Showing posts with label case study. Show all posts
Showing posts with label case study. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Presentation on digital citizenship, user experience & the emerging role of libraries

The other week I was in Wellington, New Zealand for the international Linked up, Loud and Literate: Libraries enabling digital citizenship conference.

Below is my presentation from the day, including the story of a recent customer experience with an Australian government agency.

For other presentations from the day visit nsla.org.au/digital-citizenship-2015.


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Friday, October 30, 2015

Come along to IAP2's November Canberra session on 'Introducing collaboration into the process of planning online participation'

I will be presenting at November's IAP2 session in Canberra from 6-8pm on 'Introducing collaboration into the process of planning online participation'.

The session will look at how to get internal stakeholders onboard and on the same page for an online participation process, particularly when they have disparate experience and understanding of digital approaches.

Using real world examples, and an interactive session involving Social Media Planner, attendees will get to work through the process of aligning stakeholder expectations and needs while building their understanding and support for an online engagement approach.

Presenter: Craig Thomler, Director, Social Media Planner
Time: Tues 10 November 2015, 6 for 6.15 pm (finishing about 8 pm)
Venue (TBC): Canberra Innovation Network, Level 5, 5 Moore St Civic

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Friday, July 17, 2015

Have you visited data.gov.au lately? We're beginning to witness the 'Open Data Multiplier'

PS News has a great report on the growth of data.gov.au - linking to a report on the Department of Finance's blog which indicates the site added 100 datasets in June.

The site has also upgraded to provide more data visualisation capability for users, as well as a responsive template for improved mobile access.

Most interesting was the high use of the service over GovHack, with 4,755 user sessions by 2,618 users. The most popular datasets included intellectual property government open data 2015, ABC Local online photo stories 2009-2014 and sample household electricity time of use data.

I've written about some of the interesting Govhack prototypes over at The Mandarin in the article, GovHack 2015: a wildly successful idea that keeps spawning more, where I also wrote about how participation is a useful way for agencies to test and support 'edge' innovation without committing scarce personnel and funds.

From what I've been hearing over the weeks since Govhack we're reached something of a tipping point with open data in Australia, with governments beginning to seriously recognise the value of sharing data in this manner.

Those benefits are not just external to agencies, such as transparency, economic growth or community engagement, but also internal.

Internal open data benefits to government include improving agency decision-making (through greater awareness and access to collected data), improved data quality and fostering innovation and creativity.

As a result of reaching the tipping point, I expect to see continuing significant growth in the quantity and quality of open data available across Australia, as well as more targeted and useful data as agencies become more sophisticated in their data release (as I've outlined previously in my Open Data Generations Roadmap)

This will stimulate what I've termed the Open Data Multiplier.

As with the network effect, where the value of a network increases exponentially with the number of participants (think about telephones or the internet), the Open Data Multiplier means that each additional dataset released for reuse creates a growing number of possibilities to combine it with existing data, or use it on its own, to prompt even more interesting and diverse innovations.

However the Open Data Multiplier only operates when the community and agencies are engaged with open data. Without this community both inside and outside of the public sector, data sits 'on the shelf', generating no value at all.

This is where volunteer-run events like GovHack are valuable for fostering a positive civic hacking culture.

Agencies also have a role in fostering both an internal and external culture of data-based innovation through supporting GovHack and similar events, and running their own separate challenges on agency-specific topics (as Transport for NSW and Public Transport Victoria have done).

The internal benefits don't stop at data either. The same challenge model, once adopted by government, can be used more broadly for policy and service design and in finding diverse solutions for government problems - as has been successful in Challenge.gov and is used by VicHealth and thre ACT government.

Indeed I ran a similar service design challenge for the Victorian Government at GovHack, the first exploration of such an approach at that event. The learnings will help guide Victoria's government in identifying when to use similar approaches and in designing and running future challenges.

All of this follows on from opening up government data, creating a more permissive and experimental sandpit for innovation and sharing.

And it starts with a visit to data.gov.au - have you visited lately?

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Friday, September 19, 2014

Designing the sharing state - an interview with Steve Schmid of the Open Technology Foundation

This is the fourth in a series of interviews I'm doing as part of Delib Australia's media partnership with CeBIT in support of GovInnovate. I'll also be livetweeting and blogging the conference on 25-27 November.

View other posts in this series.

With thousands of governments at local, state and national level around the world that need many of the same technological systems to govern effectively, why do governments often believe they must develop new enterprise systems and their related assets (ie guidelines, policies, methods and other shareable ICT assets) from scratch?

This question triggered the creation of one of Australia’s most interesting and innovative organisations, the Open Technology Foundation.

Founded in 2011 with the support of the South Australian government and Carnegie Mellon University Australia, the Open Technology Foundation (or OTF), has the mission to help facilitate technology sharing at all levels of government across Australia and New Zealand.

The OTF’s leader, Stephen Schmid, is passionate about the work his organisation is doing.

“All governments perform the same basic functions but historically we have built our own solutions to meet a need. This tide is changing."

He said, “a very cost effective method of provisioning services is to investigate and potentially reuse what other governments have done when faced with the same challenge – sharing rather than reinventing."

Steve isn’t a newcomer to this vision for government.

After working for Microsoft in Redmond, Worldcom in Colorado Springs and IBM, Steve’s last role in South Australian Government was as Director of the state government’s ICT division, which is responsible for whole-of-government voice and data systems.

“A single data network and voice network servicing all government departments provides significant efficiencies”, Steve says, “Other states could leverage this model as they explore opportunities for converged technologies.”

This work led Steve to the view there was a strong need for a sharing program to support connected governments, and through his role at the OTF he’s working to build a bridge for cooperation between jurisdictions.

The work has already had some significant successes.

“We work cooperatively to facilitate sharing between public administrations across Australia and New Zealand. The OTF is also working on a range of projects with Vietnam and implementing a global knowledge-sharing platform for interoperable technology solutions”

The road has, at times, been bumpy. Steve says that “one federal agency asked us ‘who gave you approval to represent Australia”.

He told me that he doesn’t see the OTF as representing Australia, “we represent our members, jurisdictions who wish to participate in a sharing program with other jurisdictions. We create our own mandate. And everything the OTF does is open to every jurisdiction, with a focus on tangible outcomes.”

Sharing technology resources isn’t simply a nice idea. Steve believes there are significant opportunities to reduce the cost of provisioning public services while improving service delivery, “we’re here for Australian & New Zealand governments to leverage the investments of other jurisdictions and reuse them – in software, materials and other services. We also help share our [AU & NZ] knowledge with other countries, especially in the Asia Pacific region.”

Steve is not the only one who believes these outcomes are worthwhile.

A number of key Australian agencies and governments are represented on the OTF’s governing council. This includes Defense, the Bureau of Meteorology, the New Zealand Government and Australian state governments such as NSW, Queensland and South Australia.

Steve says that there’s also some urgency about the work. Europe is moving ahead with interoperability solutions and technology sharing at a great rate, and the US is moving forward with NIEM, the National Information Exchange Model.

He says that “Australia is still at the starting line, and we can’t afford to be there much longer.”

Steve also discussed four projects the OTF is working on for delivery in the next twelve months.

“Our first project is about modern design for a sustainable government”.

Steve says the aim of this project was to provide a set of principles for developing portable government platforms, including associated guidelines and procurement clauses.

“There was an interoperability approach developed by Australian government back in 2006, but things have progressed since then.”

The OTF aims to deliver an outcome that allows platforms to be portable not only in Australia and New Zealand, but globally.

“European Commission have expressed interest in being involved and we will potentially also have the UN involved, linking into all major regional governments at a global level.”

If the project is successful it will make it far easier for agencies to add standard principles into their procurement clauses. For Australian technology companies this opens a door to global business, providing clarity on how they provide a specific service.

Steve says that they hope to turn the project over to a standards body at a future stage to ensure its sustainability and broader uptake.

The OTF’s second project is related to managing shared guidelines for internal ICT management and for managing vendors. He believes this project will assist both governments and vendors.

“Having vendors spend additional money to meet the separate requirements for each jurisdiction adds significantly to the cost of software to government and the development costs of vendors.”

Steve says that common shared guidelines for many of our technology needs that can be used as a baseline for our public administrations would remove this extra cost.

The project is being led by the NSW government with the initial goal of developing a set of guidelines for cloud that can be shared and reused across jurisdictions.

OTF involves all of its participating jurisdictions in the development process, and hopes to use it as a model for further shared guidelines.

The third project involves investigating whether the European Commission’s eProcurement platform can be reused by Australian governments.

“The EC’s platform was developed to be an end-to-end eProcurement platform for European countries and was released under an open source license. We’re evaluating modules of the platform with Australian state governments to test whether it meets their needs. So far we’ve found it just works, out of the box”

Steve says that the platform, Open e-PRIOR, has been developed to international standards that suite Australian governments and is a good example of how systems developed elsewhere in the world can be reused by local jurisdictions.

“We’ve found that most governments are willing to share most of their investment in ICT with other governments, beyond their secure systems. The primary barriers to sharing are the cultural ones and appropriate licensing.”

Finally, Steve says the OTF is working on building a platform for managing shared enterprise platforms.

“Our member governments feel there is no place for them currently to place their shared enterprise platforms for reuse by other governments.”

Steve says this isn’t simply a Forge for code sharing, but a robust system that incorporates management and support to provide the quality control and support necessary for large government system.

The development of this ITIL-based platform is being led by the Queensland government, with the support of other OTF members. If successful it could revolutionise how Australian governments share their shareable platforms.

Steve believes these projects are some of the foundation stones for building a technology-sharing environment for Australian and New Zealand governments, and go far beyond earlier government attempts at interoperability.

