Posts
The French government has introduced a Web 2.0 portal featuring a forum, wikis and video to support debate on their digital strategy and encourage ideas outside traditional 'government-think' limits.
As discussed in The Connected Republic, the French site is at http://assisesdunumerique.fr/forum/.
Showing posts with label wiki. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wiki. Show all posts
Friday, October 24, 2008
French government joins the online conversation | Tweet |
Monday, October 20, 2008
Putting Australian government web traffic in perspective | Tweet |
In August I analysed traffic to our agency's website in July 2008 using Hitwise's data measurement service, comparing our share of web traffic against the total to Federal government websites, other government websites and the top websites visited by Australians.
The results provided me with a view of how important government websites are in peoples' online lives - not very. Less than 2.5% of website visits were to government sites.
It also helped me form some ideas as to how Australian government departments can make their online channels more effective means of engaging citizens.
Reviewing Hitwise's reports from July 2008, tracking around 2.95 million Australians' visits to over 647,000 websites (using ISP logs), the total government sector (6,634 sites) accounted for only 2.26 percent of all tracked website visits by Australians.
Of these,
In comparison, Google.com.au and Google.com together accounted for 9.64% of Australian visits to all tracked websites, four times as much as the total government sector (Google.com.au, the number one site visited by Australians, accounted for 7.85% and Google.com for 1.79% of visits).
Facebook, the fourth most visited website, received 2.36% of total tracked visits - slightly more than the entire Australian government.
MySpace, the seventh ranked site, received 1.78% of total visits - almost 50% more than Federal government sites.
Only one government website regularly reaches Hitwise's Top Twenty list of Australian sites, the Bureau of Meteorology (coming in at 16th position with 0.51% of traffic in September 2008). In fact, this site alone accounts for almost a quarter of the visits to the total government sector.
To put these figures into perspective, I roughly estimated from my Agency's actual web traffic that each Australian web user in July 2008 made 270 visits to Hitwise tracked websites (note that at an average visit duration of 10 minutes, this is significantly less that the figure reported by Netratings in March 2008 (PDF) - of 13.7 hours/week online).
Of these estimated 270 visits,
Even if you discount my estimate and take another measure of the average number of website visits per Australian each month, the proportion based on Hitwise's tracked websites remains the same.
What does this mean for government?
Even a few visits per month by Australia's estimated 11 million plus regular internet users users adds up to a significant online audience for government in Australia.
However my conclusion is that Australian government departments should not rely on reaching our citizen audiences simply via our official websites.
We need to reach out and engage our customers via the websites they choose to use.
These non-Government websites account for over 97.5% of regular internet usage by Australian (per Hitwise's July 2008 figures).
If Australian government wants to effectively communicate with citizens online, our departments need to invest in understanding where our audiences spend their time, reaching beyond our official sites to engage them in the online communities they choose to frequent.
How do we engage citizens on their own turf?
There are many different ways that private organisations reach out to user communities, and government can learn and use many of these approaches, such as
Note
Hitwise checked the numbers drawn from their web reporting service (thank you Alex and Rebecca). The idea for this post, the conclusions drawn and any calculation errors are mine alone.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
The success of Future Melbourne - an online wiki-led consultation program | Tweet |
I've been looking at the success of the Future Melbourne program, a wiki and blog based approach to shaping the future urban landscape of Australia's second largest city.
The program allowed citizens to directly collaborate, edit and comment on the plans for the future development of the city. It attracted more than 30,000 visits by nearly 7,000 individuals and over 200 edits to the plans, ranging from spelling and grammatical corrections through to lengthy well-considered contributions (and not one instance of spam, off-topic or offensive content).
Reading through an offline presentation on Future Melbourne, the program involved several stages,
As part of the process appropriate Conditions of Registration, Privacy Policy & Discussion Rules were developed to cover the legal requirements of the program.
Participation Policies & Guidelines and a Netiquette guide were developed to help participants understand the framework for engagement.
The wiki was monitored on a day-by-day basis to ensure appropriate conduct was upheld and changes were tracked via the wiki system.
Some of the learnings of the program included:This is a wonderful example of a successful online consultation process in Australia.
