Getting on with Government 2.0 - Department of Finance and ...

Freemium
GovHack
Hacking
Hashtag
Information Product
Interoperability
Malware
Mashup
Metadata
Online consultation
Open source software
A business model involving giving products away to some users while selling it to
others.
An event sponsored by the Government 2.0 Taskforce and held in Canberra on
30 and 31 October 2009. It brought together a range of developers and encouraged
them to create new mashups using government data.
Not necessarily a negative term, hacking can refer to the act of building new
applications or modifying existing ones with the goal of encouraging openness,
sharing and collaboration.
Used on Twitter, a hashtag is a small string of text preceded by a hash character
which indicates that a tweet is relevant to some given topic. Hashtags are used as
searching tools, so that a user can mark a tweet as falling under a given topic and
search for tweets featuring hashtags which match their interests.
An item that has been derived from one or more sources of information to meet a
specific purpose. 349
Refers to the ability of two different systems to share data with one another. In an
online sense interoperability can be encouraged through the use of open standards
to facilitate data exchange between different systems or platforms.
Malicious software designed to infiltrate a computer system without the owner’s
informed consent.
A web page or application that takes data and combines it either with other data or
other web services to create something new. 350 For example, a mashup may take data
about the location of government services such as Medicare and Centrelink offices
and then plot their locations and other associated data on a map.
Metadata is structured information that describes and allows us to find, manage,
control and understand other information. 351 Metadata provides context to data
and can make data easier to reuse and combine with other data. Metadata can also
include information about the quality of the data.
Online consultations or e-consultations refer to an exchange between government
and citizens using the internet. Generally, an agency consults a group of people
to get their thoughts on an issue when a project or a policy is being developed or
implemented. This enables governments to draft more citizen-centred policy.
Open source software is built under a development process where the source code
is freely available and can be modified and redistributed by users. It commonly
uses what Eric S. Raymond described as a ‘bazaar model’, where software is
collaboratively and openly developed online, as opposed to a ‘Cathedral’ model
where development is centralised and not open. Open source software differs from
‘free software’ by emphasising this collaborative development model rather than the
rights which should be associated with software.
349 Derived from http://www.walis.wa.gov.au/resources/WALIS_glossary.
350 For examples, see http://mashupaustralia.org/.
351 http://www.finance.gov.au/Publications/australian-government-technical-interoperability-framework/glossary.html.
Engage: <strong>Getting</strong> on with Government 2.0 | report of the government 2.0 taskforce
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