The Culture of Governments govern just how willing they are to share, what they consider 'their' information. As a Records Manager in an Australian State Government I wish the Information Act was more highly regarded. It is still playing second fiddle to financial considerations. So often it is said we can't afford to change to open source or put all our information on to our EDRM system.

My questions, how can we not afford to either work present systems better, eg; adding metadata / tags to increase findability and providing more open access, if we want to achieve Governments strategic goals and increase service delivery. I remember in 2000 the Government announced their goal of e-government. That has still not been achieved in 2009 as a all of government result.

Individual Agencies, those who have used the EDRM system and keep electronic records have achieved partial success with some parts of their service delivery. There are still silos and a lack of information sharing between Agencies. This seriously impacts on emergency service delivery and social services delivery.

The best example of success I have seen so far is the Canadian Province of British Columbia who combined all its Agencies information (they call them Ministries) into a single group under a Government Chief Information Office. That's the direction I would like to see us go, all information, data, web etc including Records Management managed so that what can be open access (after all FOI should be free) is, and what needs either to be private (personal info) or secure is.

Unfortunately because of the present culture of information ownership, distrust and personal agendas of those in agencies, and a lack of sharing capabilities across Agencies this dream is a long way off.

It is therefore very interesting to me to on site - http://au.nationbuilder.com/priorities/top so many people have demonstrated that access to government information is important to them. I hope Governments start to listen.