I hope other public sector organisations are considering similar routes to engage their customers and community.
Anyone who is going down this route, I'd appreciate if you dropped me a line.
How can we effectively share our egovernment successes and failures? | Tweet |
I find egovernment an exciting area to work in.
It offers benefits to citizens and businesses in reducing the time and cost of engaging with government
It offers benefits to taxpayers due to the cost savings achievable within the public sector and the ability to improve transparency in government.
It offers benefits to individuals and communities by providing new and effective ways to collaborate with community and advocacy groups, businesses, agencies from other jurisdictions, the community and individual citizens to deliver improved policy and service outcomes.
I find that many Australian public sector organisations are engaged in exciting experiments with digital web and mobile technologies to improve their engagement and service delivery. There are also many innovative individuals working in different areas to advocate the use of modern tools to improve the solutions to age-old issues.
However finding out about these initiatives and the lessons learnt in each case isn't easy.
There are limited forums for communication between public sector organisations and the means by which we share information is often limited by funding, time and bureaucratic overheads.
In the private sector competitors often keep secrets from each other as a may to build competitive advantage. In the public sector secrets are often necessary for customer privacy or state interest, however they can also reduce our ability to provide community benefit where they cross into restrictions on learning from mistakes or successes.
Lack of information sharing also results in duplication of work, very slow learning from mistakes and redundancy - which costs government and therefore taxpayers and service recipients time and money.
I'm working through approaches to improve communication across egovernment practitioners in Australia, drawing from New Zealand's excellent wikis, the online forums used in the UK and US and the European Union's fantastic community site.
Do others have any ideas they can suggest to me to help us share our information across all levels of Australian government in an appropriate way?
Friday, October 03, 2008
Biographical secret questions weakening as security measures | Tweet |
Due to the rise of online social networks and informational sites, secret questions based on biographical information are losing strength as a supplementary to password-based security.
As discussed in a Time article, Those Crazy Internet Security Questions, as more information on individuals becomes easily available - either provided by them directly or via government, corporate and collaborative online databases - the secureness of personal questions diminish.
The article provides a ten second case study on how easy it is to get the biographical information of a prominent person from their wikipedia entry and online postal database.
Speech transcripts, videos, blog posts, social network profiles, news sites and genealogical websites can also provide significantly more information quickly and cheaply.
It's slightly more difficult to get information on an 'unknown' person - but many are doing hackers the favour of providing their own biographical information online - as well as adding to the available information on their family and friends.
This raises a need to steer secret questions away from purely biographical information, or seek stronger alternatives.
So what was your mother's maiden name again?
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Greater transparency in government - the US theme for 2008 | Tweet |
The most exciting change I'm seeing in US politics at the moment is the degree of top level support and enthusiasm for transparency in government.
Nextgov has published an article, Obama says he would use IT to open government, which details the strategies the Democrat nominee for President says he will mandate for the US Federal Government to increase their accountability to the public, reducing waste and improving openness.In the plan, Obama says he "will require his appointees who lead the executive branch departments and rulemaking agencies to conduct the significant business of the agency in public, so that any citizen can see in person or watch on the Internet as the agencies debate and deliberate the issues that affect American society. Videos of meetings will be archived on the Web, and the transcript will be available to the public. Obama will also require his appointees to commit to employ all the technological tools available to allow average citizens not just to observe, but to participate and be heard on the issues that affect their daily lives. Obama will require Cabinet officials to have periodic 21st century fireside chats, restore meaning to the Freedom of Information Act, and conduct regulatory agency business in public."
Obama has indicated that he will push the use of blogs, wikis, social networking and other strategies to create a government more connected with constituents.
The full plan is available at Government Executive.
It's both an ambitious plan and an exciting experiment in the government arena. If Obama gets the opportunity to execute, it will be interesting to see the consequences of more open government both in the US's domestic market and in international relations.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Intranet Innovation Award winners for 2008 announced | Tweet |
The Intranet Innovation Award winners for 2008 have been announced, and their details, together with an executive summary (PDF) containing two case studies of award winners is available at Step Two's website.
The case studies feature an example of collaborative information sharing via a wiki used by staff of one organisation to track competitors and an innovative intranet people finder that improves staff networking and discovery by combining elements of both Twitter and Facebook.
