AGIMO launches Government 2.0 Register for Commonwealth government

I've been a bit behind on blogging in the last two weeks due to my new job, however expect to get back into the flow next week.

In the meantime, this week has seen the important announcement of the Government 2.0 Register from AGIMO, which attempts to collect all of the Australian Government's social media initiatives into a single place.

The Register makes it much easier for agencies to compare and contrast executions, learn by others' innovation and build business cases for their own activities (where decision-makers are unaware of how much is actually going on).

While any list of this type is almost certainly going to miss a few initiatives, AGIMO has done an excellent job of identifying what is going on and is supporting user updating - meaning that agencies can self-report activities (or third parties can report for them).

Given the struggle I've had at time maintaining lists of Australian Gov 2.0 initiatives - as many agencies don't announce their public activities as publicly as they could - I'm very happy to see AGIMO taking on this challenge with their much greater resources and as they're actually paid to know what's going on so they can advise people effectively.

It is vital for Australian Governments to have internal self-knowledge of what their various agencies are doing, and sharing, collaborating and borrowing from the successes of others.

Otherwise we'd constantly be reinventing the wheel and waste public money hand over fist.

I hope we'll see similar initiatives outside of Gov 2.0 as well, enabled by Gov 2.0 platforms. Such as agency recruitment sites, research activities and reports, procurement practices, financial systems, organisational policies (starting with social media policies) and other areas where government agencies can share information in ways which improves collective knowledge and skills, reduces redundant work and saves money.

Who knows - maybe in the future new agencies will simply be able to pick from a 'shopping list' of best practice policies and approaches across government!



I'll keep updating my Twitter list with all the additional accounts AGIMO has identified, and with a bunch of others I've found - when I have spare time to do so.