ACT Government planning to release a data portal and real-time bus information in reusable formats

Brought to my attention by @maxious, the ACT government has said in response to their Estimates process that they are building a data portal which they aim to have ready in July 2012.

Discussed in ACT's Hansard, Andrew Cappie-Wood, Head of Service and Director-General for ACT, said that, "There is a lot of interest in gaining access to data sets so that the community can use them more effectively.", giving the example of AllHomes' use of ACTPLA data.

Cappie-Wood went on to state that the ACT government intended to progressively make data sets available, keeping privacy issues front-of-mind, but pursuing a proactive approach so that the community could make their own apps through reusing the data and also use the data in other ways useful to the community.

Later in the Estimates session Paul Peters, Executive Director, Roads and Public Transport Division, said that there was also the intention to make real-time information on the location of ACTION buses available through data.gov.au such that various players in the market can develop and on-sell their own apps.

Read the transcript in ACT Government Hansard (PDF)

• Data portal - refer to page 866
• Real-time bus information - refer to page 919

Read full post...

View summary...

Are Australia's emergency services ready to engage with social media? BushfireConnect unsuccessful in government grant bid

It's come to my attention that the BushfireConnect team were unsuccessful in securing a small grant under the National Disaster Resilience Grant Scheme to support their work in providing emergency support during Australia's bushfire season.

I've been told that the reason the grant was rejected was that, "as the VIC Emergency Services do not yet have a Social Media Policy, they did not 'feel comfortable with' being seen to 'endorse' Emergency Management Social Media projects by providing them with grants."

All three social media projects vying for a grant were rejected.

Reportedly, they are still working to get their heads around the use of social media in emergency management.

I wonder how many other social media initiatives across Australia have been knocked back due to government officials (at any level) not yet having their heads around the area as yet.

BushfireConnect was established in May 2010 and has been run by volunteers with no formal support from government.

They are currently seeking volunteers to help manage the service once the official bushfire season starts on 1 October.

As they said about the grant result,

We could probably spend hours chewing the fat on the why and the how, but this is the landscape we're all working in. In the mean time, the fire season is starting as early as September this year, so we have stuff to do :) Hopefully we can get sufficient traction this season so that we cannot be ignored in the future.

To learn more, watch the video below of Maurits van der Vlugt, one of the founders, speaking about Bushfire Connect and emergency management assisted by social media at Ignite Sydney 6.

Below this are Maurits's slides from an earlier conference (which seem to be very similar to those used for Ignite).

Bushfire Connect - Trust, Transparency & Timeliness

View more presentations from Maurits van der Vlugt

Read full post...

View summary...

NSW electoral commission asking citizens to geolocate their own addresses

In a initiative to improve electoral records, the NSW electoral commission is asking citizens to geocode their own location.

The initiative relies on the prevalence of GPS units in peoples' smartphones and other devices, coupled with an online system which allows people to locate their homes online and confirm that they have been mapped correctly in the electoral database.

Details on the initiative are available at the Elector Geo-Location System pages of the NSW electoral commission's site.

I hope this initiative won't remain limited to NSW, there's application for this approach across all Australian electorates.

What will be interesting after the collection of this data is how it will be used, beyond mapping electorates.

For instance the geomapped locations of Australian addresses, appropriately de-identified, could be used to supplement other geolocational records, improving the ability for emergency services to reach addresses in a crisis.

They could also be released freely as open data - after all the government isn't paying citizens for the data.

That would certainly be a better outcome than locking up public data in an organisation such as PSMA Australia Limited, a government-owned corporation, which collects public data and then resells it back to Australians.

Read full post...

View summary...

Getting creative with visualisations in Government sites and documents

Government is the master of the written word. Across Australian governments we probably produce billions of them each year, carefully organised into documents designed to impart knowledge and influence decisions.

If you were to consider a medium-size agency producing, let's estimate, twenty 100 page reports each year, fifty 2-page media releases and 200 4-page minutes, with 200 words per page, that's 580,000 words already - not to mention emails, websites, internal documents, procurements, recruitment processes, forms presentations and all the draft versions produced.

Many of these words are important and necessary - however some might be better communicated graphically. Do we use visualisations as much as we could to represent choices and data?

I have rarely seen information presented in a visually exciting and impactful way in government documents or website.

Why? It can't be due to accessibility - it is simple to display the same information in text or tabular form and to provide alt text.

This is where the web can provide support.

I'm a big fan of infographics and the Information is beautiful and Cool Infographics blogs are two of my favourite sites. They provides some stunning examples of how information can be presented pictorially to convey meaning.