If successful Steve believes they will help herald in an age of more connected and responsive government, dramatically cutting the cost and need for agencies to develop their own new systems.

It’s a big goal but a worthy one.

“Gaining the required levels of participation to make this sharing cooperation a real success story is challenging, but with the continued support of our member governments and networks, we will all benefit in the long term.”

You’ll be able to hear more from Steve at GovInnovate on 25-27 November in Canberra.

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Friday, September 12, 2014

New South Wales's iVote® system - an interview with Ian Brightwell

This is the second in a series of interviews I'm doing as part of Delib Australia's media partnership with CeBIT in support of GovInnovate. I'll also be livetweeting and blogging the conference on 25-27 November.

View other posts in this series.

If I had to pick someone to be in charge of developing an electronic voting system, I’d want them both to be highly skilled at technical project management and a passionate supporter of democracy.

Ian Brightwell fits both criteria in spades.

“My first voting experience was in 1974 when the Whitlam government was re-elected. Then in 1975, when this government was dismissed, I recall seeing people arguing in the street over politics, which I had not seen before and indeed not seen since.

“After the dismissal in 1975 and before the election, no-one I knew said they would vote liberal, and then we saw a liberal landslide. It was at that point I realised the virtues of our electoral system and value of the secret ballot, allowing people to express their view without undue influence from others.”

As the CIO of the NSW Electoral Commission, Ian Brightwell is responsible not only for all of the commission’s IT infrastructure, but also for Australia’s most exciting online electronic voting initiative, the iVote® system.

The iVote® system is an internet-based voting platform which has been custom-built to support the NSW government’s requirement for remote voting at parliamentary elections. Under current legislation only electors with vision or physical disabilities and remote or voters absent from NSW on election day are entitled to use the system.

In 2011, the first time the iVote® system was used, some 46,684 electors used it while over 200,000 people are expected to use the system in the next state election in 2015.

Ian says that despite the limited number of voters currently entitled to use the iVote® system, it has already demonstrated its value.

In 2011, he says, there was a much larger group of out-of-state voters than they had seen in previous elections, as people didn't have to go to specific locations to vote.

Ian says he can see the iVote® system being expanded to other groups of voters in the future, but at this stage he is comfortable with using the platform for those voters the Commission find difficult to service– where it is hard to get to them manually –it also allows more time for the system to be refined before it is scaled.

One group Ian identified as a potential future target audience were postal voters.

The head of Australia Post has said that first class mail may not be available within 5 – 10 years as a result of Australia Post reducing postal services in line with declining demand. On this basis it is possible that all Australian jurisdictions with postal voting will need a replacement approach for future elections.

He also sees absent voting at local government elections as an area the iVote® system can help. This is particularly a concern because NSW’s Local Government legislation doesn’t permit absent voting at a council elections (this problem will be exacerbated if the proposal by Sydney City Council to require businesses to vote is enacted). For NSW local government elections there’s around 300,000 more non voters fined than at state elections because absent voters are not able to vote.

Another area of interest has been for plebiscites and ‘mini-polls’. Ian demonstrated the system at Parliament House in Sydney, primarily to minor party representatives. They were excited about the potential for using a system like iVote® to include more direct democracy in our system through polling voters on what they thought on different topics.

Ian isn’t sure this is necessarily a good idea, “I’m not sure voters are always well placed to make decisions on complex individual topics, due to the depth of material to absorb and the range of options, but it is an interesting proposition which needs further exploration.”

He believes that “voters are far better at picking the people they want to represent them for parliamentary decision-making.”

Ian does however believe that the iVote® system could be valuable for referendums, which he says there’s a current reluctance to run due to the cost, “the marginal cost of electronic voting, once the system is established, is much lower than that of paper voting.”

One area that Ian doesn’t see the iVote® system moving into any time soon, is replacing the local voting booth.

He believes paper voting is a key method for retaining confidence and trust in the electoral system – particularly given the concerns that have been raised overseas with electronic voting systems in physical locations.

Ian also said that, “for the most part with our current arrangement, replacing attendance paper voting with electronic attendance voting would be quite costly, and there would have to be clear set of benefits to offset that cost.”

Ian believes there isn’t a strong push for Australia to move to electronic attendance voting as there’s sufficient trust in the existing electoral system.

However, he says “with manual systems voters have to trust electoral authorities to do their job and although there is some ability for voters to see this in polling places there can be no evidence votes are finally counted as cast because the final count happens weeks later in remote offices and electors cannot observer this process.

However, with an electronic system you can provide the elector with a little more transparency, though they will have to understand the more complex electronic process to fully appreciate the verification information they have been provided – it’s a different kind of trust.”

Speaking of trust, the iVote® system has been designed with modern security to ensure that the system is as secure and unshakable as possible. Ian says they have updated the security and will conduct penetration testing to mitigate the risk of hacking at the 2015 election.

Also, he says, as the system is in place only during election periods, there’s a very limited window for a hacker to break through security and alter the results.

While no electronic system is perfect, he’s confident that his team has done everything possible to ensure that NSW voters using the iVote® system can trust that their vote will be recorded and counted accurately.

Ian says that the international experience has been that electronic voting isn’t a universal preference if offered to all electors anyway, “a few countries have offered electronic voting to all citizens, and have found that it peaks out at 20-30% of voters, with others preferring physical polling places or other forms of voting.”

“In Australia voting is a community and social activity and taking away a polling place from a small community can create enormous controversy and concern in the community.”

Ian thinks that we should not take away from physical voting or the opportunity for civic social contact, but definitely should offer a diversity of ways to vote, with electronic voting part of the mix.

In particular Ian said that there are issues with areas, with large and growing populations, where in older areas the available polling places can get overrun and newer areas there are no available venues for polling places. He says there is a need to manage the pressure on the attendance voting system which is already feeling over loaded.

While the iVote® system may not be used now to replace physical voting, this still leaves a large number of voters it can service. Ian says that these days 20-30% of votes are not attendance votes (in district votes in a polling places or pre-poll).

an also says that, from the data we have on voting patterns by voting channel, all voting channels generally have a similar electoral outcome. That is electoral commissions see similar voting trends across attendance, postal, absent voting channels. Electronic voting in NSW in 2011 was no exception, it gave a similar electoral outcome to other channels, so in the future this pattern should hold for other jurisdictions that choose to use electronic voting. This is a useful way of determining if major electoral fraud has occurred in just one voting channel.

While the iVote® system has been designed for NSW state voting, Ian’s team kept in mind that it could be used for local government voting in the future. He says that NSW has far less turnout for local elections, “we send out up to 300,000 more penalty notices for local government voting than for state voting.”

Ian also says that other states and territories are watching his team’s work closely, “we’ve had lots of interest from other states, federally and overseas, and expect interest to translate to some action after the next election.”

Looking into the future, Ian said that he didn’t see huge change in voting approaches in the next five to ten years, but expects an ongoing shift from postal to electronic and increasing levels of absent voting driving electronic voting.

He also sees increasing levels of early voting being the first avenue for attendance electronic voting being used “it is already immensely popular and we see 50-100% increase in early voting election on election - but parties hate it as they have to get their party volunteers there for 2-3 weeks prior to election day and it is hard for them to manage their election message. The public love it as it frees them up on election day. The reality is the public will win this one in the long run.”

Australia already has a very high voter participation rate, so while in the US electronic voting may be seen as a way to raise voting participation, Ian says that’s not a consideration in Australia, “as we have such a high participation rate we have has bipartisan support for electronic voting.”

You’ll be able to hear more from Ian at GovInnovate on 25-27 November in Canberra.

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Tuesday, June 10, 2014

It's nice to see government agencies share with each other

One of the most frustrating and, I think, silliest things I found when working in Australian government agencies was how almost every department, agency and statutory body developed almost all of its own policies, procedures, software and tools.

There was often 'undercover' sharing - where people in agencies would ask their colleagues in others for copies of their whatever policy, so they could craft one just like it - however there was no central repository where public servants could go and browse standard templated policy documents or access software code developed by other agencies to resolve certain common issues.

At one stage I actively looked at building a research directory for government - either from within an agency, or as a third-party site - where public servants could list the research their agencies had undertaken and the research they needed to access or undertake, so that it could be effectively shared between departments, saving money in re-running research and informing policy decisions.

This attempt didn't get off the ground as senior management strongly felt they had no obligation to share information on the research work conducted with 'THEIR' public dollars with other agencies - even the fact that they'd undertaken it in the first place.

Fortunately most of those senior managers have now retired (literally), and the new crop coming through are realising that, cash and time constrained as they are, that fighting over which agency 'owns' a specific policy, custom software or research that they commissioned gets in the way of productivity, efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

One of the outcomes has been the latest Australian Government whole-of-government website, GovShare.

GovShare had been talked about for nearly five years and has now finally arrived as a central location for agencies to share their work with other agencies to build standardisation and save money across the public service.

As the About page states, GovShare has been designed to support and promote collaboration across the Australian Public Service, and as an online resource it has been provided to APS agencies and their staff to:

  • publish, discover and access a broad range of artefacts used within the APS, such as frameworks, guidelines, policies, standards, architectural models, open source software and a host of other ICT and business artefacts; 
  • explore APS ICT services and solutions through the Agency Online Services Database and Agency Solutions Database; 
  • find skilled people across the APS with expertise in particular fields or products; and 
  • contribute to online discussions using the forum.

This type of sharing helps save money and time in government. It allows agencies to collaborate to design the best possible policies, guidelines and software and then customise it if needed for their specific needs.

