Don't forget the why of Gov 2.0

In any job it is easy to get caught up in the details - the what and how of what we need to do, day in and day out, to deliver the outputs demanded of us.

Whether it's writing a brief, building a website, managing a social media channel, responding to a crisis or some other activity driving our actions, the focus is on what we need to do and how we need to deliver.

However amongst all this activity it is important to take time out periodically to consider why we are doing what we do.

What is the purpose of our activities, what are the outcomes we want, not simply the outputs.

This is particularly important for Government 2.0, which is essentially a set of strategies, tools and techniques - not a goal in and of itself.

When, as an individual or an agency, we decide to use social media to communicate or collaborate with our stakeholders and citizens, or release data in machine-readable formats for reuse, we need to consider why we are taking these steps. What is the goal we're trying to accomplish, or the change we're trying to make.

We shouldn't be engaging in Gov 2.0 activities because of the 'bling' of working with cool technologies, the thrill of doing something new first or the kudos from peers, speaking engagements and awards.

The Gov 2.0 activities need to help us deliver on the why we are there. Helping the public to make better choices, helping government better understand its customers and what they need to live full and rich lives.

Government 2.0, just like government, is a tool to achieve a desired goal - a happy, healthy, fair society where everyone can live securely and with mutual respect and understanding under a transparent and accountable system.

So stop, take a breath and consider why you're doing what you're doing. Think about whether you've picked the right approach - the 'how'- and whether there's more, less, or different things which you could do to best achieve your why.

Put your why first - decide why you are going to do what you are going to do - before you decide what you will do and how.

Also consider the video below - the power of considering the why - it can do much more than assist aligning your Government 2.0 initiatives, it can reshape organisations or revolutionise the world.

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Should you design websites for the '1%'?

A concern I’ve had for the last ten years is how websites are designed and approved by organisations (both in government and the commercial sector).

In a better-than-average world, when asked to develop a new website or improve an existing one, the web team goes out to discover what users think of the site.

This involves identifying the site’s key audiences and using surveys, focus groups, other research and past feedback to identify good and bad design and usability features. After this the team come up with concepts, tests them on audiences and refines.

 (In a average or worse world the web team isn’t given the time or resourcing to do all this research, so short-cuts the process with their ‘best guess’ design improvements based on feedback and experience. This is far too common but can still deliver improvements.)

When the web team reach final agreement on a few design alternatives, they go to senior management for approval, often with a detailed case explaining all the design decisions.

And this is where the process breaks down.

• “Can you make the website more blue? I want it to be bluer.”
• “I like (pick a random site visited in the last day). Can you redesign it so that our website looks just like that one.” 
• “I don’t use search, I use menus, so can you move the search to the bottom right of the page” 
• “I don’t believe anyone wants three columns in a webpage, please restructure to two columns.” 
• “It’s too hard for me to find anything, can you simply list all the main site categories and pages in the homepage.” 
• “We’d prefer to organise information by our divisions rather than by subject, I’m sure that would be much easier to understand” 
• “We actually wanted the website to look just like the printed brochure” 
• “I like the shirt I am wearing today, make the website the same colour”

Suddenly web teams have to reassess what they are attempting to deliver and who they are delivering for.

Their collective expertise and research is no longer relevant.

The audience of the site is no longer relevant.

They are designing for one person, or a small group of people – decision-makers who are often not the target audience and possible don’t even use the website.

This is a source of great frustration for web teams. They are no longer designing for the 99% of their audience, they are designing for the 1%.

Now what if this process was turned on its head...

Rather than having an executive or Minister approve a website, we instead released several near final designs for A/B testing on online audiences (as organisations like Google, Amazon and Microsoft do), a proven and effective technique, or took the final couple of design alternatives and put them online for the public to vote on and thereby approve.

Of course there would still need to be some level of senior executive involvement in defining the organisation’s overall requirements for the website. The site does have to meet the organisation's goals.

However the actual approval would come from the audience, the 99%, people using the website, the people you wish to communicate with, support, engage or influence.

Radical? Maybe.

Effective. Certainly.

Doable?

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Why aren't Aussies using open government data to create value?

This post was inspired by a comment by John Sheridan on Twitter,

@craigthomler what I'd like for #gov2au #NY? egs of use of #PSI for service delivery innovation, value creation etc, not just curiosity

It's a good New Years wish and highlights two questions that I have been pondering for a long time.

1. Why aren't people making more use of publicly release government data?
2. Does making government data publicly available have any value if people aren't using it to value add?

Let's take them in order...

1. Why aren't people making more use of publicly release government data?

In Australia the data.gov.au catalogue contains 844 datasets (and growing). NSW (data.nsw.gov.au) and Victoria's (data.vic.gov.au) catalogues are also quite large. 

By comparison, the US data.gov catalogue contains over 390,000 datasets, Canada's data.gc.ca over 265,000, the UK's data.gov.uk around 7,700,  Singapore's data.gov.sg about 5,000 datasets and New Zealand's data.govt.nz over 1,600 datasets.