They can be as simple as this comparison of the amount of time US citizens spend each year sitting in front of the idiot box television passively watching, versus the estimated amount of time it took to create all of Wikipedia - over 1 billion english words alone (begging the question, what would happen if we could redirect all that wasted energy).

 

Or as complex as this explanation of the Left vs Right US political world (click to view it larger).

Thanks to the growth of Web 2.0, there are now an array of online services and tools designed to assist you visualise data in creative and useful ways.

These can help agencies revitalise their data, see it in new ways and generate new realisations and understandings.

It is even possible, with open data approaches, to integrate data from other agencies with your own information and present it in visually effective ways, updating it live.

To help you get started, here's a set of online services that can be used to generate interesting visualisations. Most are free.

Online tools

Creately
Particularly useful for flow diagrams, Creately is a highly collaborative and flexible tool, allowing the creation of very professional infographics solo or in a collaborative way. The tool is also useful for project planning and other visually focused activities.

Gapminder
As used by Hans Rosling in brilliant TED talks, GapMinder provides the ability to automate time series to look at data changes over time. You can choose from existing data or add your own to create brilliant mash-ups.

Google Public Data
Google Public Data is more of a simple charting tool that you can use to display your information as bar, line and pie charts, however it also allows you to add bubbles over Google Maps and provide time series data, where you can map one or two variables and manually jump around in time, or hit a play button to watch changes unfold step by step.

Hohli Charts
A simple, yet elegant tool for creating simple charts, scatter plots, radar charts and venn diagrams based on Google's charting tools, Hohli makes it very easy to make distinctive graphs.

Many Eyes
This is a beta service provided by IBM,  but don't let that scare you - the tool works fines. Many Eyes lets you upload your own data or use data in the site to generate a wide range of visualisations including a good range of world maps, word clouds bubble charts, scattergrams and treemaps. There's a good chance you'll find some of your publicly released data already visualised here.

New York Times Viz Lab
This can be used to visualise New York Times data using an embedded version of IBM's ManyEyes technology. You can also look through visualisations created by others. While not a separate service, it should make you consider whether you could integrate a visualisation tool into your own website to allow your own visitors to visualise your data and create their own views.

Statplanet
Visualise the planet using existing data, or create your own charts, scatter plots and world maps by adding your own. StatPlanet's flash-based mapping tool is used by a number of public sector organisations at a global scale to plot development data across the world.

TagCrowd
A functional word mapping tool, TagCrowd isn't as versatile as Wordle (below), however is very good for some uses, such as creating an even block of text, mapping frequency by size - such as for the backdrop of a document cover.

Wordle
If you need word maps, Wordle creates the most elegant and flexible ones on the web. Use it to look at your documents or speeches in a visual form (you might be surprised at which words occur most frequently) and tweak settings such as font, direction and colours. It can also be useful for mapping open answers in survey data to visually represent the top concerns.

Other tools
Here's some web-based visualisation tools that use existing online data to present it in visual ways. They provide inspiration and new approaches for viewing internet information, 16 Awesome Data Visualization Tools and The Best Tools for Vizualisation.

And here's 28 tools you can use to add visualisations to your own website.

Know of any other great visualisation tools? Add then in the comments below.

Read full post...

View summary...

NSW launches live traffic monitoring online

The NSW Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) has launched RTA Live. This new website provides live updates on road conditions across NSW, including road work, fires, floods, accidents as well as feeds from 67 traffic cameras across Sydney.

There's also a widget embeddable on blogs and websites to provide traffic information.

Displaying the data on Google Maps, the site is an excellent example of the use of Web 2.0 technologies in a government context.

My only suggestion for the site would be to include data for Canberra to fill the annoying ACT-sized hole in the map.

Read full post...

View summary...

The street as a platform, what's government's role?

An extremely thought-provoking post about The street as platform written by Dan Hill in February 2008 has been brought to my attention by Darren Sharp.

The post explores the virtual life of a city street, all the digital data exchanging hands between systems, infrastructure, vehicles and people in the street unseen to human eyes.

While condensed into a single street, the post is based entirely on current technologies and practices. It could easily represent a real street in any major city anywhere in the world today.

The question for me is what is government's role in building the infrastructure, managing and effectively using the data collected?

Streets are generally infrastructure created and maintained by governments and the systems that 'power' a street are often installed and managed by public concerns (roads and pavements, water, sewage, electricity and telecommunications) or at least guided by government planning processes (the nature of the dwellings and commercial services provided on the street). So there's clearly a significant role for government in the virtual aspects of streets as well.

