When does organised action turn into 'gaming the system' in online engagements?

It can be difficult to define the line at which organised responses to an online consultation or engagement change from being legitimate activity by an interest group to 'gaming' the system to influence the outcome.

For that matter it can be just as difficult in a paper-based or face-to-face process. Just who does a lobby group with the Minister's ear really represent, who is funding that thinktank releasing white papers, and who is organising and transporting people to a public protest of function (such as an anti-carbon tax rally or to a Olympic Torch relay)?

Should the line be drawn between personal self interest and financial interest?
How about when a financial interest is often just as personal, such as an impact on wages or jobs?

Should the line be drawn between organisations who fund activities versus those who involve volunteers only?
Even though this might marginalise people who can't afford a day off without compensation - making protests a well-off person's tool.

In this context, I've been watching the progress of Hangout with the Prime Minister. This initiative hosted by OurSay, an independent and non-partisan organisation that supporting democratic engagement between public figures and the public, Deakin University and Fairfax Media (who have promoted it through their newspapers) involves selecting three user submitted questions to ask the Prime Minister, based on an online vote.

The actual event occurs tomorrow (Saturday 21 July). It involves the Prime Minister meeting with the three top questioners to ask their questions on a live webcast - and hopefully have them answered.

The real interest for me is in how questions were submitted, promoted and voted up through the process.

OurSay has been doing this for awhile and has a fairly robust system. Anyone with internet access can register to the site (directly or via services like Facebook and Twitter) to ask questions and to vote for existing questions.

People may ask as many questions as they like, but may only vote seven times, dividing these between questions however they like (or blowing all their votes on a single question if they want).

There's different ways to view questions - by most recent, oldest, highest number of votes or comments - and generally the process is run simultaneously. People can ask questions and vote all the way through the process (though this does bias questions asked earlier as they have more time to gather votes).

For the Hangout with the PM, voting closed on Thursday 19 July with almost 2,000 questions asked and 109,000 votes cast (according to Fairfax). Assuming people spent all their seven votes, this means at least 15,500 people took part.

The top three questions were on same-sex marriage, on defense pensions and on school chaplains (submitted by the President of the Atheist Foundation of Australia). The top question was submitted three weeks ago, and rose to the top slowly. The next two were submitted only four days ago, and rose very quickly.

So, leaving aside the potential for people to register multiple times and vote (which OurSay has a policy and some mechanisms to manage), where does gaming the system come in?

I've watched two particular incident associated with this HangOut which could be considered gaming - but may not be.

The first involved Andrew Bolt, a newspaper and TV commentator with a large following amongst politically conservative Australians.

On Tuesday 10 July Bolt blogged in support of a question at OurSay about the impact of Australia's carbon price on global warming "By how much, measured in thousandths of degrees Celsius, will the Earth's temperature be reduced through the carbon tax?”

Within four hours this had become the top question on the site, driven by Bolt's supporters flocking to support the question.

Bolt bolstered this with a post the next day, Vote for an answer at last, where he commented that thanks to the support of his readers they'd gotten two questions into the top three.

Bolt's involvement was proclaimed by OurSay as a success, as covered in Crikey, OurSay gets a boost via a Bolt from the blue.

The second incident involves Get-Up who, six hours before the Hangout closed, sent an email to supporters prompting them to vote for an asylum seeker question:

Prime Minister Julia Gillard, when will our government stop placing asylum seeker children in detention? We could hear an answer from the PM on Saturday - but there's only a few hours of voting on questions to go. Can you place your vote for this question?

The question in question asked “Dear Prime Minister, when will your government stop placing asylum seeker children in detention?”

This time I was quick enough to grab a couple of screenshots of the question as its votes increased.

The first screenshot, about 30 minutes after Get Up's email was sent, showed the question with 3,178 votes.

The second, taken two hours later, placed the question with 6,467 votes. That's an increase of nearly 3,300 votes (or between 470 and 3,300 people voting).

Now how did the questions supported by Bolt and Get Up do in the final analysis?

The tally is in the image below, however Bolt's two supported questions came 5th and 6th with 8,308 and 6,919 votes respectively.

The question supported by Get Up came in at 7th spot with 6,467 votes (which would have made Andrew Bolt happy).

The top three questions received 12,749, 10.933 and 10,756 votes respectively.

You can see the tally below.

So were the efforts by Bolt and Get Up attempts to game the system, or legitimate uses of organisational power? Were other efforts at gaming going on that we're unaware of?

Both are hard to answer and, ultimately, it is impossible to prove a negative (that no gaming has occurred).

However we do need to keep thinking about what defines 'gaming' and similar activities such as 'atroturfing' and consider whether the actions of interest groups unfairly distorts the outcomes of engagements.

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Are Australia's web developers failing to deliver accessible websites?

In a recent story in ITNews, Accessibility checker surfaces errors, John Hibbert claimed that a new Mental Health website, www.mindhealthconnect.org.au, operated by the National Health Call Centre Network and funded by the Department of Health and Ageing, didn't meet the Australian Government's minimum web standards.

Based on a review using the ACheck tool for the minimum WCAG 2.0 'A' level of compliance, John reported that the checker:

highlighted two known problems, 245 "potential problems", 20 HTML validation errors and 115 cascading style sheet problems on the site.

I tend to always take the results of these tools with a grain of salt. Many of the reported validation errors and style sheet issues are often repeats of one single issue, or are not really issues at all, and the two known problems would take a couple of minutes to fix and do not pose direct accessibility risks at all.

However this article does highlight a concern I've had for several years - whether Web Developers, contracted to produce these sites for government, always have the appropriate skills and knowledge to develop accessible websites.

I've seen this type of issue repeated a number of times. A policy or program area, possibly with support from a central communication or IT area, goes out to tender for a website. Web Developers respond, get assessed and the successful tenderer goes about creating the site.

A few months later the site is complete with days to spare before the Ministerial launch - but fails accessibility testing by the agency.

"We didn't understand how important accessibility was to you" says the Web Developer. Note that I was in the room when these exact words were said to an agency by a reputable web developer regarding a website which was developed iteratively and we'd been giving them feedback about accessibility for a number of weeks.

So what happens next?

If accessibility was not explicit mentioned in the contract, the Web Developer asks for more cash to meet the requirement, even though it is a baseline requirement for all government websites across Australia, and says it won't be ready for launch.