I was inspired by both of the case studies, but a little disappointed to see only one government site mentioned in the awards this year - the Department of Human Services (South Australia) was commended for their CEO blog.
I hope there will be a greater public sector presence next year.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
The business case for social media within a government department | Tweet |
Brought to my attention by the Victorian eGovernment Resource Centre, the below video from Shel Holzman provides an excellent summary of the value of social media as an set of egovernment tools within government intranets.
It addresses common misunderstandings and myths that have limited take-up, case studies of successful social media use and talks through appropriate applications for different tools.
Shel's video should be compulsory viewing for senior public sector executives who have an interest in improving the capture and dissemination of knowledge within their workplace, reduce the knowledge drain as babyboomers exit the workforce or improving their project management capacity and success rate.
By the way, Shel's regular podcast, The Hobson & Holtz Report, was to have a live phone in on 21 August discussing the topic of my blog post, the relationship between a strong commitment to internal communications and an effective intranet.
This has been postponed until 20 September, in case you want to catch it. The timing is tricky for Australians and New Zealanders, but it will be available on their site after the event.
This has been postponed until 20 September, in case you want to catch it. The timing is tricky for Australians and New Zealanders, but it will be available on their site after the event.
Thursday, September 04, 2008
Case study - helping employees help each other via Intranet social networking | Tweet |
Prescient Digital Media has published a case study on the adoption and success of Intranet social networking and other Web 2.0 technologies at Sabre, the company that runs most of the world’s airline flight reservation systems.
Sabre custom-built a solution that supports employees in discovering and sharing information between staff, leading to six-figure direct cost savings and improving the information flows throughout the organisation.
In fact the solution was so effective (with over 90% of staff now participating) that Sabre packaged their custom solution and are now selling it to other organisations.
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Collaboration doesn't have to equal cost and complexity | Tweet |
A mistake I've seen many organisations make when considering online staff collaboration systems for staff is trying to achieve perfection at the get go - building systems from scratch or investing in high-cost branded technologies that requires significant time to implement and can be expensive to operate and develop.
More prudent, in my view, is to find a cheap way of satisfying the basic requirements while delivering quickly.
This helps get collaboration (the goal) underway and allows the organisation to progressively develop its understanding of what staff need with a low upfront investment and instant benefits. In other words, a low cost pilot - helpful in the development of detailed business requirements for a future system.
So how can organisations achieve this without expensive servers, months of development and hordes of testers?
In many cases organisations have strict 'environmental' rules - restricting the applications staff can use and websites they can access. These rules are in place partly to protect internal data and partly to protect an organisation from its own staff and their possible activities, introducing malware or other nasties into the organisation.
Using a web environment it is possible for even business users to configure several low cost servers and provide access to tools - within or outside the firewall - while shielding the network from harm.
The tools themselves are low cost or free, drawing from open source communities (tools such as MediaWiki and PhpBB), public online tools (such as Blogger and Ning) and fully featured solutions (such as Wordpress or Confluence - available via Govdex).
So if your organisation needs a quick solution for a blog, wiki or other collaboration tool, consider whether it is possible to run a low cost pilot before investing in a long-term solution
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Survey on Intranet use/adoption of Web 2.0 technologies | Tweet |
James Robertson of Step Two Designs has posted about a survey being conducted by Prescient Digital Media exploring intranet use and adoption plans for Web 2.0 technologies.
To participate and receive a copy of the aggregate results (plus a chance to win a US$400 prize) complete the short (10 minute) survey.
Monday, September 01, 2008
Online collaboration article from Step Two | Tweet |
Cairo Walker of Step Two Designs has written an excellent article on collaboration, looking at the use of digital tools and approaches to facilitating adoption within organisations.
Entitled Collaboration: leading by example, the article includes a case study on the World Wildlife Fund detailing how a not-for-profit organisation can productively implement collaboration tools that meet the needs of staff.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
egovernment online participation - New Zealand-style | Tweet |
I really admired the efforts of our New Zealand cousins in the egovernment arena as I've mentioned before.
One of their initiatives is their ParticipationNZ wiki, which is allowing NZ public servants to collaboratively develop, assess and reflect on the overall approach to online participation by government agencies.