There has been some work done internationally on what precisely is the role of government (some articles and publications listed at the Victorian Government's eGovernment Resource Centre, but have we done enough here in Australia?

Given we have a national broadband network planned, and are already in the process of preparing for pilot roll outs, ensuring that this enables, rather than limits the vision of our digital streets in a managed and well-thought out manner is clearly moving its way up the priority list.

Read full post...

View summary...

Innovative government use of Twitter highlighted in case study

The GovTwit blog has put me on to the latest case study in Twitter 101 (where they showcase how organisations are using Twitter in innovative ways).

It's on the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), who are using Twitter to monitor earthquakes as they occur - an early detection system that is proving to be much faster than seismic instruments (at least in populated areas).

The case study, Science for a changing world, reflects some of the discussions I had with Geosciences Australia last year. Geosciences Australia were looking at how they could use social media to detect the human impact of natural disasters and perhaps even identify small earth tremors in populated areas where there are no seismic instruments nearby.

In the USGS's case they are simply listening for mentions of earthquake related words and using them to map the extent of human-felt earth tremors. They also say that,

In sparsely instrumented regions, they can be our first indication that an earthquake may have occurred.

There are many other examples out there of ways that government agencies are using social media in innovative ways to serve the public good.

I just wish I saw more examples of Australian governments putting these uses into practice rather than largely finding them used by overseas jurisdictions.

Many Australians tell me that we are early adopters of technology, highly creative and innovative. Those statements only become true if we prove them every day.

Read full post...

View summary...

UK launches data.gov.uk (and how Australia could top it)

Just in case you missed this the other week, on 21 January the UK launched the data.gov.uk website with 2,500 government datasets available for access and reuse by the public.

This leapfrogged the US's data.gov, which now has around 1,000 datasets available.

The UK site also extends the government open data space in several other directions, with a wiki and forum supporting discussion and collaboration between people reusing datasets in the site and a Ideas tool for submitting ideas on what data should be released and how it should be combined to provide new and useful insights.

The site also includes a gallery of applications developed to make use of government data, making it a central place to locate these applications.

I believe this is the new world leader for open data websites from government - though I look forward to the day when Australia tops it (in data.gov.au).

How could we top it with data.gov.au?

Here's some ideas:

• Build in a data analysis and visualisation module that allows people without technical expertise to combine, model and view datasets, no matter their origin (like IBM's Manyeyes).
• Then allow people to embed these visualisations into their own sites.
  
• Support community submission of data that can then be shared and used by government alongside government datasets to improve insights and understanding - including allowing the appropriate Creative Commons copyright to be embedded into these datasets as part of the submission process.
• Comments on datasets - allow every set of data to support a discussion to allow people to ask questions to clarify what the dataset contains and discuss how it could be presented in a more usable way.
  
• Allow tagging of datasets and applications - so that over time there's a bottom-up folksonomy that people can use to find related data or search on, rather than relying on government metadata (which may not match the community's mental models).
• Support data correction through the site - if someone detects an error in a dataset there should be a clear path to notify the submitter of the data and have it corrected.
• Vote on applications, allowing the community to provide feedback on how useful and valuable they found them. The voting mechanism should be able to be embedded with applications in other sites, rather than rely on people returning to data.gov.au to vote.
  
• GEOmapping engine, to map locations such that they can be placed on maps, rather than having to have people build their own tools to transform the data.
  
• Collaborative data modelling projects - where the community is invited to work together to model data, assisting the government and community.
  
• Data competitions with cash prizes. Similar to the NetFlicks Prize, provide the tools for government agencies - and even commercial entities - to create competitions to solve tricky data problems through crowdsourcing.
  
• Create user profiles and including information on how many applications / data visualisations and other activities they have undertaken in relation to the data site. People respond to competitive challenge and recognition - like in the Australian National Library's Manyhands project.
• Create webinars and run physical events to raise awareness of the site and to show Australians (developers, corporates, not-for-profits, interested parties) how easy it is to reuse government data.
• Hold annual awards for the best applications, including peoples' choice awards based on user votes and awards for schools and students to encourage an interest in and innovative uses of data.

If you have other ideas on how Data.gov.au could be better than the UK and US efforts, please add them in the comments below.

To finish up - here's a good presentation from Sir Tim Berners Lee (who has led the work on data.gov.uk) on why we need to make government data available in raw reusable form, to the public.

Read full post...

View summary...

Last chance to vote on MashupAustralia's peoples' choice - 81 entries to choose from

MashUpAustralia had 81 entries into Australia's first competitive event for mashing up data from Australian governments.