While the benefits of the site won't necessarily be clearly visible outside of government circles, the efficiencies it will support will help agencies focus their resources on achieving the goals of government rather than on endlessly recreating the policies already in place elsewhere in government.

The site already contains nearly 2,000 'artefacts' for review, reuse and adaptation, and hopefully over the next few years this will swell as more agencies become active contributors as well as takers from the site.

It will also hopefully expand beyond its ICT roots into other business areas - allowing agencies to share standard communication strategy templates, HR policies, procurement guidebooks and financial guidelines - tools and resources that help public servants understand and abide by the rules the government sets in these areas.

Hopefully the site will expand beyond federal government as well, bringing state and local into the fold. These governments often face the same challenges, often with fewer resources, and GovShare could have a large role to play in reducing costs at all levels of government in Australia.

Ultimately it would be wonderful to see 'packages' of policies and guidelines that a newly created agency or statutory body can simply pick up, adapt and use for their operations.

This would be similar to the 'agency on a USB stick' concept that I've been talking about for several years around a set of software platforms and settings that would allow an agency to put in place a solid set of operational systems in a very short time.

However it is, as yet, early days for GovShare. Its success relies on three things, ongoing support from the department hosting it (Finance), active participation by agencies in 'gifting' their work to a common store for other agencies to access and the political will and nous to not kill the program before it bears fruit.

I hope Govshare will succeed, and think the omens are good. Its journey over the next five years will be interesting to watch.

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Friday, October 04, 2013

My presentation from RightClick - the latest in global digital government

Earlier this week I presented at RightClick in WA about the latest in global digital government.

My main points were that government in Australia has largely been doing OK in the digital stakes, although talent is thinly spread and there is not a consistent level of expertise across agencies.

For example, the fourth computer in the world was built by CSIR, an agency in the Australian government, and the WA government was using the internet seven years before Facebook was created.

Yes things have changed enormously in the last ten years, however the use of digital is now well-embedded within the public sector, not only in Australia but also across a large proportion of the world.

The challenge is to keep improving, to focus on designing services for digital which are relevance, simple and easy to use for citizens and to become better at connecting - reusing what others have done and at sharing what agencies are doing.

At the end of the day, however, it is not about the technology - that's simply an enabler - it's about meeting agency goals.

So even when you feel your agency, or you, are a dinosaur, remember that dinosaurs can survive massive change - provided they are prepared to change themselves.


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Friday, July 19, 2013

Contribute to The Guide for Opening Government

In an example of openness in action, the Transparency and Accountability Initiative (T/AI) is redeveloping The Guide to Opening Government using a collaborative approach.

First developed by the T/AI in 2011 with leading experts, The Guide brought together key practical steps governments can take to achieve openness, supporting civil society organisations and governments to develop and update effective Open Government Action Plans.

The T/AI is now working to update The Guide in a transparent and collaborative manner.

Bringing together expert organisations and participants in the Open Government Partnership, the T/AI is working to update and expand The Guide into a richer online resource with new topic areas and more lessons and updates from ongoing experience.

You can contribute to the new version of The Guide to Opening Government at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16VYWpslkyE0w9tZwIApisQB8zKXtsThtC7kjh9TQPy4/edit?disco=AAAAAGGEkNU# 

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Wednesday, July 17, 2013

How should governments educate agencies about open data?

Australia now has eight whole-of-jurisdiction open data catalogues at state and federal level, alongside agency-based repositories such as at the ABS and Geosciences Australia.

There's now a recommendation, if not a clear mandate, that agencies release data in some kind of open form - although machine-readable data remains limited and some agencies have attempted to develop their own copyright processes rather than using a pre-existing scheme such as Creative Commons (the standard to by Attorney-Generals several years ago and implemented as default in several jurisdictions).

However the quantity of data released remains low - as does the quality and context around much of the data that has been released. Agencies still resist calls to release data, with some requiring FOI requests to prompt them rather than proactively provide data to the public for reuse.

While a growing group of public servants at both senior and junior levels are becoming more aware of open data, there is often still a low level of awareness about what open data means, why it is important, what agencies have been requested to do and what this means in practice.

This isn't an issue unique to Australia, it is a challenge in every jurisdiction releasing open data around the world - over 300 of them.

Fortunately some jurisdictions have recognised this issue and taken steps to address it.

A great example is the City of Philadelphia in the United States of America.

Philadelphia had been an early entry into the open data space, originally releasing its GIS (Geographic information system) data free to the public in 2001, long before the open data movement gained steam.

However they had lost steam by 2009, with other city, state and national governments moving forward with their own open data sites. As the city was in the midst of the GFC and couldn't afford to develop its own open data presence, it worked with a group of open data advocates and companies, who had an interest in accessing and using the data - particularly with Azavea, a data visualisation company.

The resulting site, OpenDataPhilly, is still a great example of a very usable open data site and the City has used it effectively to expose much of the data it already had made public and build on this with additional data.

However, like other jurisdictions, the City of Philadelphia struck the same issue in terms of many public servants not understanding the value or importance of open data. While I can't speak specifically for the City of Philadelphia's experience, this issue can lead to the gradual decay of open data sites, with few new datasets added, old data not being updated and data that is released not having been collected in ways designed to simplify and reduce the cost of publishing.

As a result, two years after launching OpenDataPhilly, the City's government has released the Open Data Guidebook, designed to provide practical guidance to City of Philadelphia departments and agencies on the release of open data to the public.

Released as a work-in-progress Google Doc and subject to regular updates, the Open Data Guidebook is an excellent guide for any jurisdiction seeking to increase internal awareness and understanding of open data and its value to government and the community.

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Monday, July 08, 2013

Delivering last decade's technology today - what has gone wrong with ATO eTAX?

Six months ago I blogged about the success of e-tax as an egovernment service.

Over the last 14 years the service had grown to an annual 2.5 million submissions, with growth of around 5% per year.

I called it an egovernment success story for Australia - and stand by that view. E-tax has done a great job of delivering a service most adult Australians needed, a way of completing our annual tax return in a much faster and simpler manner.

However the buzz around the Australian Tax Office's (ATO) launch of an Apple version of its e-tax software has been uniformly negative.

Error message in etax for Apple
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
Besides there being issues with the software not working under the default security settings for Apple's operating system (now fixed), the interface not complying with Apple's user interface standards (due to being a direct port from Windows), and the time it has taken for an Apple version (17 years), concerns have also been raised at the development cost (reportedly $5.2 million) and the entire approach - developing system-specific software rather than a web application.

When the ATO first launched e-tax (for Windows only) in 1997 on CD, it was considered a state-of-the-art egovernment service, showcasing the way ahead for government in moving from paper to a digital-first approach.

Over the years, as the service grew in popularity, so did the calls for the ATO to support other platforms - even create a web-based service.

The ATO continued developing e-tax, updating it every year with the latest tax law changes, refining the interface, improving the speed and logic and ensuring it worked with the latest versions of Windows - apparently spending over $39 million on the software to 2013, or an average of $2.8 million per year.

Of that, approximately $32 million went to the private company that developed the software, yes e-tax was outsourced from the start.

According to Crikey, in 2004 the Tax Commissioner indicated at Senate Estimates that the ATO hadn't seen substantial demand for versions of e-tax on other platforms, however by 2007 the ATO announced in a media release that they would test an Apple version in 2008.

These tests were subsequently abandoned and nothing further happened until 2011, when the ATO again said it had an Apple version almost ready - but again delayed it until 2013 due to issues.

The Apple version of e-tax released last Friday, reportedly cost $5.2 million to develop on top of the cost of the Windows product.

I can't verify how good this version is, as I've not yet succeeded in getting it to run on my Apple laptop.

However even if it runs perfectly, the ATO has reached a point where it needs to look beyond the current software-based approach to e-tax.

While understanding the ATO's commitment to security, in an age when the majority of Australians use the internet for their banking, companies use web-based financial, HR and CRM systems and the world's financial markets are managed through web-based trading systems, it doesn't make sense that the ATO is still developing and maintaining operating system specific software.

While I appreciate that not all Australians are online, that hasn't been a barrier to other commercial or government services offering online services, backed by face-to-face, phone or paper processes for people offline.

In fact the ATO's paper submission process works quite well - the design thinking employed by the ATO has borne a lot of fruit in this area.

From being a leader in the electronic tax return area, we've now dropped in the list significantly - with some other nations offering more sophisticated web-based solutions, or having opened the field to private companies who meet their tax office's requirements.

The ATO's centralised software-based approach is a good 20th Century solution, but an increasingly poor approach for the 21st Century as the range of devices people are using keeps increasing.

While the ATO might be able to justify cost-efficiencies in continuing to deliver e-tax as a software product, the writing is on the wall for operating system specific client software.

More and more software is moving online, with computers and other internet connection devices increasingly using web browsers essentially as their operating systems.

The risk the ATO faces is that the rising cost of maintaining and updating multiple copies of e-tax might leave the agency with less and less funds for product innovation.

In effect, if the ATO doesn't put a concerted effort into making the leap from software clients to software as a service it risks having e-tax become a white elephant, dragging down its future innovation capability.

Many organisations face this type of decision at some point. Deciding when to make a paradigm leap of  this type is hard, and quickly distinguishes good from bad management.

Microsoft is moving its products online as services, as is Adobe and companies such as Salesforce.com have led the way in replacing locally hosted CRM, HR, financial and other organisational systems with online equivalents.

Government agencies will need to make similar, if not identical, decisions. When to shift the services they provide, such as e-tax, from client to cloud, when to replace the services they use with cloud from client - and which they especially need to not replace.

Whatever impact the current media storm has on the ATO, I hope both political and public sector leadership is prepared to lead in this area. To change how they approach and deliver IT to deliver long-term efficiencies and improvements.

