Every years there are many conferences, forums and other publicly orientated events where public servants speak - providing views on their activities, successes and learnings across a wide-range of professional disciples.
The conference I have been at the last two days, FutureGov Hong Kong, is one example of these - where three Australian public servants spoke about our experiences and our presentations were distributed to delegates from approximately 10 countries.
Given that these events are public - anyone who registers (and pays a fee if one is charged) can attend, I have often wondered why more government departments do not make presentations given publicly by their staff - which do not contain sensitive or in confidence material - available online for the benefit of broader audiences.
Recently I found the State of Utah slideshare site, which does exactly this.
This is a great example of how to leverage government knowledge, sharing it across a department, a government, different governments and with the community.
Spreading this knowledge across the public sector increases its impact and value (and reduces the potential economic tax placed on its distribution by private sector conference organisers).
Are any Australian governments or departments doing this already?
That's a great idea, and with streaming video so accessible these days there's no reason it couldn't work.
ReplyDeleteWe've been doing something similar recently with The Premier's "People's Question Time" - the sessions are recorded on video and then made available on the website - http://www.premiers.qld.gov.au/government/peoples-question-time.aspx . As seating is limited at the events this is good for making sure everyone can watch the sessions and also contribute to the next session by asking a question online.
We have been doing this for presentations to our various groups within government from both external parties and government employees and have set up the eGovernment Resource Centre Slideshare account http://www.slideshare.net/egovrc - while we don't have a lot of content up there as yet - the aim is to grow it.
ReplyDeleteIt's good to see that both Vic and Qld have this on their 'to do' lists.
ReplyDeleteThe value of sharing knowledge, versus the effort in doing so makes this most worthwhile.
Thanks Craig. Interesting to see that Utah seem to be applying a Copyright All Rights Reserved on the presentations rather than Creative Commons. But surely a step in the right direction.
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