Now that entries have closed, the public have until 4PM AEDT on 20 November to vote for a people's choice - that means you!

So if you've not yet had a look at the entries and voted, this is your LAST chance.

Go to MashUpAustralia to vote.

Read full post...

View summary...

High speed broadband for Australia - the unexplored country

This morning I am presenting at Public Sphere #1 - High bandwidth for Australia in a personal capacity.

The event will discuss what high speed bandwidth can do for Australian society, business and government.

I have previously posted some ideas on this topic and will be talking today about how the killer applications and services for a 100Mbit plus service are likely to not have been invented yet.

For those not attending the event, I have attached my presentation below and will add a transcript in the near future.

I will hopefully be liveblogging the event after my presentation throughout the morning.

High Bandwidth for Australia - The Unexplored Country

View more presentations from Craig Thomler.

Read full post...

View summary...

Victoria police launches local crime stats online in MyPlace

I applaud Victoria Police for their latest foray into online engagement, MyPlace.

As highlighted in Victoria's eGovernment Resource Centre, the Victorian Police have launched MyPlace as,

An interactive mapping service provide by Victoria Police which is updated every three months so you can see what is happening in your suburbs and hear directly from your local police Inspector about the work being done by police in your neighbourhood.

It is great to see government making this type of public information more easily available to the public in more intuitive and usable ways.

The chat function is an extra bonus. Scheduled chats with the Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police are a great tool for raising community engagement. The general public do not often get to communicate with senior police in a convenient and open environment. I hope in future this will be broadened to include chats with other senior Police officers, and potentially an ongoing blog highlighting the good work done by Victoria Police.

However, and this is a small however, I am disappointed that all the wonderful data provided by MyPlace is not available as a standard geoRSS or XML feed or API so that people can reuse the data (under appropriate Creative Commons copyright).

Google launched a wonderful feature last Tuesday which makes it much easier for the public to access, interact with and understand data from US government - doing a fantastic job of integrating data from various different local, state and federal agencies into a seamless experience.

If Victoria Police had taken an open approach to their public data Google, Microsoft and other online services could have shared the 'heavy lifting' of modelling the data by postcode at no cost to the government. This would have then allowed developers across Victoria and across the world, to build innovative new applications using the data.

These applications could include heat maps of crime statistics, integrating crime figures into rental, home and business purchase listings or school selections or even allow high school students doing school projects to compare crime stats with employment and income levels and other ABS census data (if the ABS made its data available in this manner as well) to explore the factors that lead to crime. Many other useful applications are possible, however will, for now, remain unexplored.

At the end of the day MyPlace is a great first step for Victoria Police - and should be considered by every other police force in Australia - and it would be fantastic to see it taken further into openness and transparency, by Victoria or others.

Read full post...

View summary...

Google maps talk in Sydney by creator

Google maps were originally developed in Australia and one of the founders of the original company, Dr Lars Rasmussen, now a Google employee, is giving a talk at the Powerhouse museum, "From Australia to the World – The Rise & Rise of Google Maps" on 2 July.

It should be an interesting presentation both on how an Australian company 'made it' on the world stage (having to sell itself to a US company in the process) and on the importance of maps for visualising data.

Google maps have played a key role in informing and supporting people through a number of disasters (including Victorian bushfires) over the last several years - picking up the load where government provided services were not able to cope with peak traffic.

Note this isn't a criticism of government emergency services - it's a reflection on how public agencies rely on the private sector to support them, just as the government relies on traditional media to get disaster information out to the community rather than creating its own specific disaster TV channels, radio stations or newspapers.

Governments can use existing online services to support them in the same way - just as the Vic Premier's office relied on a free gadget creation tool, Facebook, Youtube and other free online services to communicate messages about the bushfires.

I think there is an ongoing need for increasing government collaboration with private services such as Google maps and other mapping services provided by companies such as Microsoft, OpenLayers and open street map.

Why should government provide a service where the private sector does it as well, if not better, than the public sector can?

Read full post...

View summary...

What does the future look like?

Microsoft have developed a Future Visions series to provide some insight into where technology is headed, and how it will help people.

If you are looking to anticipate the needs of your customers, rather than simply play catch-up, the series provides some very thought provoking ideas.

Here is the montage video, exploring different concepts in brief. Below I've placed links to the full videos on each topic.



And in case you think this technology is still a long way off, read this article from the Inquisitor, If You Want the Future, Look to the Hackers. It talks about companies placing working brainjacks into people's heads, and how to create a Minority Report-style interface using your Nintendo Wii.