With the focus on the ATO, I hope they are able to step up. While their track record on egovernment is good, the environment has changed and they must change with it.

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Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Do government agencies and councils deliberately make it harder for citizens to engage?

I've been watching a great TEDx talk by Dave Meslin on citizen engagement, which asks the question - if governments want to be open and engaging, why do they make it so hard for citizens to engage?

He raises a very good point, and demonstrates it very clearly in the video (below).



This is one of the areas I've struggled with for years.

Some of the processes governments and councils put in place around citizen engagement are designed to address political considerations, such as minimising the advertising spend (so government is not seen to promote itself too much), or address agency resourcing or timing limits, such as having extremely short engagement processes or 'hiding' consultations deep in a website so they receive only a few responses to analyse.

There's also cases where the people managing the consultation don't really understand the audience they are consulting. They may use specialist terminology, language or documents so long and complex they are impenetrable to the average Australian (who has an 8th grade reading level - that of a 14-15 year old), let alone the 46% of Australians who were considered functionally illiterate just a few years ago.

As an example, I recall an Australian council development proposal just a few years ago that was 385 pages long, provided via a sub-page in their website (with a limited number of printed copies) where people were expected to provide feedback within two weeks, responding via email.

Most Australians couldn't finish a 385 page novel in two weeks (given the amount of time per day they'd have available to read), let alone a complex planning document - even if they could find it in the council's website in time.

Response methods are equally an issue.

Holding a community forum or town hall meeting is still a popular way of consulting, and suits people who have the time and the interest to dedicate several hours to travel to and attend such an event in order to speak for a few minutes for or against a proposal. However many are increasingly dominated by retirees, the unemployed or students - who have the time to attend.

Professionals, people with young families, shift workers and tradies often don't have the time available when councils and agencies wish to hold these events.

Email-based online consultation, which is still the predominant way Australian governments ask for feedback via the internet, is dangerous in a number of ways. Emails may be blocked due to large document attachments or misclassified as spam and lost (as has happened on several occasions in the last few years - almost costing Ministers their jobs).

The generic form of responses received through emails may not suit the complexity of the consultation process. An email response to, for example, that 385 page document, may be very difficult to match against the key topics and themes, requiring a lot of time for a council or agency to analyse.

Then there's the cost and complexity of publishing responses. One of my pet hates while working in government online communications was the policy area who came to us and said, "we've just held a consultation and received 500 email responses - could you publish them in the website within two days please."

The resourcing required to publish email responses - even without considering the accessibility and privacy considerations - was immense, and was never budgeted for by the policy area.


These issues reflect on what I feel is the key issue with citizen engagement - not the common view that citizens are disengaged, but the challenge to governments to adapt their engagement approaches to provide the right environment and information for citizens to get involved and respond.

While governments tout their openness and transparency, how they are adopting a 'citizen-centric' focus and employing techniques like crowdsourcing and co-design to involve communities in decision-making, are they making the necessary changes in their own processes, approaches and people to ensure that citizen engagement is actually inclusion and effective?

In my view there's a long way to go - in Australia and in similar nations around the world - to retrain public servants, politicians and even the media, to put citizens at the centre of engagement.

It's not simply about engaging more or using online. It is about rewriting community engagement guidelines, redeveloping consultation procedures and revisiting political concerns to ensure that citizen engagement is indeed about engaging citizens, and not simply about ticking a procedural box in a government process.

For citizens to be central in engagement, perhaps governments and councils should be approaching citizens to involve them in codesigning their engagement processes.

Perhaps groups of citizens should be commissioned (at a small fee for their time) oversee or audit agency and council engagements, to provide advise and suggestions on how specific processes could be improved, or consultation materials adjusted to suit the audience being targeted.

Perhaps governments should even crowdsource the development of major consultation processes. Before asking citizens 'do you want....' they should ask 'how should we engage you on do you want....' for each major engagement.

Whatever the approaches taken, one thing is clear. If governments and councils want citizens to feel more engaged, they need to start by changing the way they engage.

Repeatedly using the same approaches to citizen engagement as have been used in the past is unlikely to deliver improved outcomes.

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Monday, May 13, 2013

Can an 'open' government site be open if it is poorly designed?

I was chatting with Paul Davis on Twitter recently about the The State Decoded, an open source US-developed platform for accessibly and openly exposing state legislation online (see the platform in use at Marylandcode.org).

He suggested that the tool was effectively a US version of Austlii, which is a repository for Australian federal and state law.

My view was that there were significant differences between the two approaches.

The State Decoded is an open source platform being crowd developed, which anyone can replicate for any jurisdiction. It contains APIs, presents all content as accessible web pages and is nicely designed to be easy for casual users to access.

Austlii, on the other hand, is a closed platform developed by two universities. There's no APIs, much of the content is available only as PDFs and documents, and the design - well, minimalist is possibly the right term, with the site difficult to navigate for all but university professors (who developed it) and lawyers.

When I made this comparison (in brief given Twitter's character limits), Paul said to me...
This made me think a little - do I consider visual design a criteria for openness in government?

And my answer was:
I thought in this post I would expand a little on my view.

For some technically orientated people design can be an afterthought. Their focus is on making a system or machine work as it should, able to take in data and spit out information correctly and quickly.

For these people, design is a 'nice to have' added towards the end of the process, with sites and systems made 'pretty' to appease the communications and marketing people, but is otherwise non-functional.

I've participated in many IT-led 'design' processes, where the focus was on how entities within the system should interact with each other, and the testing focused on 'user-acceptance' - which basically is designed to answer the question 'do the system's features work as intended?'.

In these processes there was little or no consideration regarding the visual appeal of the solution, whether the terminology was understandable to the audience, the search results expected or the navigation logical for non-experts and non-programmers. At best there was some commitment to making the site accessible - however this often meant 'bare bones' lists of text on a white background, rather than using alternative methods  to provide a pleasurable experience for all users.

Of course it is essential that websites and system respond quickly and as intended. However if users don't find them appealing, intelligible or intuitive, they will use them unwillingly, if at all.

I like to compare this to the car market. Originally cars were designed to be functional only - with little in the way of 'frills' to appeal to the public. The hard part was in getting the mechanics to work right and to last and car developers (blacksmiths, bicycle and train makers) weren't concerned about appeal.

Today, however, you'd be hard pressed to find any car maker who doesn't strive for visual perfection as much as for mechanical perfection.

Yes we expect cars to perform flawlessly, but we also expect them to look good. All things being equal (mechanically and safety wise), more attractive cars outsell less attractive cars, people develop more attachment to them, use them more and stick with the brand.

So to with products on supermarket shelves. In many cases people are selecting between products which differ little in their composition (or they don't understand the technical differences), simply choosing on the basis of how the packaging looks and makes them feel. Companies build their brands around their visual and emotional connection with customers, with ingredients a secondary (though still important) consideration.

So it is for software and websites. Well designed software systems and sites attract more use - even where they may be technically inferior (who can tell if a site is a few milliseconds slower than a competitor).

And so it is for open government sites. It is certainly possible to make an open government site with brilliant functionality and the best data - however if it doesn't visually resonate with the audience, if it isn't appealing for them to explore and use, it won't be broadly used.

Governments who seek to be open should recognise that it isn't simply about exposing lots of data, or opening the doors for user participation on a mass scale online. Design must be core to the thinking, how sites are designed, how users interact with the system, the structure of the language and of the navigation.

For openness to succeed in attracting broad interest and active participation from citizens, governments must not only think about what they release, how they release it and how they invite citizens to participate.

They must equally consider the citizen-experience, whether citizens can access information or participate in an intuitive and comfortable way, how citizens feel when using the site - excited, engaged and empowered (for a well-designed site), or frustrated, marginalised and stupid (for a poorly designed site).

Design is important and needs to be involved from the start of the development process. How people should feel when engaging should help drive the features and their operation, rather than trying to 'retroengineer' a clumsy system to meet user needs (a far more expensive and unsatisfying process).

So I stand by my view on open government - a technically open site that is unusable for casual users due to inconsistent, inaccessible & generally poor design isn't open.


Indeed, if a government is only playing lip service to openness (forbid the thought), poor design might be an effective tactic to hide things 'in plain sight', reduce the number of user and 'tick boxes' without revealing anything they are required to publish, but don't want easily found.

So where a government, or agency, releases poorly designed open data or engagement sites (particularly as a second or third version), just as they may release a 'bad news' media release under cover of a major news story, or an old report deep in their site (so they can say it is public even though no-one can find it), citizens really need to consider whether there really is a government commitment, or simply the appearance, of openness and transparency.

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Tuesday, April 16, 2013

VicHealth Seed Challenge and the history and potential for government challenges

VicHealth has just announced the start of the VicHealth Seed Challenge, where the agency is asking people from across the nutrition sector, fruit and vegetable industries, researchers, social innovators/entrepreneurs and the digital world to collaborate and seek solutions to the wicked problem:
"How do we improve fruit and vegetable supply and access, as well as develop and promote a culture of healthy eating in Victoria?"
The challenge takes the format of a competition, where VicHealth, with support from The Australian Centre for Social Innovation, will initially select and fund the most promising ideas with a one-off investment to further refine and develop a business case.

From here, the two most promising ideas that demonstrate a fresh way of thinking will be selected to receive ongoing mentoring, coaching, business development and financial support of up to $100,000.

For more information about the VicHealth Seed Challenge, and upcoming information sessions on 1 May, visit its website: http://www.vichealth.vic.gov.au/seedchallenge

This type of challenge isn't new or unique in government - although it certainly qualifies as innovative in the way it involves the community in the process of addressing difficult, or wicked, problems and in how digital channels are being integrated into the challenge process.