If your agency is considering participating in the online arena, this is a great place to find global best practice examples of actual participation policy and initiatives.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Mapping the social media landscape - a guide for understanding | Tweet |
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.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
California launches a best practice government wiki | Tweet |
As reported in Government Technology, California has launched a best practices wiki for state employees.
It currently covers topics including:
- Healthcare in Prisons
- Customer Service
- Disaster Preparedness
- Education and Training
- Green California
- Human Resources
- Information Technology
There's an interesting write-up regarding the process used to create the wiki as a sample best practice.
I expect to see more of these types of self-regulating professional networks emerge across government over the next few years in support of moves to whole-of-government standards and to improve knowledge capture, transfer and management.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Online engagement - learning from the private sector | Tweet |
A few months ago a PR agency representing the National Australia Bank (NAB) made a series of comments on AFL blogs advertising NAB services.
This incident has been discussed in publications such as Marketing Magazine, NAB spamming: maybe it's time to take dance lessons and Crickey, NAB spams blogs to spruik its SMS banking, which confirmed that the approach was endorsed by the NAB. From the Crikey article,
Crikey's article went on to point out that the NAB had a strong anti-spamming message on its website, which did not seem to apply to how the bank chose to engage with others.NAB media relations spokesperson Felicity Glennie-Holmes confirmed that the message was indeed from the bank. The idea to spam the comments sections of private blogs was a recommendation of PR agency Cox+Inall, part of the BWM group, and had been undertaken by Cox+Inall with the bank’s full knowledge and approval.
Cox+Inall had searched for blogs that included AFL coverage and were “well-enough read to attract readers who might be interested in our offer,” said Ms Glennie-Holmes. No-one at NAB or at Cox+Inall had considered approaching blog owners first for permission before posting their promotional messages, she said.
“Blogs are a public forum”, said Ms Glennie-Holmes. NAB and Cox+Inall felt this meant commercial interests could feel free to contribute unsolicited and irrelevant commercial material as comments, placing the onus on blog moderators to reject or delete unwanted comments.
The incident has created a great deal of concern across the blogging community and a number of people I have spoken have lowered their view of the NAB.
An example of the backlash is this Youtube video looking at how NAB would feel if people came onto NAB property to advertise their own services. It's cheap and grainy - but the point is clear, respect the rights of others in their own spaces.
Bloggers have also contacted NAB directly to complain about this incident and a recorded interview was published online, as reported by Better Communications Results, StewArtMedia and NAB’s comment spam.
What can be learnt from this
I believe there are a couple of things communications professionals can learn from the NAB's experience.
Understand the channel and medium before engaging
The view of the NAB was that blogs were public forums, available for commercial comment.
In this case I feel that the NAB did not initially build a strong understanding of the online channel and consider how the medium of blogs actually function.
While blogs are available publicly, they are usually owned by a single individual and operated in a highly personal way. Just as people would take offense if an advertiser came into their home and started talking to their family and friends about a commercial offering, blog owners are proprietory about their blogs and need to be approached and engaged in an appropriate way.
This applies equally for an situation where an organisation engages with someone else's online property - be it a blog, forum or chatroom.
It is important for the organisation to take the time to understand the appropriate ground rules for the venue, consult appropriately and engage with the full agreement of the site operator.
Respect others
Respecting others is part of the social 'glue' that holds civilisation together. By stepping into someone's space and shouting a message an organisation, or individual, can be demonstrating a lack of respect.
While the internet is a public service, and blogs and forums publicly accessible, they still have rules of engagement - just like a public event.
An organisation seeking to engage within the online medium needs to spend the time observing to understand the social rules and codes of conduct before diving in.
This demonstrates respect for others and demonstrably changes the reception the organisation will receive.
Online engagement must add value
In this case the NAB posted commercial messages unlinked to the discussions taking place in the blog.
There did not appear to be any planning or thought around building credibility with the audience or adding value with the comments.
For organisations engaging online it is not sufficient to rely on the branding and established reputation in other mediums. Organisations need to think about what they bring to the forum or blog and what value they add to the conversation.
