Showing posts with label infographic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label infographic. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Infographic: Australian government agencies and councils have now sent 2 million tweets and have 3.9 million followers

I've been tracking the active Twitter accounts of Australian government agencies and councils for over four years now.

In February 2013 I reported that the number of tweets by government agencies and councils had reached one million in January of that year, and eleven months laters in November 2013 I reported that the number of tweets had exceeded 1.5 million.

At the time I predicted that it would take a shorter time to reach two million tweets from 1.5 million than the eleven months it took to reach 1.5 million from one million. I then predicted that the two million tweets level would be reached around 2014.

I was half right. It was faster to reach two million tweets - taking only ten months - however by my count it wasn't reached until this month, September 2014.

Given I'm sure I've missed a few active accounts, and I excluded deleted and decommissioned ones, I'm comfortable with a two month margin of error.

Many of the numbers numbers have more than doubled since January 2013. Agencies are tweeting three times as frequently and the total number of followers has increased 2.22 times.

To celebrate the occasion, I've created an infographic of the key numbers (below), as I did at the one million milestone (compare it with the one million tweet infographic, which is here).

You can view my raw figures and analysis in my Google spreadsheet and I'll provide more information and analysis in coming weeks.



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Wednesday, August 13, 2014

ACT Crime Stats data - ready for people to analyse and mashup

At GovHack a few weeks ago my team, The Hack Warriors, wanted to integrate ACT crime data into our project 'Where Should I?'

While the ACT makes the data available visually in the awesome Crime Statistics site, it wasn't available as open data from data.act.gov.au.

So during the weekend I went through the code for the Crime Statistics site and (with a little help) identified where the data was coming from. I was able to download the actual Crime Stats data and process it into a spreadsheet with all the figures by suburb.

For reuse purposes I put the data up as a public Google Fusion table, which anyone can now access via a search of Fusion tables, or via the direct web address: https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1Cztgi-LF4CtXtS-EbU1M6JXnZAzPt1wLAH5YdXnN#rows:id=1

What this means is that now anyone who wants to mine the crime statistics for the ACT can do so easily using this table - performing statistical analysis or mashing it up with other data and mapping it easily.

Even better I found that while the ACT Crime Statistics site allowed people to see data back to 2010, the actual data went all the way back to 2007 - providing more historical data than is visually available from the site.

So if you want to play with the actual numbers behind the ACT's Crime Statistics site - you could start with the table below.




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Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Don't help your official agency and Ministerial photos become parody memes through poor selection and timing

A challenge today for politicians and public servants is how easy it is for a photo or frame from a video to be reused out-of-context to parody, well, literally anything.

We've seen the increasing use of 'photoshopped' images on social media to support all kinds of political and social positions, ranging from the clever and amusing to the downright disturbing.

Two of the most notable examples - which have become memes in their own right - include the 'floating Chinese officials' from 2011, the result of the accidental upload of a poorly photoshopped image of three council officials (below).


The image appeared to show the officials (including the County mayor and vice-mayor) floating above the road and was immediately parodied by internet users, who placed the officials in a range of amusing and inappropriate locations, such as below.


The second example of a government photo-turned-meme was the phone call from David Cameron to President Obama in March this year, where the UK Prime Minister tweeted a serious photo of him listening to a landline phone, claiming he was on the phone to President Obama of the USA to discuss the Ukrainian situation (below).



This was parodied by a range of people, who started by posting tweets of them speaking on the phone, and then on a variety of other items. It even attracted celebrity attention from people like Sir Patrick Stewart (as below), and in the end David Cameron played along and tweeted a photo of him meeting an ex-US President in person.


This second 'on the phone' meme was replicated a month after the Cameron call in Australia when the Prime Minister tweeted a serious photo of himself on the phone addressing the MH17 crisis. This was predictably mocked by many people online in the same vein.

Now while it isn't possible to prevent the 'photoshopping' of images and their reuse in parody form, it is possible for agencies and politicians to consider what images they wish to 'put out there' to reduce the prospect of having their message overshadowed by a clever, funny or touching parody.