In fact the first significant government challenge I am aware of began nearly 300 years ago in 1714, with the offer of the Longitude Prize by the British parliament.

This challenge offered a significant cash prize for the inventor who could come up with an accurate way to measure longitude at sea.

This had become a vital technology for an island nation reliant on its navy for protection and its merchant fleet to allow economic growth and to feed a fast growing population. At the time existing technology was not able to retain its accuracy with the rolling movement of ships.

The prizes ranged from £10,000 to £20,000 depending on accuracy - equivalent to several million dollars today.

The Longitude Prize created a whirlwind of innovation across the nation, with many people working to win the prize and the glory - however with the slow speed of technological advancement, the prize was not awarded until 1761 - 47 years later.

The winner of the prize, Yorkshire carpenter John Harrison, submitted his first project in 1730 and a second in 1735, however when trialled in 1741 neither model was able to compensate for centrifugal force, although they did compensate for gravity and ship motion.

His third attempt in 1759 introduced several major innovations such as caged ball bearings (still used today), however still proved inaccurate, but his fourth attempt in 1761, which resembled a pocketwatch, was successful and was awarded the £20,000 top prize.

In the three hundred years since the Longitude Prize, many governments have used challenges and prizes to encourage public participation in the progress of science, the development of physical structures and the solution of difficult social and economic problems.

Notable examples in Australia include the 1912 competition to design an 'Ideal City' as the capital of the country, leading to the selection of Walter Burleigh-Griffin's design for Canberra and the 1956 competition for the construction of a national opera house at Bennelong Point in Sydney, which led to the construction of the Sydney Opera House.

Jumping forward a few years, we've seen the arrival of the internet vastly increase the potential reach and flexibility of challenges for government, while significantly reducing the timeframes required to enter or the cost of running these challenges.

In the US the Federal Government has had a central online challenge platform in place for several years (challenge.gov), which has seen dozens of agencies hold close to 200 competitions.

In Australia the process has been far more piecemeal and conservative, with straight competitions (such as the photo competition I ran at the Department of Regional Australia, attracting well over 2,000 entries) being the norm - designed to engage citizens, rather than to source ideas or solutions from them.

We have seen some challenges recently tied to the open data movement - beginning with a broad MashUpAustralia challenge held by the Gov 2.0 taskforce in 2009 and more directed and specific open data challenges held most recently by the NSW government in the transport and health areas.

While digital is now the preferred channel for holding these challenges, due to the speed of engagement and low cost, it is a mistake to solely link challenges to open data, or to focus them purely on programming skills.

As the US has demonstrated via Challenge.gov, there are a vast array of issues where government-run challenges can add value in finding solutions, improving communication or developing new or better services - open data challenges have their place, but are only one subset of what is possible.

The VicHealth Seed Challenge is an example of one of the possibilities for government challenges in the digital age - where the challenge isn't about data, but about solving a known wicked problem, using all the tools available today - digital and otherwise.

I hope other governments pay attention to this great work by VicHealth and consider the history and potential of challenges beyond the small open data subset.

Government challenges can be a cost-effective way to solve wicked social, transport, economic and health problems - every agency and council should consider them, where relevant, within policy and service deliberations.




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Tuesday, April 02, 2013

Vote Compass - not just interesting, but useful for government and the public

Vote Compass App for Australia
abc.net.au/news/elections/federal/2013/votecompass/
The ABC has launched the Vote Compass service
in Australia, designed to help the public match their policy views with the official platforms of Australian political parties.

Vote Compass (votecompass.ca) was developed by political scientists in Canada, where it has been used for both Canadian and US elections. Asides from helping citizens discover which political parties their policy views match, it has been used to stimulate discussion and engagement and identify the underlying policy concerns in the community.

It is particularly useful where political parties do a poor job (sometimes deliberately) of making their policies accessible online in comprable formats to allow citizens to easily understand where parties stand on specific issues and what they offer voters.

Unfortunately it is not always in the interests of political parties to make all their policies widely known. Either because they don't clearly differentiate the party, they have not had significant costing and scrutiny or they might place sections of the community offside if they were widely communicated (such as the now abandoned internet filtering policy released by the Labor party five days prior to the 2007 election).

Some substitute services have emerged - notably the Australian Christian Lobby's Australia Votes site, which compares party policies from the perspective of a particular Christian perspective, the sadly defunct GovMonitor site, and the ABC provides a basic comparison each election.

They do it a little better in the UK, where the Vote for Policies site provides a comparison of the policies of six parties and allows people to 'place' themselves via their views.

I've also suggest the creation of an XML schema for party policies to provide a consistent way for the public to view and compare policies. As this relies on either the support of political parties to adopt the approach, or a community-based organisation to do the 'heavy lifting', I don't see this as a short-term goal.

Services such as Vote Compass are therefore important democratic tools to ensure that citizens have an informed vote in elections, even if political parties would prefer them not to.

However they also have potential value for the public service and government as well.

Views on Government Spending (2011 Canadian election)
votecompass.ca/results/ca-2011/government-spending
Vote Compass, and similar tools that ask citizens where they stand on policy issues, can provide a far more granulated view on the attitudes and concerns of the public than single policy studies or broadbrush voting polls.

With a little demographic data - age, gender, education level, employment status, postcode and maybe a few others - having a view of citizens across policies helps identify and group audiences and map affinities based on similar policy groups (social services, foreign policy, education and so on).

This type of cross-policy data is rarely collected by agencies, who focus almost exclusively on their own policy areas and may miss insights or opportunities across policy domains - similar to how scientists in specific disciplines can miss cross-discipline insights, such as the application of physicists' chaos theory to biological populations or to fluid dynamics.

Where this data is being collected by entities outside of government (even the ABC, which tends to remain at arms length), these insights may not be realised or accepted by policy areas within the public sector.

Demographics on views of Government spending
(2011 Canadian election)
votecompass.ca/results/ca-2011/government-spending 
In my view this makes a decent case for the government to consider adopting or developing tools similar to Vote Compass to help provide agencies and politicians with better insights into citizens, while simultaneously using these tools to give citizens better insights into government policy alternatives.

Certainly this type of information would be useful for the localisation of policy delivery by region - which may make the Department of Regional Australia the logical manager of the process.

For this to happen there would need to be an understanding within government that improving the public understanding of policy positions is a benefit to democracy, rather than a partisan activity designed to support a particular viewpoint. Also there'd have to be a consistent and open way of sharing the information, so it isn't limited to the party which happens to hold government - such as the public release of an online 'policy map' which map policy views on by electorate, age, gender and other demographics in an appropriately anonymised manner.

Of course an organisation such as the ABC might take Vote Compass a little further and, rather than simply using the data they collect to map views to customise reporting across their local radio network, could release it publicly to help everyone.

Should governments rely on media organisations, even publicly-funded ones - to provide this kind of public service?

Or should the education of voters and the use of insights from citizens to inform policy decisions and local delivery be a primary concern of the core of government?

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Thursday, March 28, 2013

Should political accounts for governments declare they're not run by the public service?

I blogged last December on the topic of whether social media was blurring the non-partisan status of appointed public servants.

At the time I was reflecting on the confusion that can be caused when political operatives and members of a politician's own staff use social networks in ways that can mislead parts of the broader community into thinking those accounts are run by appointed professional public servants.

Examples I used included the Prime Minister's @JuliaGillard Twitter account, which was listed, and remains in the list of official government accounts in Australia.gov.au. It's the only account in the list not operated by the Australian Public Service (APS) and it is regularly used to tweet in a partisan way. I don't dispute whether the Prime Minister should use her account in this way, it is her right, only that it appears as the sole politically operated account on a list of APS accounts, potentially confusing members of the community.

I also used an example of the Queensland State Budget account (@QLDStateBudget) - which has now been deleted after receiving significant criticism.

In this case the confusion went further - the account appeared to be operated by the QLD Treasury, but in fact was operated by a QLD Liberal party advisor and used for partisan purposes. This created significant confusion amongst Twitter users and controversy in other media during its brief existence.

Now we have a another account that fits this model.

Operated by the Prime Minister's Media Office, @PMOPressOffice is tweeting a combination of useful facts, partisan comparisons and commentary.

I recognise this account is operated by the PM's Office, not the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, and thereby by staff appointed by the ruling party, not by the Australian Public Service (APS). They're called Member of Parliament Staff (MOPS) and are not required to abide by the Public Service Act, instead falling under the Members of Parliament Staff Act.

As such they're not required to be seen to be apolitical when carrying out official duties (such as running Twitter accounts) and are largely appointed party operatives.

However this distinction isn't clear to everyone - and there's already been quite a bit of discussion, and even criticism, directed at the (apolitical) APS, due to a mistaken understanding that this account is operated by them.

This is precisely the concern I wrote about in December, blurring the lines between public service and political operatives can damage trust in the machinery of government, making it harder for the public service to achieve the goals that the ruling political party sets for them.

As I commented about these types of accounts last year, I don't think it is inappropriate for the PM's Office to operate this account - it is making a valuable contribution to public discussion about policy and politics and by providing facts which are sometimes thin on the ground.

However I would suggest that the account makes it clear in its Twitter profile that it is not operated by the public service - mitigating controversy, questions and any mistaken loss of respect for the APS.

This could be as simple as rewriting the profile as follows (fits 160 character limit):

From:
The official Twitter account of the Prime Minister of Australia's Press Office. All tweets are on the record.
To:
Official Twitter account of the Prime Minister of Australia's Press Office. All tweets are on the record. Operated by MOP staff not Australian Public Servants.