Across these six countries (I am excluding the two states), that is in excess of 670,000 datasets released publicly. However if you search around there's not that many apps listed using the data. The US site lists around 1,150 and Australia's site lists 16 - however that's not many compared to the number of datasets.

As Victoria's data blog asks, what has happened to all the apps produced in government-sponsored competitions? Are they actually worth holding?

OK, let's work through a few possibilities. 

Firstly it could be that these datasets are being widely used, but people simply aren't telling the catalogues. Data may be embedded in websites and apps without any communication back to the central catalogue, or it may be downloaded and used in internal spreadsheets and intranets. In this case there's no actual issue, just a perceived one due to lack of evidence.

Secondly, to face facts, the majority of people probably are still not aware of these data catalogues - they haven't really been widely promoted and aren't of much interest to the popular media. Therefore there may be hundreds of thousands of people wishing to access certain government information but unaware that it is readily available.

Thirdly, those people aware of these datasets may be daunted by the number released, unable to find the data they specifically want to use or simply aren't interested.

Finally, perhaps simply releasing a dataset isn't enough. Few people are data experts or know what to do with a list of values. Could it be that we need simple and free analysis tools as well as raw data?

There's steps governments can take to address all of these possibilities.

If people aren't telling the government about their apps, why not establish light 'registration' processes to use them which capture information on why they are being used? Or if this is too invasive, offer people appropriate incentives to tell the central catalogue about their uses of the data.

Secondly, there may be a need to promote these data catalogues more actively - to build awareness via appropriate promotion.

Thirdly, perhaps we need to do more user-testing of our data catalogues to better understand if they meet the audience's needs. Combined with excellent mechanisms for suggesting and rating datasets, this could greatly inform the future development and success of these catalogues.

And finally, governments need to consider the next step. Provide the raw data, but also provide sites and tools that can analyse them. Sure governments are hoping that the public will create these, and maybe they will, however that doesn't mean that agencies can't do so as well. There's also pre-existing tools, such as Yahoo Pipes, IBM's Manyeyes and analytics tools from Google which could be pre-populated with the government datasets, ready for users to play with.

Alongside all these specific solutions, maybe governments need to start using some of the tools at their disposal to ask why people aren't using their data. Is it the wrong data? Presented in the wrong way? Too hard to use? Market research might help answer these questions.

2. Does making government data publicly available have any value if people aren't using it to value add?

Now to take the second question - does it really matter whether people are using open government data anyway?

Are there other goals that releasing data addresses, such as transparency and accountability, intra-government sharing and culture change?

If the mandate to release data leads to government culture change it may drive other benefits - improved collaboration, improved policy outcomes, cost-savings through code and knowledge sharing.

Of course it is harder to provide a direct quantitative link between releasing data, changing culture and the benefits above. However maybe this is what we need to learn how to measure, rather than simply the direct correlation between 844 datasets released, 16 apps created.

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What if computer problems happened in real life?

I'll let the video speak for itself...

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Allowing your customers to codesign your services

Crowdsourcing often seems to be a high stress area for organisations, who fear what might happen if they allowed their users to design their products and services.

However what is often forgotten is that it's not about handing over the design process, it is about sharing it as a codesign process - combining the brain power of a few internal or contracted specialist designers who don't necessarily use your products or services with the brain power of thousands of non-specialists who use or interact with your products and services, often on a regular basis.

A good example of this process was recently discussed in Inc., where Fiat crowd sourced the design of its 2009 concept car, the Fiat Mio.

The main part of this process was conducted in Spanish (as Fiat is Brazilian based), and while I watched it occur at the time, there was only a limited subset of the conversation in English.

However Fiat ended up involving people from 160 countries - taking on board over 10,000 suggestions.  The website about the making of the car provides more information on how Fiat went about integrating these suggestions.

The concept car won widespread critical acclaim. 


This isn't the only approach possible, and the article in Inc, Letting Your Customers Design Your Products, describes five different types of crowd sourcing:

• Crowdfunding: Sites such as Kickstarter that allow an individual or enterprise to receive funding.
• Distributed knowledge: The aggregation of data and information from a variety of sources.
• Cloud labor: Leveraging a virtual labor pool.
• Collective creativity: Tapping "creative" communities for user-generated art, media or content.
• Open innovation: The use of outside resources to generate new ideas and company processes.

 How many of these could your agency benefit from?

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Happy belated 20th birthday Mr Web Browser

The first web browser, appropriately named WorldWideWeb, was released publicly in August 1991 by 'Father of the Web' Tim Berners-Lee.

While I realise this post is a month late, I thought it would still be worth wishing the web browser 'Happy Birthday' and commenting on the impact that web browser software has had over the last twenty years.

If you go back twenty years (and two months), the internet was primarily a text based knowledge storage and communication medium.

While it was already global - just - the number of users could be counted in the thousands and were primarily researchers and academics at universities, with a few large companies and individuals thrown in.

With the introduction of WorldWideWeb (which became open source code in 1993), the internet was capable of becoming a visual medium, displaying text in stylesheets, images, sounds and even movies (it even built in a spellchecker and a WYSIWYG web page editing tool).