This means avoiding deliberately publishing images which are obvious fodder for parody - anything related to being 'on the phone', 'inspecting developments' or easily misinterpreted facial expressions.

It is also important to avoid 'follow the leader' shots - where an Australian official is photographed in a similar pose, or doing a similar thing, to an overseas official who was recently parodied for the same pose (such as the Cameron - Abbott situation).

I saw one of these images yesterday from an Australian politician and decided to see how easy it would be to modify it for use in parody.

Using my trusty copy of Seashore - a free graphics editing tool with many of the same features of Photoshop, I was able to cut out the relevant parts of the original image within about 15 minutes.

It then took a simple Google image search to locate some freely available images and a matter of second to import and place the politicians within the scenes.

Below I've included a copy of the original image (in its original tweet), as well as several of the 'photoshopped' parody images.

Consider this what is possible by a relatively inexperienced user of a free graphic design program in under an hour - then consider what someone with more experience and more intent could do with images that make parody easy.

The original Tweet (with a 'watching infrastructure' image - a type very likely to be parodied):

My (very quickly) 'photoshopped' images - starting with my favourite:





Now think about how you want your Minister and staff portrayed, and how you can minimise the likelihood of your official images being reused for parody purposes.

While you can't prevent this from happening, prudent image selection and advice can, at least, minimise the potential and help you retain control of your message.

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Tuesday, November 26, 2013

90% of Australian federal politicians now use Facebook and/or Twitter

I've been tracking the number of Australian federal politicians using social media channels for some time, with the proportion using these channels (principally Facebook and Twitter) sitting at the low-mid 70% level for several years (see my last post on this from June 2012).

However I've just finished updating the figures based on the September 2013 election and have found a large jump - just over 90% of federal politicians now use social media to engage with Australians.

I'll give a breakdown below, however I thought it worth comparing Australia to the US government. Twitter recently blogged that 100% of their Senate and 97% of their House of Representatives used Twitter.

That compares to 71.62% of Australia's Senate and 72.67% of our House of Representatives - still some way to go to catch up.

In fact our politicians appear to favour Facebook, with 72.97% of Senators and 90.67% of MPs using the service.

From my analysis there's three key features that distinguish Australian federal politicians that use social media from those that do not - age, gender and House.

Firstly age - older politicians are far less likely to use social media than their younger colleagues.

The average age of this parliament is several years less (at about 50 years) than the previous parliament (at about 52 years), with a number of older politicians having retired or lost their seats.

The largest increase was in politicians born since 1980, who increased from two to seven in the latest parliament. Those born in the 1970s also saw a significant increase from 36 to 50, while those born in the 1960s increased slightly from 76 to 82 parliamentarians. In contrast, politicians born in the 1950s or earlier declined from a total of 112 to only 85 parliamentarians - with no-one born before 1940 remaining, down from one in the last parliament.


(Note there's fewer politicians (224) counted in the latest parliament because there's a Senate vacancy to be filled and an extra was counted in the previous parliament (226) due to a member resigning and being replaced. This does not statistically alter my findings.)

The large number of younger politicians significantly impacted the level of social media use. While politicians born in the 1980s or 1990s all used social media (100%), and those in the 70s were almost as prolific at 98%, this declined to 93.9% of politicians born in the 1960s, 83.56% of those born in the 1950s and only 66.67% of those born in the 1940s.

 

This reflects the adoption we see in the wider population and there's been a similar experience in other countries - people aged 50 and over are far less likely to engage via social media. This takes generational change to alter (within organisations as well as within politics).

I haven't looked into the average age of residents in electorates with older representatives, however I would be surprised to find a difference to other electorates - my conclusion is that older politicians are less likely to use social channels due to their own media preferences, not due to the preferences of the people they represent - leaving them increasingly vulnerable to younger and more social media savvy would-be politicians.

The second major factor impacting on social media use by politicians is their gender. Women are generally more likely to use social media channels than men and this shows through in our politicians as it does in the broader community.