If an accessibility level was explicitly agreed to in the contract, the Web Developer grudgingly assigns a junior developer to 'sort it out' - with a vague promise that it will be done in a few weeks or months.

The agency is left having to launch a website which doesn't meet the minimum and fix it as soon as possible afterwards - all because the Web Developer didn't recognise and act on the legal requirement for accessibility.

Of course there's many examples where Web Developers have done exceptional accessibility work for agencies, however I have seen and heard too many issues where professional Web Developers didn't understand the accessibility requirements of governments.

Delivering an inaccessible website to a government agency will cause that agency to break the law and expose it to enormous risks of legal damages. No vendor should ever put their client in this type of position knowingly, particularly where it is so easily avoidable.

My view is that any Web Developer that doesn't deliver a government website to at least the minimum accessible standards (unless otherwise explicitly agreed to by the agency in question) should not receive any payment until they have addressed all accessibility issues.

They should also lose their right to bid for other government business until they can prove they have fully trained their staff on accessible web design.

These may be harsh and strong measures, and I doubt they will be considered due to contractual and practical issues.

However if a vendor contracted to sell a government agency a car that turned out to not be street legal or rent them a building that turned out to not meet the building code, government would walk away without paying and ask for damages, plus be very cautious about working with that vendor again.

Why should it be any different with illegal websites?

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What should agencies do when social media channels close down?

Last week I received the following email:

Dear Hashable Users,

We regret to inform you that the Hashable mobile apps and Hashable.com will be shutting down on July 25th. The service will be unavailable after this date.

While we are still very passionate about making better connections and meeting new people, the time has come for us to focus our energy elsewhere.  

Some of you have stored valuable information in Hashable, and we want to give you the opportunity to save that data for your own records.  If you’d like to receive a file with your complete history, please log onto Hashable.com, navigate to the "Profile" tab, then to the “Your History” section on that page. You can download the file by clicking “Export full history to .csv” and accepting the dialog that pops up.

We are incredibly grateful for all the people we have met through Hashable.   Thank you for all your support, and we hope to connect with you again in the future. 

All the best,

The Hashable Team

It made me think about the situation that faces organisations when the social media tools they use close down.

How does the organisation tell people interacting with them via the service? Where will they move the community to? Can they extract and reuse any data they or their community have entered into the service? Who else will be able to access and reuse this data?

With the thousands of social media tools that now exist it is inevitable that a proportion of them will close down. In fact I've been surprised at how few have done so - largely because of the low cost of keeping them running.

Where agencies are using these services, what is their recourse? It's hard to hold a company to a service level, or sue, if you're paying next to nothing for access and the service is domiciled in another country with no local presence.


The key is to prepare and risk-manage before beginning to use these types of services.

Define why and how you'll use a social media service, what data you will be providing into the service and what data you wish to collect (and in what timeframes and formats).

Ensure you've carefully scrutinised the privacy policy and terms of use, both for your sake and for your audience - you may have an obligation to point out differences between your privacy policy and the policy of the service.

Check that the service allows you to extract your data if necessary and, if required, also confirm whether you can delete your account and purge all data.

Devise written exit plans for likely future scenarios. These should, at minimum, include:

• The social media service closing down in an orderly fashion,
• the social media service closing down suddenly and unexpectedly (for a short time or permanently),
• the social media service being bought and integrated into the offering of another company, or
• your program ending and needing to be closed down, even when the social media services you are using are still going strong.

These plans provide a framework to help you, your management and your successors to manage any shut-down in a measured way. They also form part of your governance and risk-mitigation strategy.

It's also important to put in place a regular back-up and review strategy. Back-up data from your account by downloading it every month (or if the service doesn't support this, reconsider if you're happy using it).

Also periodically review whether your stated purpose for using the service still reflects how you, and your audience are using it, and whether you need to adjust your approach or your data management policies. This review should include checking whether the service's privacy policy or terms of use have changed - avoiding the risk of the 'slippery slope' where you create your agency's account under a strict privacy policy, but find that your rights have eroded over time.

Together with the above, keep an eye on emerging services that might build on the tools you already use. I don't recommend switching horses regularly, however if a social media service important to you and your stakeholders is closing, knowing where you can move the community to maintain the conversation is important to have at hand.

As is often quoted, failing to plan means you're planning to fail.

This is as true for social media as for any other channel or project. So prepare yourself for the future by planning and keep a watchful eye on the services you use and how and why you're using them.

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Transforming public engagement though social media (almost live from Singapore)

This morning I presented at the Reading Room Digital Conversations forum to a group of Singaporean government officials on the topic of Transforming public engagement through social media.

I talked through how connected Australia had become, and pointed out that the goals of public engagement have not really changed (using the IAP2 model to illustrate), only our tools.

My presentation then went through a range of different engagement examples across the IAP2 spectrum, from Inform to Empower, and then pointed out that governments weren't necessarily the driving force behind Gov 2.0 - illustrating several Gov 2.0 initiatives created outside of government.

I concluded with Zombies (as all good presentations do) - demonstrating how governments can be more playful without being unprofessional, using popular culture and memes to stimulate public engagement with hard to reach audiences.


I've embedded my presentation below - enjoy!

View more presentations from Craig Thomler.

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In government in Tassie? Come along to the IPAA Forum on Transforming public engagement through social media

I'm headed to Tassie in early August and whilst there will be presenting at an IPAA forum on the topic of Transforming public engagement through social media.

If you're in a Tassie state agency or local government and interested in Gov 2.0, social media or community engagement, I'd like to invite you to consider coming along.

Details are available at the IPAA Tasmania website: http://www.tas.ipaa.org.au/events

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Mapping government policies online - Govmonitor, a great new aussie site

For all the attention on government policies, the various announcements and documentation on political party sites, it can be very difficult to compare and contrast where different parties sit on different issues and, for governments, difficult to keep track of whether they are sticking to their election policies or amending them for pragmatic, political or other reasons.

While the capacity to provide quick and easy insights and access to party policy statements online is technically possible, it isn't often done. Even traditional media outlets tend to turn it into a shopping list or a tool for punishing parties rather than a tool for informing the public and improving policy discussions within and outside parties.

That's why prior to last election I participated in a Google doc project to map the policies of various parties, which prompted some very interesting conversations, but has not been maintained.

