Simplifying Customer Interation Online Consultation

Your Nomination

Title for nomination:

Nominee's name or organisation:

Inland Revenue (Jason Bell)

Overview of your nomination:

This nomination is for the 'Simplifying Customer Interaction (SCI) Online Consultation. Traditionally Inland Revenue's Policy Advice Division (PAD) have consulted through the distribution of large documents and by expecting people to read through all proposed policy change and respond in a formal way. This approach worked well for accounting or law firms but when the Policy team said that they wanted to consult with a broader representation of the population on potential changes to Student Loans and that they were keen to do so online we saw a fantastic opportunity. The outcome was the 'Student Loans Online Forum' in June of 2009. This first online forum was a huge success. It received nation-wide acclaim for being a ground-breaking step towards e-democracy and more 'citizen-centric' consultation. Ministers, senior management and everyday people alike heaped their praises on the concept and the need for better and more efficient consultation on policy became even more of a hot topic. (http://www.beehive.govt.nz/speech/address+centre+accounting+governance+a...) However, this first forum had been built under real time pressure and was delivered by heavily customising an open-source forum tool, 'Vanilla' (http://vanillaforums.org/). We knew that if we had the chance to build another one we would do it very differently. In January 2010 of this year that opportunity arose when PAD asked us to work on a bigger and more wide-reaching online consultation initiative to consult on significant potential changes to the Tax system. This time, with our learning's from the first forum we focused our attention on building a reusable, easily administrative framework for a consultation model that could be used by all of Government. Building a consultation website that was accessible to everyone; where people could relate to specific changes that would affect them personally and was simple yet functional was now the easy bit. We wanted to develop a tool which could be re-themed, could be modified with ease and could be maintained and moderated by non-technical users. In short, we wanted to build the first building block in the All of Government web tool-kit.

Reasons for winning this award:

The SCI online consultation took consultation to a whole new level for IR. Never before had such volumes and quality of consultation been achieved. We had broken new ground as far as Government consultation was concerned. The better engagement, broader coverage and superior actual consultation from the NZ population were results that to be frank, we expected after our experience and learning’s from the Student Loans forum. For us this was just the tip of the iceberg though. What we also achieved is building a tool that really can be re-used by any Government Agency, Department or City Council to ask people for their view on something. To have developed such a tool using Open Source technology, to have contributed to the Open Source Community by developing modules specific to the needs of such organisations and to have given all of this back to New Zealand is why we believe the SCI consultation should win the award.

Supporting Information

Use and benefits of open source:

The Drupal content management system was the open source solution chosen to deliver the SCI online consultation. Inland Revenue had recent experience with Drupal after re-developing PAD’s main external website earlier in the year and with its strength as a social publishing platform it was an easy choice to extend its use for the online consultation. Using Drupal core and contributed modules we were able to deliver a functional forum but our stakeholders wanted more, so we rolled up our sleeves and dived into some custom Drupal development. We created 5 custom modules that enabled the Policy Advice area to easily manage the consultation using multiple staff and locations in real time. In addition to this we created a custom website theme and a custom advanced forum theme, and integrated audio, video and deployed Facebook connect. The following custom development was completed on this project: • User role moderation module • User comment moderation module • Custom login links • Advanced forum theme • Custom website theme Inland Revenue are in the process of submitting the custom modules back to the Drupal community and we have already started working with fellow Government departments sharing knowledge and expertise in the use of Drupal as a viable alternative to proprietary software.

Recent achievements:

In the last 12 months we have delivered the following open source solutions: • Policy advice website using Drupal (http://taxpolicy.ird.govt.nz/) • GST Advisory website using Drupal (http://gstadvisory.govt.nz/) • Delivery of SCI online consultation using Drupal (http://makingtaxeasier.ird.govt.nz/)

Plans for future work:

Intranet With the knowledge and skills already gained in the use of Drupal it makes sense to utilise this powerful open source tool to deliver internal solutions. We are developing a fully scripted backend administration system to enable easy development, deployment and management of Drupal websites for our intranet. Our aim is to enable new functionality and empower business users with the tools required for cross team collaboration and knowledge sharing. Phonebook We are re-developing our internal phone book using Drupal integrated with Apache Solr. These 2 open source solutions will integrate with our core authentication systems (SAP, IAMS) to capture real time information and make valuable staff data available to everyone in a accessible and easy to use user interface. We expect further custom Drupal development is required which will also be shared with the Drupal and wider Government community.

Websites and other information:

Follow the links below to other websites developed by Inland Revenue using Open source software. http://www.makingtaxeasier.ird.govt.nz/ (Drupal) http://gstadvisory.govt.nz/ (Drupal) http://taxpolicy.ird.govt.nz/ (Drupal) http://studentloanforum.taxpolicy.ird.govt.nz/ (Vanilla) Additional information The development of a fully standards compliant website theme for Drupal has enabled re-use and rapid development for Inland Revenue and means reduced cost and quicker development time, an example is the creation and deployment of the GST advisory website that was fully developed in 1 week and deployed 1 week later.