While women represent 30.8% of our elected representatives, they represent 32.7% of politicians using social media - with 91.3% of female politicians using Facebook and 76.8% using Twitter, compared to only 81.9% of male politicians using Facebook and 70.3% using Twitter.

Overall 95.6% of our elected female politicians use social media, compared to only 87.7% of male politicians.

The uses the genders put social media to also varies significantly, with female politicians far more likely to interact actively with their constituents than males, who spend more time broadcasting political messages, engaging in political slanging matches or interacting with a small circle of journalists - more on this another time.

The final significant factor was which House of parliament that politicians had been elected to. While one might think that Senators, who represent an entire state or territory, might find greater utility in social media to reach the larger number of, and more spread out, constituents they represent than members of the House of Representatives, whose electorates are usually much smaller than our states, the situation is exactly the reverse.

While 92.7% of the Members of the House of Representatives use social media, 90.7% on Facebook and 72.7% on Twitter, only 85.1% of Senators do, 73% on Facebook and 71.6% on Twitter.

The particular discrepancy is in Facebook use - which suggests to me that politicians see Facebook more for connecting with their constituents (which Senators tend to find less important) while they see Twitter more for connecting with journalists and scoring political points (which is as important for Senators as for Reps).

Factors that didn't impact significantly on whether a politician used social media were their party and the remoteness of their electorate. While regional areas of Australia tend to have lower internet and social media penetration than the cities, the representatives of these electorates actually could find more value in social media as it helps transcend large distances between settlements - there was no significant difference between social media use by metro and regional representatives except in respect the age of the politician.

All of Australia's parties (and independents) are relatively consistent in their level of social media use by politicians - with the Greens and Independents (including KAP & PUP) the most likely to use social channels (100% of politicians), as social media can help them overcome any limitations on their ability to attract traditional media attention - helping to level the playing field for communication and fund raising.

The two major parties (Labor and Liberal) were neck and neck in their use, each with about 90% of their elected politicians using social media. At the tail were the Nationals, where only 84% of their politicians use social media - though this isn't really that low as it only meant 3 of their 19 parliamentarians aren't using social channels, and these are three of their oldest politicians, aged 70, 63 and 54.

Below is an infographic that explores the data a little further, and you can view the spreadsheet of my data and analysis using the link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ap1exl80wB8OdDYtNXA1ZE9oaEtWX25OM2paNGlIcHc&usp=sharing

I also have Twitter lists following all Australian federal politicians - divided into house and party affiliation, which can be accessed from https://twitter.com/eGovAUPollies.

I have also created daily newspaper-like digests of these lists, which can be found at: http://egovau.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/read-all-about-it-get-your-daily-dose.html (updated to reflect the current parliament).


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Thursday, September 19, 2013

Can government policy, reports and consultation documents be communicated through animated infographics?

Government reports are often dry - really, really, really dry.

They are also often wordy, complex, long and, due to these properties, largely incomprehensible to the broader community.

Government policy and consultation documents can suffer from similar conditions. They are often quite complex, long and structured in ways that make sense to career bureaucrats but not necessarily to the general public.

Many agencies also dislike this and make all kinds of efforts to provide summaries, to simplify language, use images and charts and use other techniques to spice up these often long and complex government documents.

However at their core, they generally remain documents, words on paper that would be familiar to the scholars of Middle-Ages Europe, to the Ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians and to the many dynasties of the Chinese over the last six thousand years - although they may now be distributed by electronic as well as physical means.

Surely modern society can devise better ways to communicate complex information than relying on an approach that is now around six thousand years old.

And we have - by drawing from techniques that are much older and more resilient in human cultures. Pictures, dance and song.

Now I don't expect governments to communicate their reports, policies and consultation materials entirely through the use of the performing arts. Not all our politicians or public servants are as accomplished singers as, say Chris Emerson, who can be viewed below communicating about government budget reporting and the Charter of Budget Honesty in song with his band Emmo and the Wipeouts on an episode of The Hamster Decides.



However with multimedia and the use of infographics it is now possible to communicate government information in far more engaging and understandable ways than ever before.

