Voices of Australia
This page is a demonstration of a proposed national Backgrounder Library for all Voices Groups (VGs) and Community Independents (CIs). Backgrounders are built from the “buckets” VGs identify through listening to their communities about what issues they’re concerned about and what outcomes they want. That raw “voice” data is passed to Working Groups, who add primary and secondary research and expert opinion to create a discrete, well-referenced body of knowledge — a Backgrounder — on each subject. A Backgrounder deliberately stops short of formulating solutions or policies, which remain the domain of CIs.
Content will be developed collaboratively so participating VGs and CIs can share a “shopping list” of well-researched Backgrounders that CIs can then turn into Policy. Library users are free to choose which Backgrounders they wish to engage with, and can adopt them as-is or adapt them to suit local needs. This approach is summarised in Community Independents and Voices of Australia Mosaic.
This is designed to achieve quality outcomes and maximise use of scarce resources, without sacrificing independence — and to stop everybody reinventing the wheel! This demonstration illustrates the four components of the model:
1. Backgrounder Library: this was the previous page, displaying every Backgrounder as a separate “tile”
2. Backgrounder Detail: the page below, starting with the set-format Backgrounder “bloc” (Title, Statement, Bullet Point Descriptors and Message). The rest of the page contains background information; if a reader wants to check the data behind it, they can access a summary of the sources via the link at the bottom of the page.
3. Reference Library: a Knowledge Base of searchable HTML articles summarising the data sources for each Backgrounder. For readers who want more detail, the top of each article links to the original source documents.
4. Source Documents: clicking a link opens the document stored on the server, which the reader can read online or download.