I suspect it is also part of the motive behind the latest attempt to 'crowdmap' the policies of political parties at govmonitor.org

The Govmonitor site (http://govmonitor.org)

This, however is a far more visual, accessible and interactive approach than the prior collaborative document idea, providing for easier searching and visual identification of what policies and positions parties support, don't support and haven't made a decision on yet.

The site offers a range of ways to view content, by party, by issue and by topic, with a full text search as well.

It also provides an easy way for people to contribute, adding party policies or positions on issues complete with evidential links and references supporting the party positions.

This is an excellent example of Gov 2.0 in action, providing information and education through evidence-backed crowd-sourcing to support people to identify the parties their views most correlate with.

It is also a great first step as a site, with the potential to expand to support robust issue-based discussions and allowing individuals to state their positions and connect them to like minded people. There's also quite broad international potential as the same approach can be applied to any level of politics anywhere in the world where citizens have a role in selecting their leaders.

Chris Doble has done a great job with this site and I hope it gains increasing attention and traction as we move closer to the next federal election.

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If citizens can help explore galaxies, unfold proteins, track birds and transcribe texts, why can't they help analyse government data?

One area of Gov 2.0 I really think hasn't been thoroughly considered or adopted by many governments, including in Australia, is the process of having citizens help in the creation, exploration and analysis of data.

Is it due to a lack of time, money, imagination or courage?

I don't know, but I would dearly love to see more government agencies consider how they could engage citizens in crowdsourcing initiatives that could help society.

Let me give a few examples of what I mean.

Galaxy Zoo is a collaborative effort from a range of universities and astronomers to classify galaxies in our universe. The site launched in 2007 with a paltry one million galaxies visualised.

The site worked by allowing people to register to classify galaxies (as either spiral or elliptical), with multiple classifications used to verify that each classification was correct.

The team behind the site thought it might take two years to classify all million galaxies, however within 24 hours of launch, the site was receiving 70,000 classifications an hour.

In total more than 50 million classifications were received by the project during its first year, from almost 150,000 people.

This effort was so successful that the team took a selection of 250,000 galaxies and asked people to analyse them for more detailed information, calling this Galaxy Zoo 2. Over 14 months users helped the team make over 60,000,000 classifications.

This work has led into a number of lines of research and supported scientists in understanding more about how our universe works.


Planet Hunter takes a more focused approach, looking for planets around other stars. A collaboration between the group behind Galaxy Zoo and Yale University, it works on a similar basis whereby users register to look for signs of planets based on data from radio telescopes.

Users mark likely targets and, over time, when sufficient users have marked a star as a likely target, the professional astronomers analyse that star in depth.

The site is an experiment, and there's no indication of how many planets have been found using the process, however as the human eye is particularly good at detecting patterns or aberrations, while computers can struggle, it has a good shot at success. The classifications by humans may also help in improving the computer algorithms and therefore make computers better at detecting patterns in data which may indicate planets, or could be used for detecting patterns in all kinds of other data as well.

eBird is an initiative from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society launched in 2002. What it does is aggregate bird sightings by location from professionals and amateurs to better match the range, migration patterns and changing distribution of bird species.

The system is the largest database of its kind in the world and in March 2012 alone participants reported more than 3.1 million bird observations across North America - data that is valuable to educators, land managers, ornithologists, and conservation biologists amongst other groups.

The data can be viewed on maps by species or as bar and line charts to explore when in the year particular birds are in a particular region. The site also supports gamification elements, listing the top 100 eBirders and tracking each user's personal record of sightings.


Fold.it is a site where users can solve scientific math problems through playing games. The site is most famous for the speed at which gamers solved an AIDS protein puzzle that had stumped traditional scientific approaches. Gamers solved the puzzle in less than three weeks while scientists had been struggling with it for thirty years.

Supported by both universities and corporate interests, the site is exploring many biological puzzles related to protein folding that offer hope for solving many of the worse diseases and conditions afflicting humans and our domesticated animals and plants.

Again the site includes a ranked ladder of the most successful players and offers ways to socialise and share information.

Whale.fm is a great site for whale lovers as it's a place where people can listen to whale songs from Killer and Pilot whales in order to match their patterns. Supported by Scientific America, the site contains thousands of samples of whale songs.

Users can listen to snatches of song and listen for patterns, providing data that help marine researchers answer questions such as how large is the call repertoire of pilot whales and do the long and short finned pilot whales have different call repertoires (or ‘dialects’)?

Teamsurv also has a watery focus, involving mariners to help create better charts of coastal waters, by logging depth and position data whilst they are at sea, and uploading the data to the web for processing and display.

The information collected by the site helps improve nautical maps and thereby reduces risks at sea, helping sailors and reducing rescue costs.

While still in early stages and very european focused, this crowdsourcing site has great promise. I'd like to see a similar concept extended onto land, using cars with GPS as the collection point of atmospheric and traffic data that can be used to map microclimates and plan traffic measures.

BlueServo, on the other hand, focuses on collecting land-based data on the movements of illegal immigrants across the Mexican-US border. Using a range of web cameras, users are asked to watch for movement and report people crossing the border to the Texas Border Sheriff.

Called the Virtual Border Watch, the approach currently involves twelve cameras and sensors at high risk locations, though the site doesn't actually list how successful the project has been (though why would it).


reCAPTCHA is the crowdsourcing tool that people don't notice they're participating in. In fact you've probably participated in it yourself.

The system, now owned by Google, uses snippets of digitalised books and documents as 'CAPTCHA codes' - those images of letters and numbers used to help stop spambots, programs designed to break into systems to send spam messages.

Whenever you verify you are human by retyping the letters in a reCAPTCHA image you are contributing to the preservation of millions of vintage books through digitalisation, with a 99.5% accuracy rate. In fact, the accuracy of reCAPTCHA matches that of human "key and verify" transcription techniques in which two professional human transcribers independently type the data and discrepancies are corrected.



Trove is last crowdsourcing project I'll mention, but definitely not the least, the project by the National Library of Australia to digitalise old newspapers, using people to correct errors in digital scanning. I've discussed Trove before and it continues to go from strength to strength, judging from the Hall of Fame of content correctors.

Tens of millions of lines in newspapers have been corrected, improving the accuracy of Australia's historic record (the Trove site even lists my blog in its archive.


