I picked up a bunch of new blog subscriptions today after going on a bit of a reading spree. The overarching subject of interest was Canadian government technology policy. The enthusiasm for change and openness within the public service is palpable. It's still early stages but so many people are talking about web 2.0 and transparency, thinking about it, and advocating for it, that I'm excited to see what develops in the coming months.

I think it's ironic that a lot of the communication and discussion around this topic is being carried out behind the government firewall on GCPedia and other forums where it's not visible to the public.

We have a formal classification system for information that allows us to designate certain sensitive documents as protected, so why not move GCPedia onto the Internet where it can benefit from public input and collaboration? I'm pretty sure nothing on there that I've seen is sensitive or really needs to be for government eyes only. Unfortunately there is still a strongly entrenched culture of secrecy and censorship within government that seems to be ingrained in many public servants. We're slowly getting there though, and I think inevitably we will move towards an environment where all knowledge is free.

To get there, we need to take some steps:

• Stop restricting public servant's access to the Internet at work. This blatant censorship is outrageous and dated!
• All public servants should be mandated to use only open source software and open data formats.
• All government works and derivatives should belong to the public (i.e. crown copyright should be abolished).
• All government data and communications should be made available to the public.

On a separate but related note, I have an idea in mind for a web application that would model the entire government org chart, displaying all public servants in a hierarchical tree that could be navigated interactively and would let you drill down and explore different branches and organizations. You'd be able to see every public servant's contact info, their position title, the description of their job and the competencies they are required to have. You'd be able to see the length of time they'd been in their position and their history in the public service, along with their bio and photo.

Each public servant would have a professional blog and status feed that they could update optionally. You'd be able to see a listing of all projects they are working on.

For each project you'd see the project budget and dates, the key contacts and authorities, the breakdown of spending, the number of contractors, the project location, etc. All projects would be plotted on a map and you'd be able to filter on a number of key criteria like dates, budget, and industry/type. There would also be a listing of all government contracts and purchases and a list of all government staffing, internal and external. There would also be records of all employee travel, training expenses, and equipment purchases. There would be reports on employee time reporting so you can see where they've billed their time to and there would be delinquency reports, cost overruns, overtime reports and all sorts of other metrics that the public could use to hold their public service accountable.

Fortunately, most of these pieces already exist, at least internally. The trick is putting them all together into one unified application with a killer user interface. The other trick will be getting approval to open it all to the public. The technology is there, the data is there. Now we just need a game plan.