to software developers in that charities and nonprofits are between two and four times more likely than other sectors of the economy to conclude that the software they have does not meet their needs. However the most worrying result from this survey is that despite the sector spending up to an estimated $500m annually on technology, three out of five charities and nonprofits are not spending a cent on technology-related training.

 We’d now like to invite you to:

1.      Download the two parts of the Report – one from Digital Business Insights reporting the main survey data and providing some excellent case studies on technology implementation,  and one from us here at Connecting Up Australia that provides some analysis of the outcomes and some recommendations for the future. Visit here to access the reports  http://www.connectingup.org/NFPtechnologysurvey2008

2.       The data from the survey has also been fed into a terrific new service we are offering Australia’s nonprofits – Are We There Yet? (or AWTY  for short) . AWTY is an online tool that allows you to benchmark your technology capacity against similar Australian nonprofits of your size and in your specialised area of service . This in turn makes the benchmark data even richer over time, as more organisations participate. Give AWTY a try at http://www.db-insights.net/

Contact details for feedback are at http://www.connectingup.org/NFPtechnologysurvey2008  or simply comment on this post.

At a time when we are already seeing people laid off around the country, it has struck me as bizarre that this also includes those in nonprofits and charities. If ever there was a time to be stimulating this sector, it is now. Having no sooner thought that than I came across a recent article from the Brookings Institute, ‘Don’t Forget the Human Infrastructure’, which urges President-elect Obama to include the sector in any economic stimulus package. Sure, it’s American in its focus but the essential arguments are sound and I hope Kevin and Wayne get the message.

I rooly and truly promise not to be cynical about this exercise and my organisation will be putting in a submission. But I do wonder why they simply didn’t dust off the Charities Commission enquiry of a few years ago. You know the one, where we decided only Poms and Kiwis would do something as logical as that, and we limped back to the Stone Age.

Mind you this one is more about what charities and nonprofits should be disclosing to the public, just like those nice men from Firepower, Visy, Westfield etc are required to do.

Seriously, on 18 June 2008, the Senate referred the Disclosure regimes for Charities and not-for-profit organisations to the Senate Standing Committee on Economics for report by the last sitting day of November 2008. The inquiry will examine:
(a) the relevance and appropriateness of current disclosure regimes for charities and all other not-for-profit organisations;
(b) models of regulation and legal forms that would improve governance and management of charities and not-for-profit organisations and cater for emerging social enterprises; and
(c) other measures that can be taken by government and the not-for-profit sector to assist the sector to improve governance, standards, accountability and transparency in its use of public and government funds.
The closing date for submissions is Friday 29 August 2008.
Notes to assist in preparing submissions are available from the website or telephone the Secretariat on 02 6277 3540, fax: 02 6277 5719, or e-mail at the above address.

I’ll have more to say on thus subject as the process unfolds. In the meantime I look forward to the Senate Inquiry into how the Government can better fund and support the charity and nonprofit infrastructure that is expected to carry everything that’s in the too hard or too expensive basket for governments.

Final note: I once posited a model of government funding to the nonprofit sector that equated it with the domestic violence cycle. It went something like this:
Phase 1 - Honeymoon - We love you and you’ll always have what you need. (Smile for the media)
Phase 2- What do you mean you’ve spent all that money already?
Phase 3 - How dare you tell people we treat you badly. Whack!
Phase 4- Come back, we need you and we promise we’ll never do it again.
Phase 5 - Reconciliation - We love you and we’ll do our best for you in difficult circumstances. (Smile for the media unit photographer)
And so on.

But with a climate change for the future for working families I’ve got nothing to be cynical about now.