If you're interested in finding more examples of crowdsourcing, a good first stop is the Wikipedia page listing crowdsourcing projects.

Can't governments, with all that data sitting in archives, find uses for crowdsourcing too?

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Great new site - The Digital Engagement Guide

Over in the UK, Helpful Technology has released 'The Digital Engagement Guide', which aims to become one of the best sources of useful examples, tools and practical advice about how UK public sector organisations can engage online.

The site touts itself as "Part bookmark collection, part reference manual, part Q&A site, it’s a place to get inspiration, shortcuts and answers."

Whether you're after online engagement techniques, strategies, examples or want the answer to questions, The Digital Engagement Guide has it.

Most of the content is as useful for Australian, US, Canadian and other governments as it is for the UK - heck it's useful to anyone seeking to engage people online.

The site also features an awesome collection of examples of online engagement and Government 2.0 initiatives from around the world.

How awesome? See the image to the right, which is a screen capture of the examples page listing every example in the site right now. Yes, it is extremely long, so long that I'm having to write extra words simply to make this blog post long enough to match the image!

Don't get daunted by this however, you can select subsets of the examples, strategies and techniques by keyword, location and topic.

And if you can't find your own online initiative in the site, you can submit it using the Contribution page.

Dang - that image was still longer than my words... so many examples!

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Automating online activities without IT intervention - using web tools to make jobs easier

There's often lots of small - and not so small - activities that communications teams want to carry out online that would make their jobs easier, but aren't really tasks to give to IT teams.

For example, you may wish to update your agency's Facebook and Twitter profile pictures when your logo changes, automatically post your blog posts to LinkedIn and Facebook, be sent an email whenever someone tweets at you or receive an alert whenever your Minister is mentioned in a breaking news story.

This is where it is useful to get familiar with services like IFTTT and Yahoo Pipes.

IFTTT, or "IF This Then That" is a simple logic engine that allow you to string together a trigger  and an action to create a 'recipe' using the format IF [trigger] then [action].

For example, below is a recipe used to automatically tweet new posts on this blog:

A recipe in IFTTT

This sounds very simple, but it can be a very powerful labour saving tool. Each trigger and action can be from different online services, or even physical devices.

A recipe in IFTTT (click to enlarge)

Recipes can be more complex, with various parameters and settings you can configure (for example the recipe above has been configured to append #gov2au to the tweets).

For example, at right is the full page for a recipe that archives your Tweets to a text file in your Dropbox.

Besides connecting the trigger (a new tweet from you) with the action (posting your tweet in Dropbox),  you can choose whether to include retweets and @replies.

You can set the file name where your tweets will be stored and the file path in Dropbox, plus you can set the content that is saved and how it will be formated.

In this case the recipe is set to keep the text of the tweet (the 'Text' in a blue box), followed on a new line by the date it was tweeted ('CreatedAt') and then, on another new line, a permanent link to the tweet ('LinkToTweet'), followed by a line break to separate it from following tweets.

You can add additional 'ingredients' such as Tweet name and User Name - essentially whatever information that Twitter shares for each tweet.

Rather than having to invent and test your own recipes, IFTTT allows people to share their recipes with others, meaning you can often find a useful recipe, rather than having to create one from scratch.

In fact I didn't create either of the recipes I've illustrated, they were already listed.

There's currently over 36,000 recipes to choose from, for the 47 services supported - from calendars, to RSS feeds, to email, to social networks, to blogs and video services, from SMS to physical devices.

All the online services that can be 'triggers' for IFTTT

It is even possible to string together recipes in sequence.

For example, if I wanted to update my profile image in Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and LinkedIn, I can set up a series of recipes such as,

• If [My Facebook profile picture updates] Then [Update my Twitter profile picture to match]
• If [My Twitter profile picture updates] Then [Update my Blogger profile picture to match]
• If [My Blogger profile picture updates] Then [Update my LinkedIn profile picture to match]
• If [My LinkedIn profile picture updates] Then [Update my Facebook profile picture to match]

Using these four recipes, whenever I update one profile picture, they will all update.

Also it's easy to turn recipes on and off - meaning that you can stop them working when necessary (such as if you want to use different profile pictures).

However there's limits to an IF THEN system, which is where a tool like Yahoo Pipes gets interesting.

Yahoo Pipes is a service used to take inputs, such as an RSS or data feed, webpage, spreadsheet or data from a database, manipulate, filter and combine them with other data and then provide an output with no programming knowledge.

This sounds a bit vague, so here's a basic example - say you wanted to aggregate all news related to Victoria released by Australian Government agencies in media releases.

To do this in Yahoo Pipes you'd fetch RSS feeds from the agencies you were interested in, 'sploosh' them together as a single file, filter out any releases that don't mention 'Victoria', then output what is left as an RSS feed.

Building a Yahoo Pipe (click to enlarge)

But that's getting ahead of ourselves a little... To the right is an image depicting how I did this with Yahoo Pipes.

Here's how it works...

First you'll need to go to pipes.yahoo.com and log in with a Yahoo account.

First I created a set of tools to fetch RSS from Australian Government agencies. These are the top five blue boxes. To create each I simply dragged the Fetch feed from the 'sources' section of the left-hand menu onto the main part of the screen and then pasted in each RSS feed URL into the text fields provided (drawing from the RSS list in Australia.gov.au).

Next, to combine these feeds, I used one of the 'operator' function from the left menu named Union. What this does is it allows you to combine separate functions into a single output file. To combine the Fetch feed RSS feeds all I needed to do was click on the bottom circle under each (their output circle) and drag the blue line to a top circle on the Union box (the input circle).

Then I created a Filter, also an 'operator' function and defined the three conditions I wanted to include in my final output - news items with 'Victoria', 'Victorian' or 'Melbourne'. All others get filtered out.  I linked the Filter's input circle to the Union's output circle, then linked the output from the Filter to the Pipe Output.

Then I tested the system worked by clicking on the blue header for each box and viewing their output in the Debugger window at bottom.

When satisfied it worked (and I did have to remove the filter condition 'Vic' as it picked up parts of words such as "service"), I saved my pipe using the top right save button, giving it the name 'Victoria RSS', then ran the pipe and published it at http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=0392f5ec8f7450abbf650056c22f1e5d.