The others videos in the Microsoft Future Vision series are:

• Retail
• Home
• Banking
• Healthcare

Read full post...

View summary...

Is traffic the wedge into effective Australian egovernment data mashups?

Dave Fletcher has published a post on his Government and Technology Weblog about how the community is making use of Utah government traffic data to create innovative tools to help drivers.

Covered in If it could all be so effective as this, Dave covers how the information is shared with the public - much in real-time - via Commuterlink.

It can the be reused by other websites such as Hello Salt Lake City.

With traffic being a key concern for residents of most big cities, and given the success of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology in allowing mash-ups of weather (another big citizen concern), I wonder when we'll see state governments in Australia allowing this form of use of their traffic data.

As Dave concludes, due to allowing community mashups of government data,

The end result is that Utah government data actually has much broader disemmination and utility than just what is presented on the state's website. With hundreds of information systems, there are many more examples where this kind of sharing could be valuable, but it doesn't happen. It's a big opportunity.

Read full post...

View summary...

Should the government provide online services where competitive commercial sector services exist?

In the past it has been the practice for many governments around the world to avoid playing in the centre of commercial spaces, where competitively priced services are already provided by private businesses.

Government interventions in these markets are managed through legislation and direct intervention as a last resort (in cases of market failure) - as we are seeing in the current financial crisis in some countries.

The philosophy behind this approach is often that in markets where the private sector is willing to provide goods or services, competing on price, options and customer service, it is less likely that a government can add the same level of value.

Instead government concentrates on the 'margins' - situations where people are unable to afford or access the mainstream private sector services.

This, in essence, is how the public housing and unemployment benefits systems function. In both cases there are private sector options (private rentals/home purchase and jobs), while governments provide safety nets for citizens unable to access these alternatives.

Should government follow a similar approach online?

Looking at the online world, the costs and barriers to providing information and services have declined, broadening the range of services that may be offered by private enterprise.

Reflecting this, should governments follow the same philosophy of avoiding playing in commercial spaces, again only focusing on marginalised citizens?

Or should government provide public alternatives to existing commercial services?

This is a big - and highly political - question, which can be seen by the Commonwealth government's stance on internet filtering. While there are many commercial products available (from retailers, ISPs and online) including both charged and free services, the government is pursuing an approach of providing its own products, licensed from commercial providers, to ensure availability.

Similarly, should government provide 'web infrastructure' tools such as geospatial services, when large commercial organisations are already providing these services?

Geospatial services are a case in point.
We've seen the WA and QLD governments roll out their own public geospatial services specifically for their own state use, with the Commonwealth soon to follow suite at a national level via the AGOSP program.

These services provide similar functionality to both Microsoft and Google maps, and in fact Perth's public transit authority has its timetables available in a Google maps beta (but not in the state's own geospatial service).

Equally, for search, the Commonwealth government licenses the FunnelBack search technology, designed in Australia by the CSIRO, for use in Australia.gov.au and other sites (including the CSA website) rather than implementing Google's free service, as the US government has done.

In both these cases governments have followed a competitive tendering process to select the technology that best met their documented needs. The solutions are also under the control of Australian governments, rather than being owned and operated by foreign owned companies.

However, as demonstrated by Sensis this month, as reported in the SMH's article Sensis concedes defeat to Google, sometimes where the market is going is also important.

Sensis is discontinuing its Yellow Pages search and maps technologies. It will instead rely on Google to provide both services. As Google search was reportedly used by more than 7 million Australians per month, rather than the 184,000 who used Sensis's search engine there's clear commercial reasons why Sensis would want to stop sinking funds into trying to keep up with Google and instead leverage Google's audience.

Is this a valid choice for government?
Rather than custom developing or tendering for services that copy publicly available (and generally free) online services, should government agencies 'piggyback' instead?

This is a hard question to answer. Various Australian government agencies already piggyback on publicly available services - such as MySpace, SecondLife, Youtube and Google Maps.

On average Australian government websites get 25 percent of their traffic from Google search (based on Hitwise's statistics) - far outweighing the level of traffic from the central state or Commonwealth gateways.

On this basis, Australian government is already piggybacking on publicly available commercial services - and highly effectively.

However when introducing its own internet filters, customised geospatial services or search tools, Australian government is choosing to not piggyback - taking on the burden of building usage and investing in the ongoing development of new features to remain current with the commercial market.

I'm not about to venture an opinion on whether or not governments should follow this route, these decisions may be made for reasons of national security, flexibility or specific public needs.

However the options should be carefully considered by the initiators of these projects.

The decision to 'go it alone' needs to take into account the competitive landscape.