This is being done by some agencies already. The Department of Planning and Community Development in Melbourne made a series of animated infographics to communicate material from their consultation, PlanMelbourne (which I've been privileged to work on through Delib Australia).



The use is not yet widespread, with most government reports, consultation documents, policies and other material still released as words on paper - however what if it was.

What if governments mandated that agencies were required to follow a visual first approach for all materials they released to the public, only using words on paper as a secondary technique?

Could agencies rise to the challenge, communicating their material far more succinctly in visual form - a five minute video rather than a 200 page single-spaced, small-type report?

Not possible? Material too complex and long? Too many statistics to cover?

Maybe the examples below might shift a few opinions.

The first example is from the creator of PHD Comics, Jorge Cham. As an internationally renown animator Jorge asked students to describe their thesis in two minutes.

Jorge chose the best descriptions and turned them into animated infographics, such as the one below from Adam Crymble on Big Data and Old History.



Second is an example from Peter Liddicoat, a materials scientist at the University of Sydney and the winner of the Chemistry category in the 'Dance your PHD' competition.

Peter's PHD was on the topic 'Evolution of nanostructural architecture in 700 series aluminium alloys during strengthening by age-hardening and severe plastic deformation' - a wonderfully complex and obscure topic that doesn't seem to naturally lend itself to dance, but somehow works.



What I think these example demonstrate is that there are alternatives ways for government to communicate complex material. They no longer must rely on words on paper.

Certainly bureaucrats can argue that word on paper are easy for them to produce, that they satisfy a substantial proportion of the community and they have a long track record - that 6,000 years of history I mentioned earlier.

They can also argue that there's no silver bullet for communication, no technique that will satisfy 100% of the audience, and that is perfectly true.

However while governments may consider words on paper the default position, the lowest common denominator way of making information available to the public, I think they are often used as an excuse to be lazy and unengaging.

Paper make the lives of public servants and politicians easier. Paper documents are relatively cheap and fast to write, review, approve and distribute - none of which is a benefit to the intended audience and community or improves the outcomes of a consultation.

Mark Twain once said, “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

For governments words on paper are their long letters - the approach easiest for them, rather than for the recipient, their community or audience.

Agencies can now do better - using images, animations and video to communicate relegating words on paper to a back-up role.

I challenge them to try.

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Monday, June 03, 2013

GovHack 2013 - my top ten picks

Last weekend (31 May - 2 June) was a big weekend for Government 2.0 in Australia, with the first truly national GovHack held across eight locations, including seven of Australia's eight major states and territories.

With over $170,000 in prizes, and around 100 national and local prizes on offer, GovHack 2013 attracted 900 participants, who formed into 134 teams to create 124 apps using open government data - of which 108 were submitted by deadline.

Sponsors included a range of small, medium and large companies and included a number of government agencies, who used the event for inspiration on how open data could be used to generate new insights and improve public awareness and understanding.

I was unable to attend due to personal commitments, however kept an eye on the event remotely via the #govhack tag on Twitter, the event website and the online dashboard (image above).

The event, as anticipated, resulted in some awesome visualisations, tools and ideas - ranging from the visual mapping of immigration to Australia, which put asylum seeker arrivals in proportion; to the creation of jewelry based on open data.

Some awards have already been given out, with others to be decided by Thursday.

A process of public voting for entries is now underway - and you can vote for your favourite entries at http://hackerspace.govhack.org/

However here are my top ten favourite entries this year.

Immigration in proportion

This is an awesome way to visualise immigration to Australia, the type of visualisation that governments should be using to put data in perspective.

Explanation:
A visualisation of all immigration to Australia within 2011-12, created for Govhack 2013. Each dot represents one person.

Red dot: immigration through skilled entry, family reunion or special eligibility schemes.
Blue dot: refugees who arrive by boat (IMA = irregular maritime arrival).
Green dot: refugees who arrive by plane (non-IMA).

Refugees arriving through offshore resettlement (eg, from refugee camps overseas) are not currently shown.

Data is from Department of Immigration and Citizenship and Refugee Council of Australia.