You can also see the output RSS feed at: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=0392f5ec8f7450abbf650056c22f1e5d&_render=rss

Note that pipes don't have to be published, you can keep them private. You can also publish their outputs as RSS feeds or as a web service (using JSON) for input into a different system. You can even get the results as a web badge for your site, by email, phone or as PHP for websites.

An IFTTT recipe built from the Yahoo Pipe above
(click to enlarge)

Alternatively you can even combine them with IFTTT - for example creating a recipe that sends you an email every time an Australian Government agency mentions Victoria in an media release.

In fact I created this recipe (in about 30 seconds) to demonstrate how easy it was. You can see it to the right, or go and access it at IFTTT at the recipe link: http://ifttt.com/recipes/43242

So that's how easy it now is to automate actions, or activities, online - with no IT skills, in a short time.

There's lots of simple, and complex, tasks that can be automated easily and quickly with a little creativity and imagination.

You can also go back and modify or turn your recipes and pipes on and off when needed, you can share them with others in your team or across agencies quickly and easily.

Have you a task you'd like to automate? 

• Finding mentions of your Department on Twitter or Facebok
• Tracking mentions of your program in the media releases of other agencies
• Archiving all your Tweets and Facebook statuses
• Receiving an SMS alert when the weather forecast is for rain (so you take your umbrella)
• Posting your Facebook updates, Blog posts and media releases automatically on Twitter spread throughout the day (using Buffer)

The sky's the limit!

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Is this a world first? Australia's Bureau of Statistics #rickrolls its Twitter followers

Australia has been at the forefront of social media use by government agencies for a few years now (though don't tell them I said so or they might get complacent).

However I think this is possibly a world first.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) yesterday released the first tranche of results from Australia's 2011 Census, to widespread interest - partially fuelled by their effective use of social media during the data collection process.

Today the ABS thanked Australians, via Twitter, for their support with the following message.

Thank you Australia for the great support for the Census. Please see here for a special gift from the 2011Census team http://  bit.ly/7JJSz8 

The thank you link went to a classic internet meme. The RickRoll.

As far as I know this is the first time any government agency, anywhere in the world has RickRolled it's citizens - although the Zombie Apocalypse has been featured several times, by the CDC and by Queensland Police.

I like governments with a sense of human - they feel more human, more connected and more relevant.

From the reaction on Twitter, others feel the same way.

In my view this is a brilliant step that cements the ABS's position as one of the most effective organisational users of Twitter.

They have successfully built and directed attention to the importance of statistics, supporting the census process, through their sensitive, factual and yet human use of the medium.


However I wonder if this show of humanity will be punished by those who wish to portray governments in a negative light, as monolithic, humourless, emotionless institutions.

If you make your money from criticising governments, you don't want them to seem too likeable or human.

Update
I've just been reminded on Twitter that the US government was actually the first to RickRoll its followers in July last year, as covered in this Washington Post article, Did the White House just rickroll its 2 million Twitter followers?

Still it leaves the ABS as an early adopter.

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How nine year olds can now reform governments, one bite at a time

With the tools available today, influence over government policy is no longer the preserve of the wealthy, the well-connected or those people with a significant TV, radio or newspaper presence.

While traditional media and interests still have significant influence, social media has allowed individuals to become far more influential.

Blogs, forums and social networks give individuals and small groups the ability to have a national or global public platform, at little or no cost, that can be used to tell their stories and present different views or facts.

This is both challenging and an opportunity for governments. Governments, including politicians and officials, that seek to ignore, marginalise or otherwise discredit individuals for standing up for their beliefs or reporting facts are much more likely to be publicly exposed, their reputations damaged and any hypocrisy cast into the public eye.

Governments that embrace the opportunity to bring more people inside the tent, balance well-connected interests with individual views and question whether traditional lobby and representative groups actually represent the groups they claim to represent, are likely to find their work more complex but ultimately more effective, with better policy and more relevant service delivery outcome.

A great example of the influence of individuals due to social media (bolstered by traditional media once the groundswell grew) has occurred over the last week.

NeverSeconds
Some of you may be aware of the NeverSeconds blog, and the struggles its 9-year author has had with the Scottish council, which banned her taking photos of her school lunches until convinced otherwise by online public opinion, celebrities and the Scottish Education Minister.

However if you're not, here's the story in a nutshell (referencing Wired's story NeverSeconds shuts down).

In April this year nine-year-old Martha Payne in Scotland, with some technical help from her father, started a blog as a writing exercise to document what she ate each day for lunch in her school, Lochgilphead Primary.

Martha's lunch on 18 June

Before starting the blog, she and her father (who is a local farmer), encouraged by her mother (a GP), surfed foodie blogs for inspiration. Martha decided as a result that she wanted to photo each of her lunches and provide a report including how much she liked the food, the number of bites each meal took to eat, the health rating (from a nine-year old's perspective), the price and the number of hairs in the food.

The blog was approved by the school and was written entirely by Martha under supervision from her father.

Over the first two months of the blog's life, Martha attracted a huge audience from around the world, with more than a million views of her posts.

Her blog started driving good outcomes. Her local council 'remembered' to tell the school that students were entitiled to unlimited salad, fruit and bread, she and her father were invited to participate in a workshop on school lunches, other students from around the world began sending her photos of their lunches (which she posted in her blog too). A newspaper sent her some money for use of her photos, which she donated to a charity (more on this later).

The media caught wind of her blog and began writing articles about it, including Time, the Telegraph, and the Daily Mail. She was interviewed on the BBC and also attracted the attention of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, who has crusaded on the topic of healthy school lunches in Britain.

This, however, is where bureaucracy stepped in.

Martha's lunch on 30 May

An article in a newspaper used a throw-away headline, "Time to fire the dinner ladies", while discussing Martha's involvement in a thinktank on health school meals.

The local Council, Argyll and Bute Council decided that this criticism was too much, and claimed media coverage of the blog had led catering staff to fear for their jobs.

They promptly decreed on 14 June that students would no longer be allowed to take cameras into their school canteen.

Martha was accordingly called out of maths class and told that she could no longer photo her lunches.

By this time Martha had had 2 million views of her blog and had raised £2000 for charity, including £50 from the newspaper mentioned earlier.

However, as an obedient nine-year old, Martha wrote a goodbye post on her blog.

