It seems a lot of the ideas being discussed here are, to some extent, reinventing the wheel. It would be foolish to develop standards and tools in isolation from the rest of the world for several reasons. For starters, much of the hard work has already been done and we don't need to go to the expense of repeating what has already been done. Even worse would be an electronic version of different railway gauges.

The eGov IG has already developed a lot of material on sharing government data, improving access to government using web services, participation in social media and semantic interoperability.

The OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) eGov group promotes open standards for data sharing and open ICT solutions for citizen-centric government.

However there is NO representation from the Australian government in either group.