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Wednesday, March 27, 2013

The power of open data is often in serendipity

I often hear talk from government agencies about their wish to release more of their data openly, but their concern over how they allocate resources to ensure the most useful data is released first.

In several conversations I've had in different parts of Australia, the agency view was that they only wanted to release useful data, and were prepared to set up an internal review process to assess how useful data could be, then selectively release what they decided was valuable.

I strongly oppose this approach on the basis that it shouldn't be agencies who decide what data is useful, to whom, when or where.

There's no evidence that government agencies have the skills to successfully decide which data may be useful to particular groups in the broader community, or which won't. There's also no evidence that they are good at successfully predicting the future, which data will become useful at a future date.

My view is that agencies should simply release all the data they can without trying to assign levels of usefulness.

Decisions on usefulness should be left to the users - the community - allowing serendipity to thrive.


An example of this was featured at a Gov 2.0 Canberra lunch in November 2012, where Jake McMullin spoke about his use of a open dataset from the National Library to create a unique mobile app.

When he'd created the prototype app, he walked into the library and showed the first staff member he saw (who happened to be the project manager for their iPhone catalogue app).

As a result of this serendipitous meeting, the National Library funded the app, which has just been released in the iTunes store under the name Forte, with an accompanying event (on 25 March) and video (below).

Forte provides a way to explore the National Library's digitalised Australian sheet music catalogue by decade and composer.

The dataset Jake used had been released a year earlier by the National Library for a hack event, however had not been previously used, as another National Library staff member, Paul Hagon, discusses in his blog.

Government agencies cannot predict these types of events - which, when, where or how a dataset will become useful if it is released as open data. And they shouldn't try.

The power of open data is often in serendipity.

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Thursday, March 21, 2013

Addressing the 'squeaky wheels'

A report from the South Australian Emerging Leaders Program (ELP) has been brought to my attention as providing brief but useful information about how to address 'squeaky wheels' who may contact councils and agencies via various channels, including via social media.

The report, which uses the IAP2 model for engagement, is available at the following link: http://www.lgmasa.org.au/Resources/Documents/ELP_Squeaky_Wheel_Report_Final1.pdf

While the contents of the report may be useful to others seeking to manage social media engagement, the fact that the ELP program publishes its reports online each year is also a great achievement - allowing knowledge and experience to be shared more broadly than simply amongst the participants.

The ELP is run by the LGMA (SA) in partnership with the Executive Education Unit at the University of Adelaide as a 10 month experiential learning program, including a group project, and is definitely worth checking out if you're a local government employee based in SA.

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Monday, March 18, 2013

Australian CTO presentation on social media: SOCIAL(MEDIA)ISM at the International Public Sector Convention

John Sheridan has been an active senior public sector advocate for the use of digital technologies in government for some years now.

He's stepped this up a notch with his recent appointment as Australian Government's Chief Technology Officer and I thought it was valuable to share one of his most recent presentations on social media, as published in the Australian Government Information Management Office's blog, to demonstrate and share how the Australian Public Service's thinking in this area has matured.

John touches on a number of the themes I often touch on in this blog - the benefits of social media use outweigh the costs, social media is manageable and gives agencies more scope to influence discussion and media coverage, good use of digital channels provides service efficiencies and convenience, and there's no time like the present to start (stop prevaricating).

So, reproduced under their CC BY copyright license, here is John's presentation, attributed to the AGIMO Website - http://agimo.gov.au:


SOCIAL(MEDIA)ISM at the International Public Sector Convention

13 March 2013
This is a presentation I made at CPA Australia’s International Public Sector Convention on 22 February 2013. My message was that the time is right for Australian Government agencies to utilise social media and other online tools to bolster and expand their communication strategies. The costs of doing so in a targeted manner are not that high, especially when compared to those of the opportunities that not doing so could forego. You can see a shorter summary of the presentation here.
Picture of two statues with caption, 'SOCIAL(MEDIA)ISM, Maximising Web & Mobility Opportunities in Government'
Photo by Ze.Valdi used under Creative Commons
When you’re preparing for these sorts of talks it’s interesting to think about your audience and what it is that you’re going to say. And when I was first invited to do this some time ago, I had thought initially that this was my chance to get back for accrual accounting. But I sort of softened a bit on that and thought well, no, maybe I shouldn’t pick on the audience like that.
Perhaps they want some innovation? And then I thought what’s innovation, in the terms of accounting, and a Tony Soprano notion came to mind, rather than anything else. So I decided that instead I’d settle on starting with some facts, showing you what I think the sort of web and social media and mobile activities are, and then talking about what I think Public Servants should be doing about it.
Fifty-two percent of Australians are on Facebook. Now that doesn’t sound like all that many when you start, but then you think the ABS tells us that 19% of Australians are younger than 15, so 14 or younger. Now I think we can assume that many of them, if they are on Facebook, are probably supervised by their parents, so we can probably add that to the 52. I also know that there are some 4% of Australians who are 80 or over. Now some of them are indeed on Facebook and using social media, but I think again generally as a rule we can probably say maybe they’re not.
So what does that tell us? If you add 52 and 19 and four, you get 75 I think, or close enough for Government work, and that what that tells you is there’s only 25% who aren’t covered by that number. In other words, the people who are using Facebook in Australia outnumber the people who aren’t using Facebook by two to one. Right? There’s an enormous change in what we’re doing in social media, what we’re doing online, and the imperative to do something about that in Government is obviously, I think, very important.
A graph displaying social media usage captioned, 'EVERYONE'S DOING IT, e-Gov Satisfaction Survey 2011'

Now we know that everybody does use digital tools for a range of things. We’ve been running a survey for six iterations about the use of digital technologies in eGovernment, and what we discovered – this slide shows the last three iterations, 2008, 2009, and 2011 – and 2011 was the last year we ran the survey, and the reason we had to stop is the questions had stopped being relevant. We could still collect the information, but it was no longer useful in terms of how the world had changed. And in the last year you can see that 84% of the some 3,000 people that were surveyed (indicating to presentation slide) – and this was, you know, like a responsible survey, not one done using Survey Monkey one afternoon – what it does is test the fact that many Australians were indeed using digital technologies, eGovernment, to contact and get services.
An image taken from the e-Gov report captioned, 'E-GOVERNMENT, 1/3 of Australians'

We saw that when asked about how they last contacted Government over, over six iterations of the survey here (indicating to presentation slide), 1/3 consistently said at the Federal Government level, the State and Territory Government level, and at the Local Government level, that they were using technology, online internet technology, for their last transaction with Government.
Now it isn’t everybody, and there are of course things that occur. We see for example when we examine some of these statistics further that people would sometimes do a lot of work on the internet and then ring up armed with the facts. It’s the sort of scenario I think that Doctors face all the time when people come in and tell them what diseases they’ve got because they’ve been looking them up on the internet. It’s slightly better in getting Government services, but we do know that there are a lot of people using those tools to find out what’s going on, to get the information they need.
A screenshot of the australia.gov.au site captioned, 'GETTING IT TOGETHER, MyAccount to MyGov'

We built, starting a couple of years ago, a My Account function in australia.gov.au. Now the big blue bar in the middle just rules out my secret name (indicating to presentation slide), so that you can’t use it and find out all about me. Some 1.9 million Australians have accounts on australia.gov.au, 1.3 million of them are linked to various services – Centrelink services, Medicare services, the personally controlled electronic health record, Veterans’ services, and some child support services.  Using this account facility you can login and you can find the arrangements that you have, and explore what they are.
You’re going to see much more detail if someone’s using all of those services. Capturing mine doesn’t give you very much information, and I didn’t really want to bore you with my visits to the Doctor, so you could see the facilities that are here. But it is a very important tool. Indeed so important that what we are currently doing is moving from the My Account function to a new My Gov function run by the Department of Human Services, because it’s been seen that our organisation, having got this stood up, established the worth of it, and being able to support it at the numbers we started with, is no longer going to be able to support what is likely to be tens of millions of Australians using these services, because we know that people want services they can get easily and quickly – they don’t want to be waiting, they don’t want to be in queues, and they want their information quickly when they can get it.
A picutre of a tablet showcasing an app from Department of Human Services captioned, 'WHEN YOU NEED IT, DHS mobile apps'

Interestingly they don’t just want it sitting at a desk in their study or at some kiosk in the library or something like that, they want these services in their pockets, they want to be able to get them wherever they are, and all sorts of services that Government provides. The Department of Human Services has been doing a lot of really exciting work, developing mobile applications that their customers can use to get information about their entitlements.
It’s a really interesting change, because I think even those of us really interested in it, probably didn’t think that this was going to be such a significant change over time. You think that, historically, people sit down when they’ve put the kids to bed and check their finances, or do their sums, or things like that, but instead what we’re seeing is that they’re taking the opportunity to do this at other times during the day, so there’s a pressure on us to develop mobile friendly sites for Government, things that provide not just applications, but also the basic work that we have.
A screenshot of the mobile version of the Australian Government online directory captioned, 'WHAT'S HER NAME!, Mobile Government online directory'

