Excellent. I'll keep this very close.
I think it's a good idea for the committee to look at New Zealand's Public Records Act of 2005, which embeds a requirement for the documentation of government work. It requires that people who are working for government create and maintain adequate records of their activities.
There are a variety of ways to go about doing that, but I think not only a legislative requirement is needed, but also a standard, so that there isn't an ad hoc approach that deals with each new emerging kind of technology. It seems that we're always chasing new technologies rather than having a standard that we use for documentation. That would certainly be a starting point.
I think modernizing the systems we use for information management is a vital component of this entire process here, so that things are easily searchable and retrievable. Have things like an organized information architecture that incorporates new forms of technologies, including the ones we're using today. Expand the idea of “record” notionally beyond the idea of textual documents, because of course the act applies to all manner of different kinds of records. Make sure that people are easily able to not only store those records and organize them within government but actually understand what is available and be able to access them from the outside too.