At this point her readers became activated, and the media coverage exponentially increased. She received 2,370 comments on her goodbye post and over 200 articles were posted in newspapers, plus radio and TV stories around the world. She received celebrity support from Jamie Oliver and Neil Gaiman.

Twelve hours later, the Argyll and Bute Council published an official statement (now removed from their site, but still visible online thanks to @peterwalker99 at http://www.twitlonger.com/show/hrom1r).

This statement, in part, accused Martha of misrepresenting what was on offer in the canteen,

 "The Council has directly avoided any criticism of anyone involved in the ‘never seconds’ blog for obvious reasons despite a strongly held view that the information presented in it misrepresented the options and choices available to pupils"

Martha's lunch on 16 May

It went on to state the Council's dedication to good food standards in school canteens, said they'd not received formal complaints about the food in the last two years other than from Martha's family, and that the blog had, and would have, no influence on what they served students anyway. (It is interesting to compare the quality of the statement's writing with the quality of Martha's writing.)

Around this time the charity Martha was supporting, Mary's Meals, reported that they'd now received over £40,000 in donations from her blog - more than enough to build a new kitchen at Lirangwe Primary School in Blantyre, Malawi, to feed its 1,963 students. The kitchen is to be named 'Friends of NeverSeconds'.

Three hours after the Argyll and Bute Council published its statement, the council's leader, Roddy McCuish, told the BBC that he was rescinding the ban on photos in school canteens, and the council issued a statement commending Martha's blog and indicating that the council would be involving students in their efforts to keep improving school meals,

We need to find a united way forward so I am going to bring together our catering staff, the pupils, councillors and council officials - to ensure that the council continues to provide  healthy, nutrious and attractive school meals.  That "School Meals Summit" will take place later this summer.

 I will also meet Martha and her father as soon as I can, along with our lead councillor on Education, Michael Breslin to seek her continued engagement, along with lots of other pupils, in helping the council to get this issue right.   By so doing Martha Payne and her friends  will have had a strong and lasting influence not just on school meals, but on the whole of Argyll & Bute.

Martha has resumed her blogging, and has now raised over £87,000 for the Mary's Meal charity - see her total, and give to the charity here.

Meanwhile the issue of healthy school lunches is being more widely discussed and debated, and the council has learnt it needs to more closely consider the views of its constituents and the children it serves. Shutting down debate is no longer an option for successful governance.

And the children of Lirangwe Primary School in Malawi are extremely happy, with the short video below a fitting tribute to the impact individuals can now have on governments - one bite at a time.

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Prime Minister starting to leverage the influence of bloggers

Refreshments at #pmtea
Photo by @clementine_ford

Last Friday Prime Minister Gillard sat down with a group of influential female bloggers, online women's forum managers and journalists in, what I hope, is the start of an active engagement with online influencers by the Australian Government.

As a blogger I have been on the receiving end of irregular random unsolicited emails from Australian advertising agencies, that sometimes spam bloggers in the hope that some of them will talk about their latest client's products.

I don't know what they charge their clients for this 'service'.

However, to my knowledge, governments and government agencies in Australia have, with a few exceptions, largely ignored the existence and influence of bloggers.

There's also been limited research by governments in Australia into understanding the reach and influence of bloggers, and few attempts at integrating co-ordinated or long-term blogger outreach into communication and stakeholder engagement strategies.

That is what made #pmtea so exciting.

Gillard met with a group of online influencers for an hour or so. She had tea and refreshments with them and generally chatted.

There was no express policy goal or message, and it wasn't a focus group. However what it did was establish a relationship that will help the Prime Minister and govenment in the future.

A photo of #pmtea attendees from www.mymummydaze.com

The Prime Minister established personal connections with influential commentators. So now, whenever she has a message her government wants to get out to large numbers of Australian women and families, her office can include these bloggers in the 'media' distribution, even ask them for help in appropriate circumstances to counter inappropriate spin from traditional media.

When there is negative press coverage on something the government has done, will do (or has decided not to do), these bloggers will think twice before buying into the hype, balancing their views with their experience of her character and their personal connection with her.

This form of soft influence is vital for blunting criticisms aimed at governments and government agencies - just as it is for commercial organisations. Having reporters think twice and reflect, based on a personal relationship, before reporting, is how media advisors have influenced journalists for years, often resulting in more accurate and balanced stories.

Part of the breakdown between governments and media outlets has been due to the breakdown of these traditional relationships, which help commentators understand why decisions are being made and humanise the participants in every debate.

The challenge today for governments, Ministers and agencies alike, is to rebuild this type of relationship with a new form of commentator - influential bloggers. People who command directly, or indirectly, audiences in the tens or hundreds of thousands, making them potentially larger and more actively engaged audiences than those of many traditional magazines and newspapers.

I hope that now the Prime Minister has shown that it is possible and acceptable for (elected) government officials to meet and interact with influential bloggers we'll see agencies more willing to have their (appointed) officials doing the same.

Bloggers are not traditional stakeholders or lobbyists. They generally only represent their own views and are rarely backed by powerful commercial or religious organisations. However they directly interact with, reflect and influence the views of their audiences. They have reach, and they have a platform.

Agencies need to consider inviting them to their conferences, bringing them in as part of their stakeholder groups. involving them in their research and providing them with stories (not media releases) and content they can share.

In other words, agencies need to recognise the influence of bloggers, just as they do traditional media commentators.

And, most importantly, agencies need to read what influential bloggers write.

Here's a list of some of the coverage of #PMTea by blogs, forums and news outlets.