Credits: Steve Bennett, Andrew Wise, Darren Yu.




Vote for it at: http://hackerspace.govhack.org/?q=groups/asylum-seekers-proportion-and-getting-sense-scale

Trove: Open it up

While I don't care much for the word games, I love the concept of Trove having its own Captcha - which government agencies could use to enlist Australians in crowdsourcing the digitalisation of our national newspaper archive.

View it at: http://ec2-54-253-113-204.ap-southeast-2.compute.amazonaws.com/
Vote for it at: http://hackerspace.govhack.org/?q=groups/open-it

APS Jobs Gazetter

The APS Jobs Gazetter takes Australian Public Service (APS) jobs information, drawing from the (PDF) APS Jobs Gazette and presents it graphically by type of job over time, based on search terms entered.

This makes it possible to track the ebb and flow of different job types in the APS, very useful for detecting changing patterns in employment over time that simply cannot be achieved via other APS resources.

View it at: http://gazetteer.pv.tl
Vote for it at: http://hackerspace.govhack.org/?q=groups/aps-jobs-gazetteer-exploring-public-service-jobs

Australia in review

It can be difficult to get a clear picture of the Australia's past - with data spread across many sources and many accounts giving a partial sense of each year.

Australia in review is a useful addition to this area, providing a useful and usable snapshop of Australia in each of the last 40 years - with the ability to expand to provide all kinds of custom information.

View it at: http://www.bradandglen.com/govhack/
Vote for it at: http://hackerspace.govhack.org/?q=groups/australia-review-air

Deathmatch.me

There's many preconceptions about the major causes of death in Australia, and deathmatch.me takes a lighthearted approach to correcting these, by presenting causes of death in one-on-one matches to the... er... death.

View it at: http://deathmatch.me/
Vote for it at: http://hackerspace.govhack.org/?q=groups/deathmatchme

Explorations in flight

Ever been interested in seeing where people come from to visit Australia, or how this has changed over the years?

Explorations in flight provides a 20-year picture of flight arrivals and departures for Australia, showing the rise in travel and changes in origin.

View it at: http://flinklabs.com/labs/flights/
Vote for it at: http://hackerspace.govhack.org/?q=groups/explorations-flight-httpflinklabscomlabsflights

Giving kids better health outcomes

This hack isn't simply interesting, but important for supporting parents and health professionals to improve the health outcomes for their kids by understanding local issues.

The data is currently only for South Australia, but hopefully will be increased to cover the entire country.

View it at: http://www.unleashed2013.org/dashboard
Vote for it at: http://hackerspace.govhack.org/?q=groups/giving-them-better-chance-life-analytics-meets-early-childhood-development

Survival kit for international students going to NSW

This site provides information for international students on where the best places are for them to stay, relative to the university they are going to attend.

I like it because it fills a need for a group who otherwise might struggle to make the best decision for themselves due to lack of familiarity with Australia.

View it at: http://govhack2013.kelvinism.com/
Vote for it at: http://hackerspace.govhack.org/?q=groups/stay-here-not-there-survival-kit-international-students-coming-nsw

The open index

How can the public critically assess which government agencies are being the most open? For that matter, how can agencies and politicians assess this?

The open index provides a useful way of measuring openness, using a variety of measures and approaches. Agree or disagree with the weightings (and it does need some work - for example more overdue QoNs is not a good thing), it is a valuable approach for providing some kind of comparison between agencies.

View it at: http://theopenindex.org/
Vote for it at: http://hackerspace.govhack.org/?q=groups/open-index

Where do my taxes go?

I like this Govhack entry as it demystifies where tax money goes - something that is very hard to get in a snapshot from the budget or any other government information.

This is the type of tool I expect to see from modern tax agencies. The fun facts are a blast too.

View it at: http://christonkin.id.au/govhack/final/index.html
Vote for it at: http://hackerspace.govhack.org/?q=groups/where-do-my-taxes-go

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Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Where are Australia's tweeting councils and do they have enough followers

I've mapped the 222 local government Twitter accounts I track to their geographic locations around Australia (excluding NT), and it forms an interesting picture.