What alternative services are available for citizens - which do online audiences already prefer and why?
Why should citizens choose the government alternative and will the government's service deliver the outcomes citizens desire?
Is the government prepared to invest in continuous development? Or will the service fall behind commercial alternatives?

Without a full consideration of these factors, like Sensis's failed mapping and search service, these government offerings may not, in the longer-term, deliver the benefits desired.

Read full post...

View summary...

Summary of take-aways from the Driving Interoperability and Collaboration in eGovernment conference

A frantic day catching up yesterday, so I did not get to write this post until this morning.

On Monday I presented at Ark Group's Driving Interoperability and Collaboration in eGovernment conference in Brisbane.

There was a great line-up of speakers, and I had a long list of take-aways from the day.

Here's my key ones. Note these reflect my perception of the speakers' topics - not necessarily the words they used.

Overall takeaways

• There's a lot happening across the egovernment front at all levels of Australian government, with enormous benefits beginning to be realised for the government, for constituents and for business
  
  
• egovernment initiatives still remains highly siloed, with little information being shared between governments, departments, or even within agencies
  
  
• virtually all state and federal governments recognise the need to follow whole-of-government approaches, but are doing so only within their own governments, not across jurisdictions in a co-ordinated and managed way
  
  
• Enormous cost and time benefits could be realised with more centralised co-ordination (not control)

By speaker

Kim Denham
(CEO Australian Computer Society)

• Broadband is a critical utility for Australians.
• It's crucial to ensure that Australia has an appropriate network in order for long-term national success

Dominic Feik
(Director Business Services, Dept of Innovation, Industry and Regional Developments Vic)

• A successful business case is a good story, supported by evidence, relevant to stakeholders
  
  
• Storyline is critical - provides structure for the case
  
  
• Use case studies to build a picture of the outcomes
  
  
• Create and manage a stakeholder list - develop a clear strategy on how to influence and engage key decision makers (sometimes has to be from a distance)
  
  
• Use 'guided' rather than 'blank slate' consultation
  
  
• Number one reason for project failure is if the wrong people/skills are attached to the project team
  
  
• Other reasons for failure include:
  - Poor consultation
  - Poor research
  - Too much focus on implementation, not enough on business case
  - Searching for benefits in the wrong places

Gary Shaw
(Director Information Queensland)

• QLD government has a state-wide address verification system, usable across state government websites, intranets and applications (I want one at Federal level!!)
  
  
• QLD has done a fantastic job in developing a geospatial system - involving collaboration across many government agencies.
  
  
• There is insufficient collaboration across Australia government
  Qld invested $7.5 million in a geospatial display system (building a metadata atlas and other tools),
  WA invested $26 million in a similar, but separate system (more bells and whistles),
  NSW is looking to invest in such a system - separately
  Vic is looking to invest in such a system - separately
  Federally AGIMO is investing in such a system
  
  Surely Australian government only needs one such geospatial system - open enough to support the needs of various states and levels of government, and provided/managed centrally as a national public good.
  This would support the needs of businesses and individuals to deal across council and state borders, rather than requiring them to use separate tools for separate jurisdictions.
  

Tim Turner
(Lecturer at UNSW@ADFA)

• Government has focused on a 'one-size fits all' approach to online, but recently moved into portals based on demographic ('youth', 'family') and 'live event' models ('moving home', 'starting school').
  
  
• While AGIMO indicates that 60% of the internet using public has visited a government site at least once in the last twelve months, there is not much detail on how/why they visited or how frequently.
  
  
• Key limiters to government engagement online appear to be (from AGIMO):
  Usability, navigation and content
  Knowing what can be transacted (promotion)
  Wanting to deal with a 'real person' (little work in Australian government on real-time online contact via video, audio or text)
  
  
• Government also needs to considered the relationship that constituents have with government.
  
  
• Identifed four key relationships/roles:
  Customer - single-session interactions, commercially oriented, no identity requirement, expects the same experience whether public or private organisation providing product/service
  
  Client - multi-session interactions, relationship orientated, 'professional' engagement, identity required, expects the same experience whether public or private organisation providing product/service
  
  Citizen - single-session interactions, about business of government, preference for anonymity, no commercial alternatives
  
  Subject - multi-session interactions, usually initiated by government, heavily rules/procedural based, identity required, no commercial alternatives
  
  
• Government services (process/tone/approach) need to take into account the relationship the constituent has with the service - people shift from one relationship/role to another across different engagements.
  
