Friday, May 01, 2009

The daily hurdles government faces in attempting to engage online

Tim Davies from the UK has written an excellent post highlighting all the 'small hurdles' that government agencies face when attempting to engage online.

Entitled OpenGov: One big challenge? Or a thousand small hurdles, despite coming from the UK, the list reflects many of the hurdles faced in Australian government that need to be overcome for Departments to seriously use online engagement alongside other forms of communication and customer interaction.

A number of the hurdles are related to policies and behaviours which would not be tolerated by senior management were they applied to telephones, written correspondence or public appearances.

I am very curiously watching to see how long it takes government to move to remove these hurdles for the online channel as well.

2 comments:

  1. Well, "a government" can't remove these hurdles. It's up to people like you, running places like this, to encourage us great unwashed to believe they might have a say.

    Attended the AIMIA's Digital Government conference last week. The problem the (a) government has is that, even though a public servant should be allowed to give their opinion, above the radar, they are simply scared of losing their job. (Can't blame them).

    There is a review down at AGIMO (run by Ash Bassili of PWC). One of his ppt points = 'Predicting new demands and patterns from users'

    And that's the problem isn't it? One size will not fit all.

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  2. Hi Simon,

    You raise significant issues.

    In the US it took a Presidential memo to begin the ball rolling.

    Here in Australia we have taken the first step with Interim Online Media Participation guidelines for public servants and agencies.

    The rest simply takes time.

    ReplyDelete

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