UPDATE: I've updated the map data to include NT data, thanks to the help of @Maxious, who found an ABS dataset which includes them.

Local government use of Twitter in Australia by tweets - zoom for detail
There was a direct correlation between population density and the propensity of councils to tweet. This was intriguing, but not surprising.

While Twitter is most useful as a real-time news and interaction service, and therefore has enormous value in sharing information across geographically large regional councils, a combination of limited internet infrastructure and experience using services like Twitter tends to create a digital divide between rural and metro councils. As a result, many of the local governments that could most benefit from Twitter's capabilities are the least likely to use it.

One of the most critical factors on Twitter is the number of followers an account has. This is because the more followers, the greater the impact of your tweets. This becomes particularly important when distributing information on disasters, consultations or even for customer service purposes, where more people can view and act on answers to questions.

In analysing how local governments have done in building their Twitter followings, the results were quite dim. Only the six largest council accounts, all from major city councils, had more than 7,000 followers, while the average number of followers for all local government accounts was only 1,043 - compared to 2,556 for Federal and 2,459 for state and territory government Twitter accounts.


The average number of followers by state varied quite significantly, with Queensland councils tending to have the most followers (2,073 on average), followed by Victoria (a long way back at 1,196) and NSW (on 873) . Tasmania and the Northern Territory did worst, with councils in those jurisdictions having an average of 448 and 239 followers respectively.


The data also suggested only a weak correlation between how active a council was on Twitter and the number of followers they had. As pictured in the chart below, the councils that tweet most frequently are not necessarily those with the most followers and there was only a slight correlation for councils with a higher than average (1,000) followers.

Note I used a logarithmic scale for Followers in all of the following charts to emphasise the spread.

Looking at account age, there was some indication that the longer a council had operated its Twitter account, the more likely it was to have accumulated more followers, however the chart for this (below) didn't really strike me as that impressive. Many older accounts still languished below average (1,000 followers) and local councils who had more than the average number of followers were only marginally older than the average account.

A slightly stronger correlation was with the number of accounts a local council followed. Councils with more than 1,000 (average) followers were significantly more likely to follow more accounts, however it was unclear if this was a cause of their level of followers or the effect of them following people back.


To provide a comparison on this last chart, below I've looked at Twitter accounts operated by state and Commonwealth agencies on the same axes. In this case it looks as though councils have done better than other levels of government in achieving a good divident of followers by following people.


So to sum up, it looks as though neither the length of time a council operates an account, the level of active tweeting or the number of people followed adequately, or together come close to explaining why some local councils do better at gaining Twitter followers than other.

So let's consider the two elephants in the room - council resident population and connectivity. Councils with small population bases will struggle to build their numbers significantly unless their content is either tourism-based or extremely entertaining. Equally councils with poor internet infrastructure are likely to have fewer people using social media and hence less Twitter users to follow the council.

Unfortunately I don't have detailed information on the population in every council region (though I am putting this together at the moment), nor do I have a map of internet connectivity speeds across Australia.

However I have reviewed a sample of councils in WA, NSW and Victoria, and from my understanding of this data (not yet sufficiently processed for publishing) population has a significant impact on Twitter follower numbers for councils and connectivity probably does as well.


So what should councils do to increase their follower count and improve the effectiveness of their Twitter engagement?

The first and most basic steps are to ensure the council has the right Twitter accounts in place and there's staff able to, and responsible for, managing them. They should also follow an active (and entertaining) tweeting program and follow people, to build awareness - these steps do appear to increase following, at least modestly.

Alongside these steps, local governments should take actions to inform their residents about their Twitter account and its benefits. This can be done via their other material (bills, pamphlets, websites, business cards, etc), and also provide classes and training on how to use the service - both for residents and their own staff.

Finally, while councils are unable to change their population numbers significantly in a short time, they are often able to take steps to improve internet connectivity and usage in their region. This can involve lobbying the NBN to provide or accelerate services, or installing their own networks to provide a solution where commercial providers cannot financially justify wiring a town.

