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Victoria's eGovernment Resource Centre's newsletter has alerted me to moves underway in the House of Representatives to treat electronic petitions in the same manner as paper petitions.
Covered in an article in the The Age, Paper and internet petitions may soon be treated equally, the approach being recommended is for the Federal government to adopt Queensland's system and operate an official government petitions site, similar to the UK approach with e-Petitions.
There is still some resistance to the idea, as documented in the The Age article. However my view is that the reduction in barriers to petition participation is a good move, particularly as we, as a society, are moving away from a letter-writing cultural tradition to a digital one.
Provided the government continues to support paper petitions alongside digital ones the community will be supported.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Paper and internet petitions may soon be treated equally | Tweet |
Friday, November 27, 2009
State of the eUnion: Government 2.0 and onwards | Tweet |
You may have already seen notices about this book over at the eGovernment Resource Centre or other places but, in case you're not aware of it, this is a fantastic read on where Government 2.0 is right now and where it is going.
The book is available for free download from 21Gov.net and you can get the PDF right here, State of the eUnion: Government 2.0 and Onwards.
Enjoy - and please tell me what you thought of it in comments below.
Great read on Gov 2.0 in Australia - Upgrading Democracy (foreword by Minister Tanner) | Tweet |
The Centre for Policy Development, a non-partisan Australian think tank, has released the Upgrading Democracy Edition of Insight, their enewsletter.
With a foreword by Minister Lindsay Tanner and articles from Senator Kate Lundy and Gov 2.0 Taskforce member Martin Stewart-Weeks - amongst a set of other fantastic essays, I recommend reading this Insight to gain a clearer picture of the Australian Government's vision for Gov 2.0 and how it can be put into practice.
It is jam-packed with Gov 2.0 information that's both useful for experienced practitioners and for newcomers, as well as for senior agency leadership.
It is free to read and has been released under a Creative Commons license to make it easy to share.
How much should a government website cost - are we over-engineering our websites? | Tweet |
These days when I personally need to set up a new website, I either hop onto Wordpress or download one of the free open-source content management systems, purchase space on a decent US server and follow the installation instructions.
I use a design template found online, customising it with some style tweaks where required, then spend a few days writing content.
It's not very hard and doesn't take very long (normally under a week).
However in government we have very strong governance structures around website creation - with good reason - to ensure that the platforms we use are secure, reliable and effective. We also have extensive content approval processes which can require a number of steps before words reach the screen.
This places a great deal of overhead on the process of creating and managing government websites, adding significantly to IT and resourcing costs.
I don't question the need for public organisations to guarantee the reliability and security of their websites. However I do wonder if we're placing a disproportionate level of cost onto this process - so much overhead on our websites that they may be slower to deliver and less cost-effective than other communications channels.
I also wonder if departments spend much time scrutinising their governance arrangements to see if they can reduce the burden, and therefore the cost and time to market, (without compromising the outcome) by either planing ahead or working together better.
If we are really one government shouldn't we be able to - as a group or via some central agency - security assess and review a group of web technologies then pick and choose between them as needed - depending on our internal platforms and needs?
Why not compare our departmental content management processes and learn from the organisations who are most effective and efficient?
Food for thought.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Bringing government into the age of persistent communications | Tweet |
Many organisations use campaign-based communications models.
They develop their campaign strategy, identify and engage their audience, communicate a message, then wind down the campaign and allow the audience to disengage and disperse.
At a future time, when the audience no longer seems influenced by the previous message, they repeat this process - potentially reusing campaign materials, but having to locate and engage the audience all over again.
A cynic could call this communications amnesia - we deliberately forget all about our audiences as soon as we've finished shouting our message at them.
I prefer to call this episodic communications as it operates very similarly to episodic programming, at the end of each episode the set may remain in place, but the actors are returned to their starting points.
Social media, on the other hand, allows organisations to cost-effectively establish an ongoing relationship with their audiences.
By developing online spaces where their audience can gather and interact, seeding them with content and well-considered participation guidelines, organisations can encourage audience members to join and participate in a community around a given topic for an extended period of time.
Best of all the approach supports and improves the efficiency of episodic communications campaigns by providing a ready-made engaged audience who can be encouraged to pay attention to new messages at significantly less additional cost.
I call this approach persistent communications.
I'm starting to see governments use social media tools to build engaged audiences around specific topics - from the Digital Economy and National Culture Policy to yourHealth.
However so far I have seen limited appreciation of how these audiences can be leveraged as persistent communities of interest.
To me it makes sense that once you've invested money, resources and time into building one of these groups, it is worth continuing to invest a small amount to keep the group - a budding community - functioning and growing.
This turns it into an ongoing resource that can be leveraged in the future for additional input or directed into future campaign-based initiatives.
This can create a positive feedback loop - with campaigns becoming more cost-effective over time.
Campaign (used to build a) -> Persistent audience (leveraged into further) -> Campaigns (used to build a) -> (bigger) Persistent audience -> and so on.
This approach hasn't been totally ignored in government.
Future Melbourne has done a reasonable job of maintaining its momentum. It makes sense - Melbourne has a long future ahead of it, why not leverage the investment in the community by keeping them engaged and willing to participate. It saves money, time and effort.
Similarly Bang The Table has been peppering me with additional consultations being held by the ACT government, leveraging my participation in an earlier consultation as someone who is interested and willing to comment on further topics over time (although they've not yet taken the step to build a profile for me and invite me to consultations from other governments which fit my interest profile).
Most commercial organisations know that a relationship with a customer is worth its weight in gold. Once a customer is deeply engaged with one of your products you are able to leverage this into new areas at much lower cost than - take Apple's progression from computers to music players to phones or Sony's fiercely loyal Playstation audience.
Government also has this opportunity to use persistent communication centred on social media to build and sustain persistent relationships with our community.
We can leverage interest in one consultation via one department at one level of government into future interest in another engagement activity in a different agency in another government level through sustaining an persistent communications strategy.
This would save significant public money, however to get there we will need to rethink our departmental communications approaches - revisiting our systems for developing, governing, tracking and analysing communications.
From episodic communications tactics to a persistent communications strategy -should we call this Communications 2.0?