Today, the web is the largest media distribution channel on the planet, used by 2 billion people directly, and indirectly by almost the entire population of the planet. It supports the largest video library in the world (YouTube), the largest and fastest updating encyclopedia (Wikipedia) and the dominant social networks used by well over a billion people to remain connected to each other, despite distance and time.

Much of this is due to the innovations embodied in that first web browser - the browser that literally founded the world wide web.

Source: The brewing browser brouhaha
Sydney Morning Herald 29/09/2011 

The Sydney Morning Herald recently reported on the current state of the web browser market, looking at the five main platforms available - all of which are free to download and use (see image right).

Internet Explorer, from Microsoft retains the single largest market share, a reported 43% share - well down from the 90% plus they claimed back in 2005 (when IE6 dominated).

IE's share is split across four versions of the browser, each with very different capabilities - for July 2011 from net applications this was divided into IE6 (9.22%), IE7 (6.25%), IE8 (29.23%) and IE9 (6.8%).

Similarly, Firefox's share across versions has increased as their development pace has accelerated - for September 2011 from StatCounter this was divided into mainly Firefox 3.6 or lower (9.44%), Firefox 4 (2.10%), Firefox 5 (10.09%) and Firefox 6 (5.73%).

Today's diversity of web browsers is both an opportunity and a challenge for organisations. It provides an ecosystem rich in innovation and increasingly compliant with industry standards, however requires organisations to constantly reassess whether they are still designing for the right standard, or equipping their staff appropriately to access the range of web content they need in their jobs.

On the whole I think it is good to see this competition, although I appreciate the incremental cost of web design it brings - compatibility adds at least 10% of costs to web projects and can add more than 20% if designing for 10 year old web browsers, such as IE6.

The web browser has changed the world, largely for the better. It has opens up global publishing and distribution to billions and generated enormous efficiencies in sharing information (many of which remain to be realised as laws and processes catch up with the changed environment).

And yet, if the web browser was a person, it would not yet (quite) be legally allowed to drink in the USA.

I wonder what the next twenty years will bring.

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Should government agencies embrace co-production for policy and services?

Ovum has published an interesting article by Steve Hodgkinson on Co-production: the new face of public services.

In the article Hodgkinson concludes that,

Agencies now need to nurture and embrace co-production by design, or risk either failing to harness this new resource or being left behind like old-style monopolists in an increasingly dynamic and competitive public services market.

What do you think, do government agencies need to integrate the wisdom of crowds in the design of public policy and services?

Or do agencies need to focus on developing their own internal design capabilities, using tried and true engagement, consultation and test processes to fine tune public policies and services to community needs?

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Gov 2.0 views from Gartner's Government day

I attended Gartner's Government Day on Monday for their ITXPO Symposium (I was on a panel), and it was very interesting to hear the views expressed about social media.

Below are some of the quotes I recorded from Gartner analysts and senior IT leaders. They are not all verbatim and have been reordered to flow more logically.

• Social media is not about technology, it's about collaboration - the only risk is in ignoring it.
   
• There are 20 exabytes of social media information available online today - it is real, it is not a fad.  It doesn't matter whether you are using social media - you cannot ignore it because your customers use it.
   
• In a world where people can talk to people, as an organisation you had better be believable - traditional PR no longer works.  If you wish to be credible in social media, you have to tell the truth. Black box organisations will not survive.
   
• The public will judge organisations not on whether they make mistakes, they all do, but on how they visibly recover.
   
• Google's PR strategy made mistakes OK, so that customers don't mind. Organisations that try to pretend they don't make mistakes and then attempt to hide their mistakes create huge media attention and serious reputation damage. It is better to be honest and truthful and not create those types of unrealistic expectations.
   
• Bloggers are hugely important public influencers. Organisations no longer control the message, they must influence the influencers. This is an entirely new approach to public relations.
 
• You could allow marketing to lead social media initiatives - but there's a risk it will disappear down a black hole. Organisations need a broader strategic approach. BHP tried all traditional communications approaches with the Gulf oil spill and they didn't work.
   
• If staff want to discuss confidential matters they will  - banning them from Facebook at work doesn't make a different, they will use other channels, like a phone, or their own devices. Secure their communications through training and support, not their technology.
   
• It isn't the right of ICT security to control social media issues - privacy and record-keeping are corporate governance issues.
   
• IT is shirking its responsibility by not providing organisational platforms for online monitoring and engagement. IT needs to be a source of data, information and strategic advice to marketing for social media as it changes.
   
• IT must support and facilitate business to realise social media opportunities. If it doesn't, its role will get smaller and less significant. Twenty years ago ICT stepped back and allowed marketing to run websites, we can't afford to step back to that again.
   
• You should own your own '[organisation] sucks' domain and site. Use it to listen and respond to customer complaints.
   
• Organisations struggle with how to engage via social media - the answer is to listen, rectify issues, contact and invite comment. Imagine a customised 'Tripadvisor.com.au' service where the public could comment on your service and rate you. It may not be far away.
   
• The more layers of management, the more barriers to collaboration and transparency.
   
