Information sharing over better roads?
Can improving access to information really be more important to the community than maintaining roads?
I was going back over posts I’d flagged to read later and came across this very interesting piece of research. Thanks to Bang the Table for publishing and for MicroMex research for giving permission.
The research seeks to calculate a derived or genuine priority to make sense of the priorities that people state. It’s no great insight that when you ask people what they want, everything is important. The analysis of 30,000 local government area interviews developed a derived importance based on the contribution to overall satisfaction with Council. The derived importance, enforcing a real prioritisation, differs significantly from stated importance where everything is equal.
The research shows, for Pittwater Council at least, the two areas that can have the greatest impact on overall community satisfaction are improvements in access to Council information and community involvement in decision making.
For me this reinforces that the legislative program around transitioning from FOI towards a right to information (GIPA in NSW) is not leading public opinion but reflecting a public opinion that has already well and truly changed.