This last approach has been taken in the US and, to a lessor extent in the UK, and I am aware of a few old examples in Australia. I think this is still a valid approach in Australia, particularly for councils receiving limited NBN wiring, and one that needs to be considered for the economic as well as the communications benefits.


Notes and caveats
All Twitter usage data was current at 25 January 2013.

The map has been updated to use ABS derived local government boundaries.
I may not be monitoring all government accounts in Australia. New ones are created regularly and while I update my list on a regular basis it is unlikely to include all goverment accounts at all times. However I am confident it contains the vast majority of accounts and is statistically accurate.

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Monday, February 25, 2013

Infographic: The Australian Government's commitment to open data

Last Friday the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner released a major report on the release of public sector information by Australian Government agencies.

The report, Open public sector information: from principles to practice, is available online and is a relative straightforward read.

The OAIC also released the aggregated data for the report into data.gov.au - modelling the behaviour that other government agencies should follow (though I would have preferred raw data).

This contains lots of additional data worth reviewing that someone who just reads the report won't learn. You can find this file from: http://data.gov.au/dataset/data-from-the-oaic-public-sector-information-survey-2012/

I've developed a three page infographic (embedded below) using some of the data released for this report to explore the Australian Government's commitment to open data and the types of challenges agencies say they face.

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Tuesday, February 05, 2013

Infographic: The top government Twitter accounts in Australia

In January 2013 I found that the total tweets by all government agencies and councils in Australia I track had exceeded one million.

As a reflection of that achievement I've worked through the data I have on the use of Twitter by government agencies and councils in Australia to produce the following infographic (scroll for more).

I'll be producing state by state (including territories and federal), local and topic-based infographics as a follow-up over the next few weeks, with more detailed information.

I'm considering writing an academic paper on the use of Twitter by government in Australia in case there's any academics out there who would be interested in co-authoring.

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Monday, February 04, 2013

Infographic: How Aussies with mobile phones spend their weekends

Google has released a fascinating infographic detailing the mobile use of Aussies in their blog post, Insights into the Mobile Aussie Weekend.

Useful for communications and policy people in government, it provides insights into how Australians are using their mobile phone to search the internet over weekends based on Google's statistical data.

A Day in the Mobile Aussie Weekend


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Friday, February 01, 2013

Infographic: Which federal politicians are tweeting?

I'm continuing to work on statistics around government agencies and politicians who use Twitter in Australia.

Next week I'll provide detailed statistics on agencies, however given the date of the next Federal election was announced this week, I thought I'd provide a little more information on which of our politicians are tweeting, using the infographic below.

Interestingly while the Government is slightly better represented on Twitter than the oppositions (when including Independents and Greens), the shadow Ministry is better represented than the Ministry, particularly Shadow Parliamentary Secretaries (effectively junior Ministers) who are far likelier to use Twitter than their counterparts.

More statistics are available in my post last week and via my Google spreadsheet, which can be accessed via this post: http://egovau.blogspot.sg/2012/10/update-77-of-australian-federal.html


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Friday, November 23, 2012

The latest infographic about Twitter - Australians the third most active users

The Twitter infographic below has been brought to my attention by The Wall and I thought it worth reflecting here.

As you'll see below, Australia is rated the third most active nation on Twitter, behind the US and UK and just ahead of Brazil, Canada and India.

There's some useful general demographics on Twitter's global audience, though I'm still waiting for the time when Twitter releases country-based demographics before it becomes possible to really assess Twitter's value as a promotional medium.

Right now for I'm tracking 633 government accounts in Australia (excluding politicians), including the latest addition, @ACTGIO.

The infographic was compiled by www.website-monitoring.com.



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Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Enterprise social networking - the latest infographic

I thought this infographic from the US on enterprise social networking from Tibbr, released in July 2012, was worth sharing.

Particularly notable was how high an adopter of these types of tools was government ('Public Administration') at 74%, which closely reflects the share of Australian Government agencies I've tracked as now using social media officially (73%).



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