• Allconsuming: Morning Tea with the Prime Minister at Kirribilli House. I KNOW. - http://www.allconsuming.com.au/2012/06/morning-tea-prime-minister-kirribilli-house-i-know/
  
• Daily Life: The best time I ever met Australia's Prime Minister - http://www.dailylife.com.au/life-and-love/real-life/the-best-time-i-ever-met-australias-prime-minister-20120618-20iqh.html 
• Edenland: Julia Gillard, the Bloggers, and the Agenda. - http://www.edenriley.com/2012/06/julia-gillard-bloggers-and-agenda.html and Intagr.am - http://instagr.am/p/L3772TwVa5/
• Good googs: I made a joke and the Prime Minister laughed - http://www.goodgoogs.com/i-made-a-joke-and-the-prime-minister-laughed/
• Life and other crises: PM Seeks Sackville's Advice on Anxiety - http://lifeandothercrises.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/pm-seeks-sackvilles-advice-on-anxiety.html
• Lizosaurus: #PMtea -  http://lizosaurus.com/2012/06/pmtea/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Lizosaurus+%28lizosaurus%29
• MonetPaisley: PMtea - http://monetpaisley.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/pmtea.html
• MyMummydaze: Julia Gillard is more than just our PM - http://www.mymummydaze.com/2012/06/julia-gillard-is-more-than-just-our-pm.html
• Mummy time: The one where I got all huggy with Ms JG - http://mummy-time.com/2012/06/the-one-where-i-got-all-huggy-with-ms-jg/
• Parent wellbeing: Morning tea with the Prime Minister - http://www.parentwellbeing.com/blog/?p=4777
• Planning with kids: Morning tea with the Prime Minister - http://planningwithkids.com/2012/06/16/morning-tea-with-the-prime-minister/
• The Bub Hub: Morning tea with the PM - http://www.bubhub.com.au/community/forums/entry.php?524-Morning-tea-with-the-PM
• WOOGSWORLD: White and one, thanks Jules. Part One - http://www.woogsworld.com/2012/06/white-and-one-thanks-jules-part-one.html
• WOOGSWORLD: White and one, thanks Jules. Part two - http://www.woogsworld.com/2012/06/white-and-one-thanks-jules-part-two.html

News outlets

• Sydney Morning Herald: PM gets more than a cuppa and a catch-up as mummy bloggers spread the goss - http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/pm-gets-more-than-a-cuppa-and-a-catchup-as-mummy-bloggers-spread-the-goss-20120617-20id2.html#ixzz1y6maaERf
• ABC Radio 666 Canberra: The World Today - http://www.abc.net.au/canberra/programs/webcam_radio.htm?ref=listenlive

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Are our Federal politicians 'connected' enough online?

In my copious spare time, I've been pulling together a list of social media channels used by our Federal politicians.

The question I wanted to answer was "Are our Federal politicians using social media effectively to connect with their constituents?", particularly given the level of activity by government agencies, lobby groups and media online.

Surprisingly it wasn't easy to find a comprehensive list of social media accounts operated by Federal politicians. Both the Liberal party and ALP websites were very inaccurate (20-30% incorrect) as well as hard to search - which surprised me considering the electoral value of making it easy for citizens to connect to their local member. It also surprised me that individual MPs were not checking that their information remained accurate in these sites.

Independent services such as MyPolitician, TweetMP and MPTweets were also inaccurate (10-20% incorrect) although they remain fantastic statistical services. Considering these are labours of love I can appreciate the struggle to maintain the currency of information. (However if I were a member of parliament I'd ensure my details were submitted to these and other directories when I first joined each social media network.)

The APH also doesn't provide this information - which isn't really surprising, however they do provide links to websites and email contact forms for members (and fantastic downloadable files which I used for much of the rest of my information). Should social media accounts still be treated differently to email contact information?

Anyway - onto the important bits....

As I've discussed before, my FOI request (which is still in progress) found that about 73% of Australian Government agencies use social media for official purposes. The 2012 Yellow Pages Sensis Social Media report indicated that 62% of Australians use social media - so how did politicians do?

Quite well I am glad to say.

I found that 72.12% of Australian Federal politicians used at least one social media channel, with slightly more of our male politicians (72.67%) than our female (70.77%)  having a social media presence. This is the reverse of the normal statistics for the Australian population, where women are generally more likely to use social media (particularly Facebook) than men.

The Senate did far worse than the House of Representatives, with only 58% of Senators using at least one social media channel, compared to 78% of Reps MPs. I found this quite intriguing given that Senators cover entire states rather than smaller, more easily visitable, electorates. Perhaps it reflects their term length, or a lower level of direct citizen engagement. I can't see a link based on age or gender.

By party, the Greens win on percentages, with 100% of their 10 elected parliamentarians using social media and all of them on Twitter.

The Liberals outpaced the ALP, with 76.60%, or 72 of their 94 elected parliamentarians using some form of social media and 61 on Twitter. The ALP only had 67.65%, or 69 of their 102 elected parliamentarians on social media, with 57 using Twitter.


The Nationals sit on 50%, with six of their 12 elected parliamentarians on social media - and all five on Twitter. Of the eight independents, six use social media (75%), with five of these on Twitter. The two holdouts are Nick Xenophon and Tony Windsor - probably for very different reasons.

Looking at specific social media services, Facebook (133 accounts) and Twitter (132 accounts) dominate with an almost equal number of accounts at about 58% of parliamentarians. This is interesting when you consider that 97% of social media users in Australia are on Facebook, however only 14% use Twitter. In this case I think it can be explained by the theory that Twitter is far more politically influential as it is the haunt of most of Australia's journalists and many influential stakeholders to whom politicians wish to connect.

Female politicians are slightly ahead on Facebook (60% to 58.39% of males) while males lead on Twitter (59.01% to 56.92%). Note that percentages are not absolute, that 60% of females on Facebook represents 39 accounts, whereas the 58.39% of males represents 94 accounts.

Next comes YouTube with 15.49% of parliamentarians having personal accounts (I didn't count party accounts). Here males are well ahead, with 30, or 18.63% of male politicians having accounts compared to only 5, or 7.69% of females.

Flickr follows with 4.42%, or 10, parliamentarians, and bringing up the rear was MySpace - where I could only find 2 politicians still claiming to use the service.

As you'd expect from the Senate vs House of Representatives comparison above, Senators were far less likely to use all of the services. Facebook was used by only 39.47% (30) of Senators compared to 68.67% (103) MPs and Twitter was only used by 50% (38) of Senators, compared to 62.67% (94) MPs.

The type of electorate was a factor as well. Unsurprisingly 85.37% of MPs in Inner Metropolitan seats used a social media channel, compared to 78.72% of those in Outer Metropolitan and 69.05% in Rural seats. Provincial seats, however, bucked the trend, with a 85% usage rate. For an explanation of these terms refer to the bottom of the AEC's party codes page.

Overall I think our Federal politicians have done a decent job of establishing social media channels - although Senators have some way until they catch up with the lower house.

Finally, I am very surprised that Australia's Minister for Broadband, Communication and the Digital Economy (Senator Stephen Conroy) appears to not use social media at all, doesn't have a personal website, and even the link to his Parliamentary website is broken.