• If you want to change culture, budget one year per layer of management, for example if you have eight layers of management a single culture change can take eight years (requoted from an ex-Senior Officer).

You may agree with a number of these statements.

However, the comments were not from any 'Social media in Government' workshop.

They were from a 'Social media in the Banking industry' workshop that I attended after my panel to see how the financial industry was addressing Web 2.0 opportunities.

After the workshop I've formed the view that banking is about two to three years behind government in Australia in engaging with social media effectively.

I can see some real shake-up coming to the industry based on several other statements by Gartner analysts:

• Financial services companies are inherently conservative and don't attract innovative people.
   
• The reality is that banking industry runs on opaqueness - it is the only way it can keep the prices high and profits substantial.

The banking sector is facing significant challenges. Regardless of whether its senior leadership wishes to engage via social media or not, their customers, stakeholders and even their staff are using these channels more and more.

Increasingly, banks are seeing the rise of services like Paypal, which the panel said that banks laughed off only a few years ago but now see as a genuine threat to their business.

They are concerned about the risk of Google starting a banking business, as they believe Google has a better reputation and greater capability to be agile.

They are worried about online comparison services, which make it easy for the public to compare banking and insurance rates; and about online services, which offer substitute banking services more conveniently.

In other words, the banks are facing reputation, transparency and agility crises, brought on by a culture that resists change and innovation, at the hands of social media empowered individuals and small, agile, innovative organisations.

Government isn't always slow, conservative or inflexible, particularly compared to large institutional banks.

Maybe, in the public sector, we're doing much better than some people might appreciate.

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Whether to reuse or build - government choices in a connected world

There's been discussion on Twitter over the last day about whether Australian government should be building online platforms, such as a video aggregation and distribution service, URL shortcut tools (which Victoria have done) or collective infrastructure for hosting and developing all government websites.

This has been an area of on-and-off discussion for over a year in the Government 2.0 context, with several Gov 2.0 Taskforce projects exploring potential opportunities for Australian governments to build systems such as these.

I expect this to continue to be a debate for many years. Choosing whether to build a service, or tap into a commercial one, can be a tough decision - even tougher online than it is in the physical world.

Why so tough a decision?

For starters, many of the services which government could use are hosted overseas, therefore posing some level of sovereign risk - whether that be,

• a concern over whether the service will continue to provide what Australia needs (when foreign laws and business policies may change),
• that personal or secure data might be accessed and misused by another jurisdiction (especially all those people who only use one password), or
• that it might provide an entry point for hackers seeking confidential and secret government information.

On the other hand, existing online services are frequently cheap and fast to implement, plus several are the 'norm' that people use around the world (such as Google, YouTube and eBay).

In many cases government created systems could have to be developed to the extent where they are commercially competitive in order to attract the level of user traffic needed to justify their continued existence.

So how to reconcile these differing perspectives... There's no single answer in my view. Decisions need to be made case by case. What makes sense for some jurisdictions won't for others and decisions that are right for one type of service won't be for another.

In lieu of an easy answer, I offer up four tests that I believe these types of reuse or build choices need to consider.

1. Will it reduce private sector competition?
   In other words, is the government competing directly against enterprise. If so there may be job and tax implications. Generally Australian governments shy away from entering commercial markets except when private enterprise is unwilling or unable to deliver the services to the entire population at a fair price.
   
2. Will government deliver a superior outcome?
   This tests whether a government-run enterprise will provide a better outcome than a private sector organisation. Strange as it may seem, governments are better at providing some services and outcomes than private industry - particularly where equity or public value is an issue. If the government can deliver a superior outcome there is a strong case for stepping in - if private sector companies miss out then they need to look at whether they should have restructured.
   
3. Will it attract a significantly large and appropriate audience?
   It is very important to consider whether a government-run service will attract enough users to make it worthwhile. For example, Facebook has build its audience over a number of years, holding on to them through being so useful that people cannot abandon it without damaging their social networks. If the bulk of the audience use Facebook, would they use 'Govbook' - a government equivalent service, even if it is a superior product? The answer may not always be yes - and without audience a government service may not achieve its goals.
   
4. Is it sustainable?
   In asking this I mean will a government continue to support and run the service over an extended period of time - perhaps even transitioning it to a private concern. Or is it possible that funds will be cut to a level where the service is unable to continue to innovate and improve, thereby seeing the service slip into irrelevance. Funding maintenance alone is no longer sufficient to address the rate of development online.

Of course these tests are merely suggestions. As pointed out on Twitter they are more guidelines than rules.

However I think that applying these tests will support more effective, evidence-based decisions - particularly in light of the large number of demands on government resources and time.

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No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft...

It used to be said that no-one ever got fired for buying IBM products.

More recently much the same sentiment has been expressed about Microsoft.

However that perception now appears to be under challenge.

ReadWriteWeb reports in its article Google Sues US Government Agency Over Using Microsoft Only that,

Google has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of the Interior for requiring that messaging technologies must be part of the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite in order to be considered for procurement.

Apparently the case has some merit (the article goes on to say). While the Department had justified a Microsoft preference due to 'enhanced security', Google Apps were recently the first cloud service certified by the US Federal government's Federal Information Security Management Act certification.

