Interactive dialogue
By Jane Garcia
Peter Chen, author of the recently released Electronic Engagement: A Guide for Public Sector Managers, says technology not only provides a strong strategy for meaningfully communicating with citizens, but can play a key role in facilitate collaboration between different sections of the public sector.
He says simple actions, such as an officer having an ongoing email discussion with another officer in another department, can break down silos and form productive government connections. Tools built to facilitate e-democracy and citizen engagement can be reused to assist with whole-of-government policy approaches and communicating across organisational chains, Dr Chen says.
“API [application programming interface] tools allow them to do online engagement, share video or collaborate. Because they’ll all be on the same platform to exchange that information they can utilise those tools collaboratively, to create organic and ad hoc groups across organisations but also importantly, between levels of government and between government and non-government actors,” he says.
“One of the things that I think is the big question about how we manage this process in the next 20 years is where we do boundary crossing between public and non-public actors about decision making and joint creation and delivery of services.
“You can see that stuff beginning to develop in parts of the community capacity building field of the public sector where governments recognise that they can’t deliver the standardised services and resolve everyone’s problems in exactly the same way so they have to bring local people or local groups or specialised groups into the design and delivery of those services. That’s going to be greatly facilitated when we can exchange information more easily, we can form ad hoc kind of groups and utilise online work to form sorts of virtual teams and things like that.”
To find out more about the current state of play with electronic engagement by the Australian public sector, and some key considerations for its future, see the article Make the connection in the June edition of Government News magazine.
An electronic copy of Electronic Engagement: A Guide for Public Sector Managers is available for free download (or a hard copy version can be ordered for a nominal fee) at epress.anu.edu.au/engage_citation.html.