This is a screenshot of the mobile version of the Government online directory (indicating to presentation slide), and if you follow it through what you can find is a whole range of useful information about the Commonwealth Parliament, about the Courts, about the Governor General, and about the 19 odd Government portfolios. Indeed if you were to go to this site and search for Sheridan, you would find me and my role. And, because of the use of mobile technology, you could click on that and email me, or ring me – or at least ring my office – ring me and connect straight away.
We’re actually finding that this is an advantage not just for citizens, not just for our customers, but even for Public Servants themselves. I use this application on my iPhone now all the time. Now there’s another interesting thing that I’ll just touch on while we’re on this. You heard me say my iPhone, and this is another trend that we see, people are providing, Public Servants are providing their own devices, they want to use those to get the sort of services that they need as well. Indeed one of the challenges that we addressed at some considerable length in our work on the Government 2.0 taskforce was how we would allow people to use social media at work on their Government computers, and this occupied us for some considerable time, it was one of the recommendations that the report made and was addressed by Government at the time.
What’s interesting is that since then the world has moved on. Anyone who wants to access social media and internet and the web does so from a device in their pocket most of the time. They’re not interested in using their work systems. And what we’ve seen is that this has become so mainstream that it isn’t about IT control, but rather about personnel management control, making sure that Supervisors understand what it is that their staff are doing, and are making sure that they’re making reasonable use of the resources that they have, but are also getting on with the rest of their work. It’s that change from the technology frontend to the management middle that I think indicates how mainstream these technologies have become.
A photo of various promotion materials from WordPress captioned, 'GOVSPACE, cheap at twice the price'
Photo by Peregrino Will Reign used under Creative Commons
Now we also provide a platform for agencies to create blogs, other forms of communication with their customers. Govspace.gov.au, which you can search for very easily, contains some 53 sites already, with another 40 odd queued up, that are in development for agencies to use. We charge $4,500 a year for the basic site on data, on govspace.gov.au. You’re probably thinking, “Well why are they bothering to charge that?” Well of course I think we all know that free goods aren’t valued particularly highly, and by having a nominal charge, indeed less than you can pay on your Government credit card, what we ensure is that people who start a site and find that it doesn’t work for them, or aren’t using it, or it finishes their purpose, it can be closed down or archived, retained for the record, but it isn’t an ongoing management burden for us.
And I think this also gives you a feel for the ease and the speed at which the uptake of mobile and web technologies in this Web 2.0 world is occurring – it’s a significant change in what we do. We’re seeing now, through the use of Cloud computing, that agencies who want a new site, want a new application, can literally have it turned on in days, where previously it might have been months at least before even some of the simpler applications could get turned on. This paradigm has moved so that these things are no longer restricted to IT, and one of the messages that you take away from this is this notion of making best use of the web and online technologies is not about IT, it’s about business doing things, and working out what they can do to change how they are doing their business.
Now one of the very strong use cases for social media is in the emergency management field. We saw, and those of you who are actually from Queensland will probably know, at the time of the floods and cyclones a couple of years ago the Queensland Police Service media unit drove a considerable change in the way they were providing advice to citizens through a range of online channels. And this, I think, is an example that’s been picked up by a range of other organisations. This is a shot from the A.C.T. Emergency Services Agency’s webpage (indicating to presentation slide), and what they are finding is that by using a combination of Twitter, and Facebook, and this webpage, they’re addressing the concerns of citizens really quickly. So a citizen can see some smoke, look at the website, and discover that there’s burning off going on.
A screenshot of the ACT Emergency Services Agency website captioned, 'NO LONGER NEWS, emergency servcies online'

Now, remembering of course that, if you weren’t sure, the ACT is marginally smaller than Brisbane, so that we’re probably a slightly tighter knit community, but you can actually see what’s going on all the time, and this new level of awareness is obviously, I think, what people are seeking.
Now there are some, again, interesting challenges in this level of awareness. Social media does allow people to use platforms that essentially are free or very cheap, so if you think of the QPS’s Facebook page, you don’t pay Facebook, as I’m sure many of you know, because two out of three of you are already using it, but you don’t pay Facebook to set up the page, and you don’t necessarily control all the things that are occurring on it, so there are some challenges that grow in the way that people respond. You can see in the left hand, bottom left hand corner there (indicating to presentation slide), the caution not to use this page to report a crime.
A screenshot of the Queensland Police Facebook page captioned, 'MAKING FRIENDS'

Now the fact that QPS had to put that there indicates a range of things. Firstly, this new channel open to people was very interesting and useful for them, and they thought they could do that. But also they discovered that people were unaware of the traps of doing so. For example, if you use your Facebook account to say, “I was just here and I saw this crime occurring,” that maybe the criminal’s seeing that too, and knows what your name is, or knows how to find you as a consequence. There are also obvious concerns about some of the tragedies that the Police Service generally deals with, and seeing some of them played out in social media on the Police’s Facebook page would cause some concerns.
So when you’re setting up something like this, you also need to do the sort of risk management that you expect across really any Government activity. I’ve been having a discussion in the last couple of hours on Twitter as a consequence of a meeting I had with some senior, I guess mainly Communications Executives in Government yesterday in Canberra, and we were talking about the steps that you need to take in social media, and we all agreed that many agencies now, if not the majority of agencies, like many large organisations now, are monitoring Twitter, are monitoring Facebook, are monitoring other social media, to see what people are saying about them. And we all agreed that that was a pretty basic first step that people should do.
But I actually think there’s another step – and this was the focus of the discussion – there’s another step that people have to take immediately. Many of you will know that the speed at which a train smash unfolds on social media is about a thousand times the speed that some disaster unfolds in other forms of media, and as a consequence I put to them that I think what we have to do in Government now is not just monitor things, but have some form of disaster recovery plan in place that says, “If I see a disaster on social media, this is what I do about it.” If I see some discussion of my department that isn’t going well, that isn’t factual, and is damaging our reputation, it’s not enough to sit back and say, “Ooh, I didn’t think that was going to happen,” and before you know it not only is it over, but there’s not much you can do about it.
You’ve got to be, I think, in front of the game, and I’m quite sure that one of the things agencies have to do now is not only monitor social media, but be prepared to react to social media. They might not be on it all the time, but they need to be able to do something about it. It isn’t something that you can leave to the CIO or the IT team to tell you about it. Your communications people have to be in there, knowing what’s going on, and ready to react if something doesn’t work.
This is a shot of my Twitter page (indicating to presentation slide). It’s interesting because some people think, you know, you’ve got 1,500 followers, is that very exciting? Well, yes and no. I think it puts me in the top 150 non-communications, or non-arts people with followers in Australia, but you should understand completely, since I’m sure many of you never heard of me before today, that doesn’t really reflect the reality of the situation, rather it reflects that there are not all that many people who’ve got well developed profiles in this area, particularly in the mainstream of the APS.
If you look at the people who are using Twitter as part of their work, as I do at the moment, you will see that they’re largely restricted to the people who are already the spokesmen for their agencies – so some of you, if you followed the Department of Human Services, may have heard of Hank Jongen, who’s their spokesman; if you follow some of the discussion of migration policy, boats and things like that, you might have seen Sandi Logan, the media spokesman for Immigration. These people use social media things a lot, but as to other people using them, the Chief of the Defence Force uses Twitter, and indeed Facebook as well to get a message across, I think not just to sort of stakeholders generally, but also to the military people in his organisation. It gives them an opportunity I think to personalise the organisation.
This is one of the changes that social media, but the new online presence is also driving – people have become identifiable, public servants are seen as having personalities, are seen as being connected to the real world in a way that hasn’t occurred previously. Now whether one likes it or not – and make no mistake, I think there are a lot of people who would prefer that that wasn’t the case – whether one likes it or not, it’s changing the way that we do our work.
Let me give you an example. My bio slide you saw at the outset said I’m the Australian Government Chief Technology Officer, and indeed I am, and have been since the 4th of February, that’s as a result of a change in our department. Previously I was one of the two division heads in the Australian Government Information Management Office. Three or four years ago we were involved in the Gershon review of ICT. Now those of you who’ve got an interest in Government IT will actually have only heard about one of the recommendations that Sir Peter made in his review, that was around reducing budgets, business as usual budgets of IT departments, by a billion dollars over four years, which we did successfully.
At the outset of that period when we saw press coverage about AGIMO and about our work, it was almost universally negative. Now I think you need to understand that the amount of Government IT Press there is, is relatively limited, indeed there are probably less Journalists working in Government IT than there are people in the room now. But nevertheless I would wake up on Tuesday mornings, because that’s the computer day inThe Australian and in the Financial Review, and dread turning the page to discover what had been said about our results in budget savings , etc.
Just after that the taskforce started, we established our own blog and we started to publish on the blog, and all of a sudden – well not all of a sudden, over a period of time we saw a change. Because we were now releasing stories IT Journalists didn’t have to make them up, and because we were releasing facts and details, and were pointing to them in Twitter or on social media, they could write about things that actually had some basis in fact. And what we saw over that, we’ve seen over that three year period is actually a change in the sentiment around how our work was being reported, from what I would have described as universally negative, to universally neutral, with the occasional good thing.
Now I’ve got to tell you that in Government, if you can get that sort of response you’re doing really well. And all that’s changed is that we’ve been putting information out, we have been telling them, we have been making the stories, and this is a really interesting example of what a good internet presence can do for an agency. What it can do is, like the reforms of business took out middle management in the ’80s, the reforms, changes in the internet, the changes in Gov 2.0 are taking out the middleman, the Journalist that interferes with your message.
Previously, the Minister or somebody put out a Press Release, it just went to the Journalists, they decided what to do with it, they decided how to interpret it, they reported it in the papers, and you had to live with the effects. Now that’s changed, and we can make our own stories directly with what it is that we’re doing, and I think this is a really interesting improvement.
A screenshot of the web guide website captioned, 'HELP?'