This case, if successful, might see other software makers challenging US government requirements for vendor-specific solutions. Internationally it could even, over time, help open source and cloud application developers gain greater consideration in government procurement processes.

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The internet isn't a tool for democracy - it's simply a tool

Over the weekend I read an insightful an well written paper by Rebecca McKinnon of Harvard University. Presented at the two day 'Liberation Technology in Authoritarian Regime' conference on 10-11 October, the paper provides some compelling evidence that the internet is not a tool for democracy, it is simply a tool and can be used to support authoritarian regimes just as it can be used to support democratic ones.

Named Networked Authoritarianism in China and Beyond: Implications for global Internet freedom, and sponsored the Hoover Institution & the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), Stanford University, the paper discusses the use of the internet by China. While external sources of political news and influence may be blocked, the Chinese government is making extensive use of the internet internally to empower citizens in support of the present regime - using legal means and extensive censorship controls to channel online discussions into politically acceptable thread.

It discusses the rise of 'networked authoritarianism' - where an authoritarian regime embraces and adjusts to the changes brought by digital communications technologies and co-opts the medium. Permitting citizens the illusion of freedom of speech, the ability to discuss social ills and influence some government policies, while retaining strict control over political expression.

I think it is important to bear in mind that by itself the internet will not necessarily lead to greater transparency, openness and democratic governance. It requires the efforts of individuals and organisations to unleash its potential.

To quote two of Rebecca's conclusions:

The business and regulatory environment for telecommunications and Internet services must become a new and important focus of human rights activism and policy. Free and democratic political discourse requires Internet and telecommunications regulation and policymaking that is transparent, accountable, and open to reform both through the courts and the political system. Without such baseline conditions, opposition, dissent, and reform movements will face an increasingly uphill battle against increasingly innovative forms of censorship and surveillance, assisted by companies that operate and shape activists’ digital environment.

Finally citizens and policymakers of democratic nations must not forget that global Internet freedom begins at home. One of the most urgent tasks of the world’s democracies is to develop best practices for openness, accountability, rule of law, and transparent governance of their own digital networks. That is the best possible long-term weapon against the spread of networked authoritarianism. It is also essential in order to ensure the long-term health of the world’s existing democracies.

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World e.Gov Forum review Part 2: Gov 2.0 case studies

This is the second part of my series of posts on the World e.Gov forum I attended in early October 2010 in Paris, France. The previous part is World e.Gov Forum review Part 1: Gov 2.0 flavours.

In this part I'd like to share six case studies of Gov 2.0 and eGovernment activity from around the world that I was briefed on as part of the World e.Gov Forum.

The briefing was held at Cisco's Paris office using their telepresence system to speak with each of the countries in turn.

Any errors in the information are due to my understanding of the programs.

India - lifting people out of poverty through connectivity
We first spoke with India, where the challenges for internet use centred around their low literacy rate (64.8%) and access to high speed (or any speed) internet connections.

The internet is seen as a key development tool in India, critical to help lift people out of poverty through access to knowledge, markets and services. In a country where transportation and communication is a challenge, mobile devices and internet connectivity are the primary infrastructure necessary for modernisation and civic enablement.

The country is experiencing a huge boom in mobile connectivity at present, with 15 million new mobile connections each month - a huge number in Australian terms, and while only a fraction of India's 1.2 billion people, it still suggests that most of the country will have mobile phones within 5 years.

In 2008 the government initiated a 10 billion rupee programme to roll out eKiosks in 100,000 locations, in the largest public-private partnership in Indian history.

The kiosks form the central component of Common Service Centres (CSCs) in rural districts, which allows online bill payments, booking tickets, applying for jobs, searching for market information, selling of local produce and broader internet access services. In particular the kiosks provide access to eGovernment services - allowing the Indian government to better service remote locations. CSCs are managed by village level entrepreneurs, and are designed to be a central point for villagers to access services and government schemes.

The project is being coordinated through a set of government partners, such as Sahaj, which has won the tender to roll out 24,780 kiosks in six India states, servicing 150,000 villages.

Currently over 84,000 locations are in place and are being used for telemedicine (allowing remote villages to access doctors), provide educational courses for children and adults, support the social inclusion of women, improve agricultural efficiency and a variety of other purposes. They also serve as banking centres.

The public-private partnership is giving local entrepreneurs four years of revenue support to help them get on their feet. As part of the rollout around 10,000 WiMax towers have been put in place to provide connectivity.


Canada - improving government efficiency through collaboration
As a economically and politically developed and stable country with huge geographic distances and a relatively small population (33 million people), Canada's challenge was how to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the public service through enhancing collaboration.

Therefore for Canada we looked at a very different government initiative, GCPedia, the government's internal knowledge sharing wiki.

Originally established and released by the Canadian Government CIO as a pilot in August 2008 (and he didn't wait for political approval), the wiki was designed as a cross-government platform that could be used however Canadian public servants saw fit - within their codes of conduct.