  
• For transactional engagements (Customers/Citizens) - improve usability and appearance of trustworthiness
  
  
• For relationship engagements (Clients/Subjects) - improve usability and evidence of justice

Jonathan Gray
(Senior Researcher, NICTA)

• Some great tools now coming out of NICTA
  
  
• Seeking government agencies to partner with to pilot pre-commercialisation of IT-related solutions

Jo Bryson
(Executive Director Office of eGovernment, WA)

• Ongoing need to break down silos within and between organisations. Critical factors in doing so are;
  - Awareness and understanding
  - Consultation and engagement
  - Promotion
  
  
• Need to share information, not withhold it
  
  
• Is a significant mental shift for many long-term public servants, but a necessary one for effective governance
  
  
• ICT will only realise true business benefits with a business-centric approach NOT technology-centric
  
  
• WA has developed a great set of checklists for Ministers' offices (PDF) and Secretaries to appropriately question CIOs to ensure that business value is top-of-mind (great tool - should be used nationally!)
  

Medicare Australia

• There is real business value in electronic transactions over physical ones
  

• Physical network accounts for less than 25% of Medicare's business
  
  
• Estimated that move to electronic transactions has effectively reduced Medicare's necessary headcount by 50% (compared to headcount required if all processes remained manual)
  
  
• Implemented ability for customers to check their interactions with Medicare online (publicly available but not yet being promoted)
  
  
• Has developed a national medical backbone for providing and billing services across GPs, specialists and hospitals (ECLIPSE), which has enormous benefits for the health sector (but is largely invisible to constitutents)

Read full post...

View summary...

Mapping the social media landscape - a guide for understanding

It can be very daunting for communications professionals to build an understanding of the social media landscape, grasping its scope and diversity and use this knowledge to select the right tools to meet their communications needs.

On occasion I've spoken to other marketers and PR professionals who have said that the sheer diversity and complexity of the social media landscape makes it easier to simply avoid the area, rather than spend the time necessary to make good decisions.

Increasingly organisations will need to take their first steps into this area - social media is in widespread use by internet users and they are talking about you.

The first step to understanding any landscape is to map it - fortunately there have been a few efforts in this regard already.

Possibly the first consolidated attempt was by Robert Scoble, who published the Social Media Starfish last year.

Pictured below, the Starfish provides one way to visualise the different categories of interactions and capabilities of the different social media tools.



A video explanation of the Starfish is also available as below.


A second approach, released more recently, is the Conversation Prism, pictured below.

This was released by Brian Solis, principal of Future Works and author of PR 2.0.

In a report in ZDNet, Brian describes the Conversation Prism as a tool that "helps chart online conversations between the people that populate communities as well as the networks that connect the Social Web." The article, ‘Conversation Prism’ helps corporations visualize social media strategies, provides a good overview of how the tool works.



Of course these maps are only a start. The social media environment is evolving as technology improves and smart people come up with new ways to facilitate human interactions via digital channels.

However now that we do have these maps, we can begin to understand the social media landscape in more detail, and apply the right tools for our communications needs.

Read full post...

View summary...

The strategic benefits and risks of permeable boundaries for government websites

In the 'old days' before the internet, the boundaries of government reports, brochures, fact sheets, policy statements and other discrete documents were hard and unyielding.

While a document might feature several attributed quotes and some purchased stock art, all of the content was owned by the organisation that created it. This was a logical approach given the mediums available.

The first government websites followed the same approach. Each was a discrete island containing its own text, images, maps and code. The only enhancement was to link to other websites (sometimes wrapped in a warning that people were leaving one silo to enter another).

Today the internet has matured further as a medium and we have seen a thaw in this approach, albeit an uneven one.

Many government websites (but not all) have discarded their warnings on leaving the site. Some sites now effectively cross-link between knowledge centres, regardless of which departmental or private sector site they live within.

I've even seen some sites embed external functionality, such as Google Maps or Youtube videos, and a few allow other sites to reuse or embed government information or functionality through RSS or other means.

I am very glad to see this shift from rigid to permeable boundaries occurring. It provides a number of strategic benefits for government.


Strategic benefits of permeability

• Greater reach
  Just as governments site their customer-facing offices in high traffic areas to improve reach, in the online channel government must have presence in appropriate sites.
  With permeable boundaries government can be where people choose to congregate, in social networks such as MySpace or Facebook, or media sites such as NineMSN.
  
  
• Reduced duplication (information/effort)
  With permeable boundaries there is less effort required in re-inventing the wheel. Government agencies can embed publicly available tools in their sites and link to pre-existing information repositories.
  This allows the government to focus on filling the gaps where there are currently no tools or information rather than wasting money on replicating what already exists.
  