An organisation that provides adds value to the online conversation (speaking with), rather than advertising (speaking to) will build credibility and gain opportunities to communicate its message in more engaging ways - thereby being more successful.
Use an honest voice
In the NAB incident, a PR agency posted the comments - and they were posted anonymously, not as an official representation of the NAB.
When engaging online if you want to be taken seriously as an organisation you must represent yourself as who you are. Use an honest and real voice, advertising agencies can only take you so far, organisations will achieve far greater credibility and cut through if it is an actual representative of the organisation making the posts, using their true voice (not pre-processed PR statements).
This is very hard for organisations to understand, given the formal nature of engagement in other mediums - the best example is to think of the online channel as talkback radio and engage accordingly.
In conclusion
Thre's a lot of material available in print and online discussing the right and wrong approaches to online engagement. Most of it follows the same general theme as my points above, understand the medium, be respectful of others, add value to the conversation and use an honest voice.
Take advantage of this when developing your online engagement strategy and you'll avoid many of the mistakes organisations first face when making a decision to use the online channel actively.
Thursday, August 07, 2008
The strategic benefits and risks of permeable boundaries for government websites | Tweet |
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.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Why can one man in a cave out-communicate the government of the world's superpower? | Tweet |
There was an interesting admission from the US Army Secretary last week in Inside Defense as reported in the Wired Danger Room Blog,
Senior Army leaders have fallen behind the breakneck development of cheapThe article went on to describe some of the initiatives underway at the US Army to help it prepare for the new world - including adding blogging to their graduate school curriculum and allowing a tiny office of Web-savvy mavericks at West Point to create Army-specific Web 2.0 tools (blogs, forums, social networks) for soldiers.
digital communications including cell phones, digital cameras and Web 2.0
Internet sites such as blogs and Facebook, Army Secretary Pete Geren said at a
trade conference on July 10. That helps explain how "just one man in a cave
that's hooked up to the Internet has been able to out-communicate the greatest
communications society in the history of the world -- the United States," Geren
said.
"It's a challenge not only at home, it's a challenge in recruiting, it's a challenge internationally, because effective communication brings people over to our side and ineffective communication allows the enemy to pull people to their side," Geren continued. He said the Army brass needs to catch up -- fast. But how exactly?
One solution: "Find a blog to be a part of," Geren said.
Young people embrace social media "as a fluent second language," he added. Army leaders have to do the same.
At the same time the US Air Force is using blogs, wikis and personal profile pages to better support its missions, per a Network World article, U.S. Air Force lets Web 2.0 flourish behind walls.
I expect that the Australian armed forces are watching and learning from our US counterparts. The online channel can deliver major benefits to the training and operations of a defense force.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Promoting innovation - how can government tap Australia's creativity? | Tweet |
This post has been inspired by a post in the blog Here Comes Everybody, titled Gin, Television and Social Surplus. I strongly suggest that you also read this and think about the ramifications.
With the globe's total knowledge doubling every two years, being innovative is not longer simply an economic advantage for nations - it's a vital factor in their survival into the future.
Therefore fostering innovation should be (and fortunately is) high on the agenda for Australian governments.
However tapping creativity is not easy to do. Most organisations and institutions tend to have a love/hate relationship with innovation, seeking to foster it, but also seeking to direct and control it - resisting any potential paradigm-shifting changes that might spoil their plans.
There's an AIM breakfast briefing coming up in Canberra on 26 August featuring Mr Terry Moran AO, Secretary, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, to discuss fostering innovation in the public sector.
I want to instead explore one way that Australia's governments can tap into the creativity and innovative capacity of all our citizens for the public good.
To achieve this I have to first diverge slightly, to look at what the innovation potential of Australia might be.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia in the world.
The English version of Wikipedia, as at July 2008, featured more than 2.4 million articles consisting of a total of over 1 billion words. The full Wikipedia is substantially larger - with figures from April 2008 indicating it had over 10 million articles in 253 languages.
These figures, reported in Wikipedia itself, represent over 100 million hours of human thought and creative effort - all contributed freely.
Australian internet usage
As of March 2008, the average Australian watched 13.3 hours of television and used the internet for 13.7 hours per week, according to Nielsen Online’s 10th Australian Internet and Technology Report (PDF media release) - By the way, this is the first time internet usage has exceeded television usage in Neilsen's research.