By not restricting the ways GCPedia could be used, providing a blank slate as it were, other than the need to access it from a government IP address, this has unleashed enormous innovation, with public servants using it to meet their needs - from managing cross-government taskforces to organising car pooling.

There are over 200 active communities of practice and over 18,000 users (out of a potential 250,000). As the Canadian government representative said, once people get in they don't leave.

Over the last two years the representative said that people had become bolder and less scared of being seen. With this confidence had come greater usage of the service, fresh waves of innovation and broader benefits such as a greater willingness to engage with risk when considering public-facing engagement initiatives.

The service has provided great knowledge sharing benefits and started to become a corporate history for the Canadian public service - capturing information that otherwise left when public servants retired or otherwise left the service.

As in October 2010 the service has over 9,000 articles (pages) and 4.6 million page views.

The Canadian government is also working on their Gov 2.0 strategy, including guidance on social media use - using GCPedia of course - with a big launch planned for (northern hemisphere) spring 2011.


Bahrain - enabling eGovernment
Bahrain already has 120% mobile phone penetration, however computer-based internet connectivity is still low in many areas. A key challenge the country faced was providing government services more efficiently to the public by improving access to the internet and mobile-enabling services.

Bahrain partnered on a kiosk model in April 2010, with the goal of rolling out an initial 35 kiosks in public areas such as shopping centres. The intention is to roll out the kiosks over time in strategic locations across the kingdom. The free kiosks provide access to a range of eGovernment services as well as broader internet access.

At the same time the government has worked to roll out many egovernment services for both computer and mobile device access and now has over 150 integrated e-services available from 26 government agencies.

So far these e-services have collected over $44 million, involving 240,000 payments and 24 million pageviews.

One notable initiative has been the 'eBirth' service from the Ministry of Health which allows the birth of babies to be registered and their ID card ordered and paid for online as soon as the baby is born. This replaces a paper-based process which required significantly more effort from parents.


US - adoption of cross-government cloud computing
Next we spoke with the US regarding their new Apps.gov service, designed to be a framework to improve the adoption of cloud computing across government.

Launched only recently, Apps.gov has been designed to provide US Federal government agencies with turnkey solutions for many common business IT needs. Rather than having individual agencies identify potential solutions, conduct tender and due diligence processes, address IT security issues and host or manage solutions, they are all able to access a central 'bank' of services that have been reviewed, tested and certified by the government as a whole.

This provides enormous cost and productivity benefits. Services can be put in place very quickly, with little or no ICT costs (similar to AGIMO's provision of GovDex and GovSpace).

This is part of the US government's strategy to only build software where it meets a unique need and otherwise source it from the market.

Also part of the cloud philosophy, the FedRAMP program, aims to identify around 10 private providers of cloud computing services and certify them for US Federal government use. Agencies would then be able to pick and choose the cloud provider from within that group without needing to undertake significant additional due diligence to verify their acceptability.

The goal is again to reduce the duplication of effort by individual agencies conducting their own tender and review processes by providing a 'panel' of pre-certified services. It also is designed to reduce government IT costs while improving scalability and agility as cloud services are designed to be ramped up and down very quickly - so you have the capacity you need when you need it, but don't pay for it when you don't.

As another example of a cross-government cloud-like service, the US representative discussed their Challenge.gov service, which I've mentioned in an earlier post. As a platform for challenges and prizes the service is able to aggregate communities of interest around specific government problems and deliver innovative and cost-effective solutions.


Germany - a single phone number for all government services
Germany discussed a slightly different approach to digital government, the unification of government phone-based customer service into a single phone number (0115).

In Germany people prefer to visit government offices, then phone and then go online (the direct opposite of the Australian experience). To save money and improve efficiency Germany decided to offer a single phone number for all government information across local state and federal levels (as the representative said, people don't know which specific agency or government level provides particular services).

The service is a work in progress and it will be several years before it is fully in place. The biggest challenge has been working with the internal systems across government. Many agencies don't have knowledge management systems or professional service centres and often do not have a formal understanding or statistics on the most common enquiries made to them.

The service, by integrating government information, will also support a standard approach for collecting information from people and reduce the duplication of information collection. It also has benefits for online, providing a central knowledge database which can be used to enable a single online point of contact as well, in the future.

The approach was touted as a potential cross-European service over time, allowing people across the EU to call a single number for any government service. Several other European states are looking at the 'one number' approach and eventually it may be possible to integrate them into a single solution.


Scotland - national telehealth strategy
Scotland has a separate health system to England, managed through the Scottish government, and saw a key need to provide services to remote regions and support people in living in their homes rather than increase the burden on the health system, and reduce peoples' quality of life, by forcing them into hospitals for long-term and chronic conditions.

One of the challenges they faced wasn't a lack of interest, but the sheer number of telehealth pilots being run all over Scotland. There were hundreds of little local initiatives underway, funded in a variety of ways and, in many cases, not readily scalable.

Another issue - as yet unresolved - is the definition of telehealth. The term is being used to refer to a range of different types of health delivery and there are also a set of similar terms, such as eHealth, in use - often referring to the same type of services. Even the experts haven't been able to agree on a common definition as yet.

There is now a central group in place overseeing telehealth across Scotland.