  
• Improved awareness and trust
  Research demonstrates that people trust who their friends trust - word-of-mouth is a key influencer of decisions and behaviour.
  Permeable boundaries allow government organisations to become part of the network of friends. By engaging openly across existing communities over time this integrates government with these communities, making them a trusted member rather than an aloof outsider.
  

How to build permeable boundaries

These are quick thoughts on easy ways to start turning rigid into permeable boundaries.

• Provide your media releases via RSS/Atom and promote them with your key partners.
  
  
• Display audio-visual material using popular mediums, for example using Youtube for video, Slideshare for powerpoint slides, Scribd for documents.
  
  
• Use existing third-party tools to deliver key features rather than building new tools, for example using Google Maps for map-based functions, Google for website search, Weather.com for weather information, Blogger or Wordpress for in-site blogs and Footytips for an internal football tipping competition.
  
  
• Use Govdex to develop an extranet to share information with trusted strategic partners.
  
  
• Engage officially with existing online communities where there is clear benefit for doing so, for instance with online forums related to your area of business, with appropriate social networks and industry groups.
  
  
• Build an appropriate and managed presence in a virtual world, such as Second Life.

And manage all these online initiatives, just as your agency would manage a new shopfront or service. Online engagement isn't tick-a-box, it requires ongoing commitment to succeed.

Read full post...

View summary...

Why do some local councils in the UK have better websites than some Commonwealth agencies in Australia?

The question in my title is of course a little provocative - who is to say whether a website is better or worse?

The answer, in my view, is our users.

For some reason in Australian we have never, to my knowledge, asked our citizens to compare government websites against universal categories such as awareness, ease of task completion, information depth and quality, findability, usability or design aesthetics.

There are few objective standards or comparison processes in use in government - although Global Reviews has a good stab at rating local council sites. Having worked with them before, their methodology is robust and well developed.

Users aside, I do feel safe in saying that the UK is far ahead of Australia in the field of egovernment. While some Australian Commonwealth agencies are still struggling to introduce Web content management systems some UK local councils are now adding advanced Web 2.0 features as below (and it's not the only example, just currently the best one).


Redbridge-i
Redbridge Borough's website is a leading example of user customisable government websites in the UK and is recognised as a world leader.

As a London Borough with roughly 250,000 constituents, Redbridge's site was developed on the basis that the public own the local administration and should have the ability to comment on services and engage on an ongoing basis with the council.

It drew from best practice private sector websites, incorporating features from sites such as Amazon, Google, eBay and Facebook.

Part of the design philosophy was to allow the public to decide what was most important to them. Therefore, except for a fixed space in the upper right, the website's homepage can be reorganised as desired by individual citizens, with sections able to be dragged and dropped to other locations on the page and content hidden or show.

The site can also be customised by postcode to show the services most relevant to individual households.

Another decision was to continuously innovate, develop and release new features and let citizens decide how valuable they are. This taps into actual citizen behaviour, rather than anticipated behaviour and provides a uage-based measure of what the website's users will use than do focus groups and wishlists.

One particularly successful feature of the site are the forums supporting community consultation. Councillors are active at responding and use the forums to identify comment trends and useful stakeholders to inform council decision-making processes.

The site also has a growing transactional function and has demonstrated cost saving by transferring business from phone and face-to-face channels.

The site was developed in-house over a nine month period by a team of up to 6 people, with up to 500 staff consulted about the development, and released in 2007.

The best way to learn to learn the site is to play with it. It really is easy to use and effective at task completion.

More information about the site is available from the Innovation in local government services awards page.

A very good 5 minute video about the Redbridge-i website is available at Localgov.tv.

Read full post...

View summary...

UK government drops its pants to encourage online innovation

Since the release of the report, The power of information (which I'm planning to blog about next week), the UK government has taken enormous steps towards using the internet in more empowering and collaborative ways to improve service offerings, communication and transparency.

I've blogged previously about the principles for online participation developed for UK civil servants, which was another direct outcome of this report.

Now the UK government has released a host of new government data, previously unavailable, for use in the development of mashups by individuals, companies and government agencies.

This is a virtually (excuse the pun) unheard of step for any government - to release data in a way that makes it easy for anyone to combine it, analyse it, represent it in combination with other data and form conclusions.

Taking the concept even further, the UK government is stimulating innovation by running a competition for the best mash-ups created using the data, with 20,000 pounds in the prize pool.

More news about the competition is available from Yahoo.

Full details are at the Power of Information Taskforce's blog.

The data being released is available at the UK's Show us a better way website.

Read full post...

View summary...