Based on a population of 21.5 million Australians, the time spent using the internet equals 15,136,600,000 hours per year - or over 15 billion hours (using American billions).
If Australians decided to spend all of this online time recreating Wikipedia, it would take them the equivalent of three days to create the entire 10 million pages - assuming they started with just the basis Wiki software.
Another way of looking at this is that Australians could in a year create over 150 Wikipedias, simply using the time they are now spending communicating, collaborating, creating and interacting online.
As a contrast - the time Australians spend watching television generates no creative value whatsoever. Television watching is a passive activity that does not involve the creation of any content - it will never result in a Wikipedia or any other creative value.
Fortunately television watching is in decline, while internet usage is climbing quickly.
Tapping Australia's creativity
One way for government to tap the innovation potential of Australians would be to provide the tools and motivation for citizens to interact creatively with government online.
This includes approaches such as
- Collective policy development such as the New Zealand wiki Police Act, as I have previously discussed
- Providing social service forums, where people can share information and collaborate on the development of online and physical products to help others
- Making public data available online in raw forms that citizens can 'mash-up' into useful information and services and share
- eDemocracy initiatives - such as virtual town halls for individuals to interact with their representatives, voting and think-tank forums, where hundreds of thousands of citizens - not just a select 1,000 - can interact, engage and formulate ideas and strategies to enhance Australia's future.
Australia's governments have the ability right now to provide the framework and the opportunity for Australians to meaningfully engage in these, and other, ways.
Other governments are already providing some or all of these services, and are reaping the benefits.
Do Australian governments have the will and culture to step into these areas?
Are they willing to take a risk, allow citizens to share control, open themselves to criticism (which is already out there anyway)?
Assuming Australian governments are willing to take this risk, if, as a result of these initiatives, we capture just one hour per week of Australians' current internet usage, that would be equivalent to Australia creating 11 Wikipedias each year.
That's an enormous amount of creativity unleashed in the public interest.
What do you think?
Monday, July 14, 2008
What should egovernment focus on? | Tweet |
There's a great article up on BuzzMachine titled Google as the new press room.
It makes the point that newspapers are in the content business, not the printing and distribution or website business.
As such they should focus on what they do well (create excellent content) and outsource the non-core activities.
The specific example is to have Google, or someone like AP, provide the technology platform and allow newspapers to focus on providing content.
This philosophy applies for government as well.
In the public sector we seem to invest a great deal of money into creating new websites in order to deliver content to different stakeholder groups - I'm guilty of this approach as well.
However what does government really do well, and what do we do badly?
Firstly I'd go out on a limb and say that we do websites really badly. Most Australian government websites function differently, using different content management platforms, different technology platforms and different workflows.
The quality, structure and depth of content varies widely, as does design and the use of different enabling technologies such as Flash, AJAX and Livecycle, blogs, wikis, forums and RSS.
Realistically, across government, we could have a single web content management platform, with appropriate enabling technologies usable by any agency - including a consistent search tool and reporting system (imagine being able to see how all government websites were performing side by side!)
A central design team could provide web quality assurance - enabling agencies control over their distinctive look, but preserving a common high level of usability and accessibility.
A centralised editorial team could provide oversight for information quality and depth, allowing departments to focus on being content matter experts.
A central transactions and forms/workflows team could oversee the development of agency forms - ensuring they use consistent terminology, provide contextual support and make it as easy as possible for citizens to interact with the government.
This would allow government departments to focus on what they do best - provide specific customer services, be content matter and policy experts.
Sounds like a pipe dream?
I'm seeing the fringes of this starting now. The central DHS Letters and Forms Secretariat, AGOSP with it's single sign-on, Smartforms and geolocational services, AGIMO's existing GovDex wiki and Funnel Back search solutions.
These are all pieces in the overall puzzle.
The challenge moving forward is to overcome departmental silos, satisfy the interest groups and provide a robust centralised framework with sufficient funding and support to bring it all together.
It's a vision with enormous benefits for citizens and for governments. It just requires people in government to share the big vision and drive it forward.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