They are focusing on four key areas to start with,

• Telestroke - monitoring people in their homes to detect strokes before or as they occur and get them appropriate medical support.
• Paediatrics - providing access to specialist services in remote and rural areas, and providing better monitoring of infants for home births and in clinics so that the stabilisation time for distressed infants is shortened, reducing infant mortality and permanent injury
• Mental health support - moving towards online services to support people at risk of or experiencing mental health issues, particularly counselling services
• Management of long term conditions such as Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease through remote monitoring and online support

While the program is still in early stages, it aims to marshal the shared experience of local pilots and health experts to provide scalable telehealth solutions for Scotland.


NEXT TIME
In the next part of this review I'm going to look at the finalists for the e-Democracy Awards, though at this stage I don't expect to have this part ready until next week (though I have a few posts planned in the meantime).

So keep an eye out for World e.Gov Forum review Part 3: e-Democracy Award finalists.

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Bringing AIMIA to the ACT - plus AIMIA awards now open for entry

There's been a recent effort begun to bring AIMIA (the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association) to the ACT.

Coordinated by Reading Room, this is quite important to help improve education and standards in the interactive services being developed by government agencies and their agencies.

To find out more, and to get involved, visit AIMIA in Canberra.

Also the 17th AIMIA awards are now open for entries - including a Government and not-for-profit category.

If you want to improve the recognition of your Gov 2.0 and other online interactive initiatives this is one of the best recognised awards in Australia.

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GovHack returns - as part of Amped

Last year Australia's Gov 2.0 Taskforce initiated the GovHack event, produced by Web Directions, to showcase what could be done with open government data.

This year I'm glad to see that GovHack is returning - as part of Amped, a free 10 hour hack day, in Sydney's PowerHouse Museum on Sat 16th of October.

Whether you're a web designer or developer, interaction designer, graphic designer, project manager, writer, or just someone who has has an interesting idea, Amped is an opportunity to strut your stuff and create something of value.

Amped is fully catered, will have expert mentors on hand. The grand prize for the best hack is a trip for the winning team to Tokyo's Web Directions East.

RSVP at the Amped website.

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Tapping into Canberra's entrepreneurial community

This weekend Canberra is hosting a Start-up Camp, a three day event where entrepreneurs form teams and develop new online business concepts.

This type of event could be an opportunity for government to tap into smart and skilled people, gathering and testing new ideas.

In this camp there are six projects underway, as listed below:

itubecover.com - get your cool environmentally-friendly protective iPhone cover entirely made from recycled materials

mywardrobe.me - can't decide an outfit...take the easy option...browse through your wardrobe online

thumbtips.com.au - any topic, any time, the more controversial the better, you give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down

ilickit.com - product reviews made interesting, lick 'em or flick 'em with ilickit.com!

isplit.com.au - after world peace, surely this is needed. No one in your circle will ever dare not pay their share again

checkthishome.net - heading to Oz from overseas for a long stay...why not get the low-down on where you're going to stay ahead of them.

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Targeting Gov 2.0 apps development - US government combating child obesity with Apps for Healthy Kids

The mash-up (or Apps) competitions we've seen in Australia thus far have been broad and largely untargeted. Governments have released a bunch of public sector datasets and invited developers to create a bunch of applications related to that data for their jurisdiction, but without a highly specific goal or purpose in mind, other than creating applications that add value to the data.

The US, which leads Australia in this area of Gov 2.0, initially took a similar approach. However it has now moved to a new level - Apps competitions focused on individual campaigns, themes and issues.

One such example is the Apps for Healthy Kids competition which, quoting from its website is,

part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign to end childhood obesity within a generation. Apps for Healthy Kids challenges software developers, game designers, students, and other innovators to develop fun and engaging software tools and games that drive children, especially “tweens” (ages 9-12) – directly or through their parents – to eat better and be more physically active.

The competition, which has received over 90 entries, requires developers to use a specific government dataset of information to develop a game or activity focused on a specific audience and campaign goal.

The prize money, $60,000, is a fraction of what it could cost a government Department to develop this many concepts to production level.

The winning entry will be used by the government for 12 months at no license cost and then reverts to the entrant's control - perhaps to become a saleable product or even be licensed by the government for ongoing use.

Besides the value of the winning application, there is substantial public relations value in holding the competition in the first place. It raises awareness of the issue, engaging people in either creating and voting for entries, or simply supporting the initiative through the 'challenge supporters' mechanism.

This type of targeted crowd sourcing approach has many different potential applications for governments from local through to federal levels. Many different issues and campaigns could provide fertile ground for these types of apps competitions.

Note that despite our current lack of targeted apps competitions, Australia isn't that far behind the US in crowd sourcing. There have been examples of online video competitions, design competitions and other approaches designed to encourage the community to engage with and produce content that can be used for the public good.

Below is the introductory video for Apps for Healthy Kids:

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Contribute to the draft Unofficial Australian Government Social Media Handbook

Lisa Howdin, who now works with me, has been compiling a set of guidelines and information around how to develop, write, manage and moderate social media tools in Government in the form of a wiki.

