Dave’s tireless doggedness in chasing the Victorian Parliament has made me think that some kind of political pressure might be the key. And what better way to garner political attention than by easily digestible rankings?
Indices, rankings and league tables are used widely by thinktanks both to promote their own work and provoke discussion into a wide range of topics — corporate governance, press freedom, economic liberty and so forth.
So here’s what I’m interested in hearing from you: what factors should be included in the Wonkery Inquiry Quality Index?
Length of time for submissions? Number of steps required to submit? Availability of email / fax / phone / website contacts? All these and more could be part of it. Let us know your thoughts.
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Darn — great idea!!!!
Time between referral and opening and final reporting (see the Melbourne Water post a day ago) raises an interesting weirdness for the metric on times between announce and close and report.
Another idea (off top of head) is does it point easily to background material? (e.g. link to the legislation it reviews, ABS reports to prepare for writing, detailed prompts for parts - admittedly none do it yet - apart from that AGIMO consultation last year we both made contributions to).
Hmmm. I’ll get back on this!
Suggestion: How long before submissions (marked for publication) are published?
Rationale: Allows others to read, and either rebut or make submission incorporating those ideas - or a simple “what s/he said”
Some useful references on citizen engagement (via the good folk at AGIMO)
Citizen Engagement Principles
(Better Practice) Principles for ICT-enabled Citizen Engagement
Better Practice Checklist for Online Policy Consultation.
http://www.getinvolved.qld.gov.au which AGIMO points to as best-of-breed in Oz.
AGIMO also references Promise and Problems of E-Democracy: Challenges of Online Citizen Engagement, 2003, OECD.
Also terms of review.
In tax, the government often specifically instructs the taxboard to look at only the extent to which the legislation has worked according to its own stated rationales (that is why the taxboard is there).
Of course, everyone actually submits on policy questions anyway, which becomes an ‘FYI’ appendix to the report (and is not published) - thus the government gets the benefit of knowing what it should do without having any pressure to actually do any of it. In practice, suprise, the government cherry-picks what it wants.
Hardly best practice for those of us who don’t work on the taxboard or know someone who does!
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[…] 2008-05-29 — Dave Bath Jacques Chester stole my thunder with a great post over at "The Wonkery" about how an index might reflect the quality of a government (or departmental) inquiry. […]
[…] posting privileges, I’d like to draw the attention of Troppodillians to The Wonkery, where I am looking for ideas on how to rate and index inquiries. ShareThis This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 9:22 PM and filed under Blegs, […]
[…] "A little inquiry of our own" - Jacques Chester at "The Wonkery" (2008-05-28), which asks what makes for a decent government inquiry […]