Now one of the things that you need if you’re going to do this is some guidance for Government. We have a web guide that you can find very easily if you just type into a search engine of your choice “AGIMO web guide”, you’ll be able to find our online web guide very easily. It’s got some mandatory requirements for the Australian Government, but it’s also got some really good advice. You can tab through there, near that page (indicating to presentation slide), to our guidance about social media,Social Media 101, but there’s a wealth of information around about what you can in order to improve an agency’s online presence, both in social media and in the more traditional Web 1.0 way.
If you’re using Twitter, you can follow the hashtag gov2au – that Twitter feed will involve you in the discussion that goes on about what can be done better in this Web 2.0 social media related world.
A picture of an open toolbox containing various tools captioned, 'NOT ABOUT THE TOOLS, carpenters don't ahve hammer strategies'
Photo by Andre Hofmeister used under Creative Commons
Now I’m going to talk a little about the way that you might approach things in deciding to say, “Well I’ve got an message, and I want to do something about it.” First of all don’t get tied up in the notion of the tools. One of the things that I really hate to see is someone telling me that they’ve been developing a social media strategy, and just as the slide says here (indicating to presentation slide), carpenters don’t have hammer strategies, carpenters want to build things, they want to build houses, they don’t have strategies, they have ideas about what tools are good for something, they generally, well not always, don’t hit screws with a hammer, but they understand that there are tools for particular choices. And this is, I think, a really important message – don’t get stuck in the tools – remember that what you’re setting out to do is set up a communications strategy.
And secondly, because of these tools, you’re not just broadcasting what goes on, you actually need to be prepared for collaboration, or for two-way communication, for discussion with your audience, you need to be prepared for people to comment on what it is that you’re doing, and take you up on points, and ask you questions, and your strategy’s got to be around how do I deal with these new mechanisms in communications, not how do I use Twitter, or how do I use Facebook?
A picture of several rows of empty chairs captioned, 'AUDIENCE? Who and where is yours?'
Photo by Kevin Dooley used under Creative Commons
Establishing where your audience is, and who they are, is also very important. One of the more ironic things I often see is an agency decides they’ll set up a Twitter account, but they’ve decided that it’s important not to follow anybody because that would risk sort of some sort of bias – would they follow this person or not that person; is that a problem for their agency; what message does that send – so you see an agency that’s got sort of 20 followers of their own, but they don’t follow anybody.
Now using Twitter as a mechanism for getting a message out like that is not as effective as standing at the bus stop and yelling out, because you’ll actually get more people if you do that. The challenge is to understand that there are new things involved. What you’ve got to do – and a lot of these discussions will be occurring without you now, so if you just set up a webpage and say, “Well I’m going to have my webpage here, and this is where people are going to come to talk about the things that I’m interested in, or I want to drive the conversation about,” you actually find that that isn’t the case because they’re already having those conversations in other places, and what you’ve got to do is find where those other places are and I would say subtly get yourself into the conversation so that you can correct things.
Again, Human Services has done some very good work on busting myths about inoculations and other related matters – by going to air some of those discussions have occurred – and inserting facts into the argument. Again, if you’re using Twitter you’ve got to put a hashtag on it, or use the hashtag that’s there so that people who aren’t following you have a chance of seeing what the message is. You can’t just sit there and hope that they’ll come and see what you’re doing, because generally speaking they won’t.
Now another thing, I meant to mention before, I will just touch on tools carefully. Once upon a time all the tools that we used for things in Government, all the IT tools, were big and expensive, and it meant that you had to have a lot of investment and training. I’m sure that all of you are well versed in the functions of Excel, and in fact can create pivot tables and do all sorts of data sorting and stuff like that very easily, but most people use much less of the facility of those things. They still cost a lot. People think… I think that some of the tools you need now for social media or communications might also cost a lot, but they don’t. I use this slide App regularly now, it cost me about $2 on my iPad, and I spent another $10 on buying some nicer fonts, I produce those slides, and the appearance of it on PowerPoint now is because I emailed it to the Conference team – I didn’t need to use it on PowerPoint myself, I could do it very cheaply, and the sort of tools that you see in being used for social media are similarly not expensive, and you don’t necessarily need an enormous lot of resources for them.
A picture of a sound mixing deck captioned, 'CHOOSE. Which channels suit your audience?'
Photo by Sergiu Bacioiu used under Creative Commons
What you do have to choose is what channels you’re going to get your message across. Now first of all let’s be quite clear, there is still a digital divide. Although it might be glib for me to talk about users of Facebook outnumbering non-users by two to one, the challenge is still that many of the people to whom we need to provide Government services don’t have access to these tools. Now what a good choice of channel strategies can do here is ensure that actually what we do is balance the resources that we spend on people who do have access to these tools, because generally these things are cheaper than our historical methods of doing them, and move those resources to communicate with the people who can’t necessarily make use of these more online channels. But it’s very unlikely that what you’ll be able to do is restrict yourself to only one channel. But just as we’ve seen Government advertising, move from being in newspapers to being online, I do think we’ll continue to see a change and a growing importance of the channels that use online communications.
The next thing is to make sure that you have clarity about your message. Now that can be taken a number of ways. The first one is you’ve got to plan what it is that you’re doing about this. If your plan is to establish a social media presence, and that’s where it stops, it’s like having a plan to go for a drive in the car, rather than having any destination in mind. What you need to do is say, “Why am I using these communications? What is it that I want to get across to people, and how will I get my message out?” Whether it’s a message about the availability of services, the problem with some disaster, a change in policy, you need to understand what the message is and then make sure you use those channels to get the message across.
A picture of figurines on a bech with and a message carved into the sand captioned, 'Dont confuse your audience. MESSAGE CLARITY'
Photo by Stefan used under Creative Commons
It’s going to mean that sometimes you have to look at who it is, who’s providing the message for your organisation, just as we’ve done historically with other communication strategies. There are people who speak officially for our organisation, and people who don’t. It doesn’t mean that you can ignore the ones who don’t speak officially because you want to make sure that they’re not doing something that’s negative, you want to make that if asked they can say, “Well actually I do know about this,” or “This is the person you should ask.” But you need to get that message clarity.
I don’t know if many of you watched Media Watch on Monday night, but I was fascinated to see the ABC social media policy being discussed, and the notion that for ABC employees, their personal use of Twitter and social media is actually more constrained than that of the official accounts of ABC shows and programs, and things like that. Now I’m not actually advocating that at all, but I think it shows that they are interested in getting message clarity where it’s important.
A picture taken inside a library captioned, 'CONTENT IS KING, post regularly'
Photo by Marcus Hansson used under Creative Commons
I think the other thing that people sometimes forget is that content is what brings people back to your site. They might come the first time because it’s shiny and new, or it has good widgets or something like that, but if you don’t provide good content, people won’t come back to it, and your message will be lost over time. You need to ensure that if you set up a webpage that it’s just not static content, that it’s regularly updated. I’m sure that many of you have seen Government webpages that look like they haven’t changed since the last time the Government did. If this happens, people will just forget what they’re doing. Make sure that you’ve got a plan to provide content. If you embark on a communication strategy that involves blogs, and Twitter, and things like that, have a plan about what it is you’re going to tell people, prepare more than one post ahead, because I think we all know that in Government sometimes the urgent outweighs the important, and all of a sudden you don’t have time to put that post together if you haven’t thought about it earlier. If you want people to come back you’ve got to provide content.
Like anything else in Government work, if you don’t measure it you won’t be able to manage it. Now there are some useful ways to measure online content, and some ways that aren’t particularly useful. There’s a tool that’s supposed to measure credibility in social media, and I saw my score on that the other day and I was pretty pleased, because it said that I was in the sort of top 5% or something like that in the world. That sounded very impressive, until you worked out exactly how many people were using these things in the world, and that was sort of it made me one in 200 million or something like that. It’s like remembering that in China if you’re one in a million there are 2,000 people just like you.
A picture of a lit up cars odometer captioned, 'You can't manage what you don't measure'
Photo by dawnhops used under Creative Commons
Those tools aren’t particularly useful. And indeed one of the things that I saw was that I was actually being very highly regarded for my skills in sailing. Now you guys don’t know me, or most of you don’t, I think I’ve been sailing once in my entire life, but exploring this I saw that there was some search situation that happened to link mentions of people with my surname at least on a site that had some details about sailing. What it showed is that in expert analysis of the results, is it going to provide you with useful information about how you’re performing?
If you go back to the beginning of my presentation where I showed you those social media statistics, they’ve actually been done very carefully by those organisations, to make sure they pick up unique visitors visiting more than once, and sort those things out. You need that level of measurement and that level of sophistication if you are indeed going to make useful work in this area.
A picture of a bollard denoting men at work captioned, 'Start building NOW!'
Photo by wayneandwax used under Creative Commons
Now to some extent what I’m saying to you is that this is a call to action. There isn’t necessarily for many organisations a burning platform that says they must go better online, they must do more in social media, although I think it does exist for a range or organisations, but instead what I’m saying is there are things that you can do relatively simply now that can prepare your organisation for, if you decide that your communication strategy warrants it, taking a bigger role in online activity.
As I’ve described, the tools to do so aren’t very expensive. It’s not that resource intensive, particularly at the lower levels. You can use a lot of information that’s around now, and advices provided to help with organisations like that. Indeed if you work for the Federal Government you can email me about it atjohn.sheridan@finance.gov.au and I’ll help provide some information about it. But I do think that what we need to do is prepare for what’s going on. It isn’t enough anymore to sit back and say, “This digital revolution will wash over just like other revolutions have.” I don’t think it will. I think when people want information now, in their pockets, at the bus stop, when they’re moving along, if they want to provide feedback to Government quickly and on the spot, whether it’s about potholes to Local Government, the closures of offices to State and Territory Governments, or actual frontline services at the Federal level, they’re not going to take the excuses that, “Well we were just sitting back to see how it’d go.” I think it’s too late for that. It’s time to get started on this now.
Thanks very much for your attention.

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