The way in which our politicians are using social media channels is a post for another occasion, requiring far more analysis over time.

In case you want to see for yourself what our politicians are saying online, I've established a Twitter account to follow all Federal politicians and created listed based on their house and party affiliations. You can view these as follows:

• Latest 100 tweets from Australian Federal politicians: http://twit100.com/egovaupollies

• Federal politicians: twitter.com/#!/eGovAUPollies/federal-politicians
• Federal MPs: twitter.com/#!/eGovAUPollies/federal-house-of-reps
• Federal Senators: twitter.com/#!/eGovAUPollies/federal-senators
• Federal Labor members: twitter.com/#!/eGovAUPollies/federal-alp-pollies
• Federal Liberal members: twitter.com/#!/eGovAUPollies/federal-liberal-pollies
• Federal Greens members: twitter.com/#!/eGovAUPollies/federal-greens
• Federal National members: twitter.com/#!/eGovAUPollies/federal-nationals
• Federal Independents: twitter.com/#!/eGovAUPollies/federal-independents

A final caveat - people join and leave social media networks all the time, so these figures are 'point in time'.  Also, although I did spend a lot of time searching for social media services used by politicians, I might have missed some, so the figures are representative, but unlikely to be 100% accurate.

Note that as I did spend more time looking than a regular citizen would, I'm not prepared to take all the blame for not finding a politician's Facebook page when they've hidden it from sight really well (or locked their Twitter account as several politicians appear to have done). Politicians who want to engage online need to make these channels very easy to find - as should their parties.

All the information I've collected, and the statistics generated, are embedded below. If you see anything that is incomplete and want to help populate the spreadsheet, drop me a line via email or my @craigthomler Twitter account. I'll even populate it for you if you add comments with the missing information.

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Ten tips for social media engagement by government (from the UK Cabinet Office)

The UK Cabinet Office recently released Social Media Guidance for civil servants.

The guidance goes far beyond the level and sophistication of material I've seen from many other jurisdictions, offering support and useful advice, not just rules and warnings.

It also provides advice to CTOs and CIOs on how to oversome some of the technical barriers to accessing and using the internet and social media that still plague many agencies, stating that,

Social media is likely to become as ubiquitous as email with many more, if not all, staff eventually needing to use it in some form as part of their work.

The guidance provides an excellent model for governments in Australia. In fact it could almost be reused wholesale as most of the information holds true here as well.

As Francis Maude, Minister for Cabinet Office, states in his introduction to the guidance,

When civil servants, policy makers and service delivery units alike, open themselves to dialogue with the public they can glean a much better understanding of the real needs and concerns of citizens. They can keep up-to-date with the latest thinking as well as being a listening post and avenue for real time reassurance and information.

In particular, the ten tips for social media engagement are sound advice I'd recommend agencies in Australia follow to the letter.

These are:

1. Have a clear idea of your objectives in using social media (behaviour change/service
   delivery/consultation/communication)
2. Learn the rules of each social media space before engaging
3. Abide by the Civil Service Code and ask for advice if you are not sure
4. Remember an official account belongs to the Department not the individual
5. Communicate where your citizens are
6. Build relationships with your stakeholders on and offline – social media is just one of many
   communication channels
7. Try not to channel shift citizens backwards (move from email to telephone for example)
8. Do not open a channel of communication you cannot maintain
9. Understand when a conversation should be taken offline
10. Do not engage with users who are aggressive/abusive

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Modelling open data - new visualisation from recently released BOM data

The Bureau of Meteorology has released new data for reuse under Creative Commons licensing, ahead of the upcoming GovHack in Canberra next week, and Mark Hatcher has used it to model 153 years of Sydney weather in a short video (image to right).

The higher the temperatures, the warmer the colours.

This is a good example of how data can be reused by the public to provide different insights or perspectives into topics - providing evidence to inform different viewpoints.

These public mashups could then potentially be re-adopted (crowdsourced) and shared by governments, where they offer new insights, to better communicate with and engage the community or staff.

Of course there are technical smarts involved in this type of modelling, however tools such as ManyEyes, Visual.ly, Infogr.am and Piktochart make it easy for individuals with no technical training to create interesting views from raw data.

These tools can even be used by government agencies to model their own data - useful both for public engagement and internal engagement with staff or management. Though note it is important to only create infographics from publicly available data as the processing may be done in the cloud!

Mark's complete (41 second) video of his visualisation is below. If viewing it at work I suggest turning down the sound so as to not distract colleagues.





UPDATE:
I've received a clarification as to what data was new - and it's actually new functionality.  You can now download 'all years of data' in a single file, for daily rainfall, temp and solar exposure - hat tip to Jim Birch.

This improvement makes it much easier to produce mashups like Mark's above.

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Mapping Australian Twitter discussions

Associate Professor Axel Bruns, who has previously done marvelous work mapping Australian blogs and tracking social media activity around the Queensland bushfires, has released his team's latest research on mapping the Australian Twittersphere.

Drawing (slightly paraphrased) from the joint CCI and Queensland University of Technology media release:

With as many as two million Australians now using Twitter to exchange news, views and information, the internet phenomenon has become a focal element in the nation’s social discourse, say Axel and Dr Jean Burgess.

By analysing topics of interest and concern to Australians the researchers built a ‘network map’ showing the connections between different issues and areas. “Just as newspapers have circulation reports and TV has its ratings, it is important to understand the role which new media are playing in our society,” they say.

“The map offers us a completely different way to view Australian society – not by where people live or what job they do, but by how they connect to each other through Twitter,” said Professor Bruns.

“You can use the map to study developments in Australian politics, natural disasters or trends in public thought and opinion,” Dr Burgess says. “It offers us a completely fresh way to view the discourse that is taking place between Australians or different groups.

“It shows there are multiple, overlapping publics, interacting and interweaving in time and space across Australia.”

The map also revealed which Twitter networks are isolated from the Australian ‘mainland’ tending to connect among themselves more than with other networks. These include evangelical groups, cities like Adelaide and Perth, followers of pop stars, and various sports and beer lovers.

The researchers based their map on data from 950,000 Australian Twitter accounts, but say that the national Twitter population is estimated to be as high as 1.8-2 million. The world Twitter population is now thought to be around 200 million – about a quarter that of rival social medium Facebook.

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