She's looking for contributions from people across Australian government who are working in this area and have learnings they can add.

If you've had experience operating a government social media channel, please consider sharing your ideas in this wiki so all of your peers across government can benefit.

If you're new to the area, the Handbook, whilst still in development, already has lots of useful information that might be useful to you.

Visit the Unofficial Australian Government Social Media Handbook at: http://government20bestpractices.pbworks.com/Unofficial-Aus-Govt-Social-Media-Handbook

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iPhones dominate Australian mobile internet access

Tiphereth Gloria has posted on Digital Tip a very interesting post regarding how iPhones dominate mobile internet access in Australia.

Quoting June 2010 figures, her post iPhones dominate Australian mobile internet says that iPhones account for 93% of mobile access, with Android, Blackberries, Symbian and other operating systems combined only accounting for 7% of the market.

Overseas iPhones account for 60% of mobile internet access - still a huge share, but significantly less than the Australian experience.

Of course these figures were provided by Apple - I've not seen independent statistics - but they are still striking.

If your agency websites are not customised for access via iPhones you're potentially less accessible to a large proportion of the mobile internet market.

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Reinventing website perfection

Traditionally, in my experience both in the private and public sector, the way to build a 'perfect' website has been considered to be;
invest a large quantity of resources, personnel and time at the start of the development process,
use this investment to build all the functionality that the developers can dream up, write all the content the communicators can think of and test it with audiences,
launch the 'perfect' website and hope it works, and then
replace the website (fixing most of the bits that failed) after 3-5 years by repeating the process again.

Personally I've never liked this approach. It places a lot of reliance on using past knowledge to guess future (organisational and audience) needs, involves investing a lot of resources upfront with limited ability to terminate or redirect projects until after they have failed and it also results in websites that degrade in effectiveness over time which can lead to progressively greater reputation and legal risks.

I'd like to see the process for developing a 'perfect' website reinvented. The new process must involve a low upfront cost, the ability to be flexible and agile to meet changing needs quickly and be capable of making a website more and more effective over time, improving reputation and reducing legal risks.

But how is it possible to achieve all these goals at once?

The answer is actually quite simple and well understood by successful entrepreneurs.

Rather than aiming for a perfect site on release day after an extended development period, the goal is to quickly build and launch a site that meets at least one critical audience need.

Once the site has been launched, ensure there are tools for monitoring how it is used and identifying user needs. Then progressively build extra functionality and write more content, guided primarily by the needs of your audience.

This approach ensures the site has enough value at launch to be successful, albeit in a more limited fashion than a 'kitchen sink' website (with more functionality at launch). It also ensures that the website grows progressively more useful and relevant to the audience you aim to serve.

In this way the site becomes increasingly perfect in a more realistic way - perfect for the audience who use it, rather than 'perfect' for the stakeholders who think they know what different audiences want.

We see this approach taken with all kinds of websites and products - from Apple's iPhones through to online services such as Gmail.

It's time to see more of this approach used with government websites as well.

After all - don't we want to create the 'perfect' website for our audiences' needs?

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App My State a major Victorian Gov 2.0 success

Victoria's App My State competition has now closed to entries, and has already been an enormous success for the Gov 2.0 efforts in that state.

The competition attracted 171 entries, 75 applications and 96 ideas, over 12 weeks.

Judging has now commenced - with the public able to vote for the 'popular choice' award and other awards now being considered by judges, with winners announced on 7 June.

The Premier has personally tweeted his thanks, showing a level of high-level engagement with the competition,

@vicpremier: Well done to all the @appmystate applicants. Top quality entries. Looking forward to giving out the awards. JB

Regardless who wins the competition, the event has already proven to be a highly cost-effective method to gather useful ideas and generate meaningful approaches to using public sector data.

Is this a once-off success? The evidence argues otherwise.

NSW is in the process of holding a similar competition with a similar level of prizes. While the competition didn't include an ideas category (EDIT 24/5/10: the competition did include an ideas category, which received 64 submissions) and occurred during a changeover in Premiers and with significantly less online promotional support, it still attracted 55 app entries over a 14 week period.

App competitions in the UK and US have also generated significant returns for governments - in particular the first Apps for Democracy competition in Washington D.C. estimated that the value of the apps produced was over US$2.2 million, for less than US$100,000 in prize value.

There is even a set of guidelines on how to run an apps competition to support agencies and states produced by Apps for Democracy.

Below I've included a video where Victorian political leadership introduce the App My State competition. Below that is a list of some of the other App competitions that have been run worldwide.



Apps competitions
Involving public sector data - there are many other examples in commercial spaces.

• MashUpAustralia (Australia)
• App My State (Victoria, Australia)
• Apps4NSW (NSW, Australia)
• Apps for Democracy (United States)
• Apps for America (United States)
• Apps for Army (United States)
• INCA – the Innovative and Creative Application Contest (Belgium)
• Apps competitions in Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands and Spain
• Apps for New York (United States)
• Show Us A Better Way competition (Great Britain)
• Apps for Climate Change (British Columbia, Canada)
• Apps for Development (World Bank)

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