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The ABS has launched the CodePlay initiative as a Gov 2.0 approach to help drive collaboration between students, developers and national and international statistical agencies.
The competition challenges Australian tertiary students to help the ABS design the next generation of open-data tools to help people access, view and use statistical information.
While I'm not sure why the ABS believes that all the great ideas will come from university students - why not include everyone - this is a strong initiative and should produce a very interesting outcome.
To learn more, visit the CodePlay website or their twitter account at @ABSCodePlay.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
ABS launches CodePlay competition for tertiary students | Tweet |
Monday, December 13, 2010
How workplaces can use social media | Tweet |
Commoncraft, one of my favourite instructional video developers, has created a new video on Social Media and the Workplace.
In about four minutes it provides an excellent summary of how social media can be used to address reputation issues, provide customer service and otherwise support organisations in a managed and safe manner.
Unfortunately the video isn't embeddable yet, so you'll have to click over to the Commoncraft website to view it.
View social media and the workplace.
Which Commonwealth agencies use which social media tools? | Tweet |
Based on information I've collected over the last year, and using the data collected via the Vic Government, I have prepared a Google Spreadsheet designed to identify who in the Commonwealth Government is using which social media channels in their activities.
It is fairly basic at this stage;
- it is only Commonwealth for now (sorry to the state and local government guys - I will be building the same system for you soon);
- it doesn't look at how many of each channel your agency runs;
- it doesn't link to the channels;
- it doesn't link to agency websites;
- it may miss some smaller offices and agencies (I sourced the data from Australia.gov.au, so it should be fairly accurate, but it is hard to be sure, given the frequent changes and that not everyone might inform AGIMO of them).
- there are no contact details for the teams managing the channels.
I need your help filling it out and expanding it into a useful tool for helping agencies identify which of their colleagues are actively using these channels on an official basis.
All contributions are anonymous - please circulate it to your peers. The more data we have, the more useful it becomes.
To give a taste of the spreadsheet - the stats are below.
Click on the link below, choose edit and then 'External social media' to add your data.
You can go to the full spreadsheet at: https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0Ap1exl80wB8OdENTTHE1VkJmZURzaGRPUHV4ZW1teGc&output=html
Friday, December 10, 2010
Should government policy be discussed in social media? | Tweet |
There's a fantastic series of articles being published over at FutureGov Asia-Pacific at the moment, introducing some very interesting perspectives on social media and government.
One asks, Should policy be debated in social media?, providing perspectives from senior leaders in different jurisdictions across the region.
There is a fair amount of diversity in the viewpoints, however the overall consensus appears to be that it should.
Several of those asked to comment pointed out that it is happening anyway - regardless of what governments may wish.
It is my view that we're past the point where government agencies and politicians have the luxury to choose where and how they form their policy. They can no longer fall back on government-controlled due process.
The crowd is now in command. Australians have many ways to make their views known, and are doing so on the matters of most concern to them.
Government agencies ignore active discussions at their own and at their ministers' peril. If they don't consider the views being expressed through social media channels - even when they are not being expressed through a government social media channel - there is the potential for them to damage their own credibility and reputation and even to call the APS and Government into disrepute.
The most recent example has been the Australian Government's approach to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Regardless of whether people support the actions of Wikileaks, there's been enormous public support for Australia to treat him 'fairly', providing appropriate consular support for him whilst under arrest in the UK.
For example, the Open letter: To Julia Gillard, re Julian Assange, hosted at ABC The Drum, has attracted over 4,600 comments (predominantly in support) alongside the more than 180 people directly signing the letter.
There have been large numbers of comments on other articles, blog posts, forum discussions, videos and tweets about the Wikileaks situation, with the same general viewpoint. The poll at the SMH (Should government agencies take more action to stop WikiLeaks operating?) is trending in the same way.
These comments have not been made directly to the Australian Government through channels and processes it had established for this purpose. There's certainly been no direct 'public consultation' on Wikileaks to help the Government consider its policy.
We've now seen public assurances from several senior Ministers that Julian Assange will, and is, receiving consular support, as would any other Australian in a difficult situation overseas.
This should be a wake-up call for all Australian public servants and politicians.
Ministers and agencies can still choose whether and how they hold a defined consultation around a given policy proposal. However Australians won't necessarily only make their views known when and through these processes, they will use social media - in spades.
Ignore them at your own risk.
Thursday, December 09, 2010
Australia is the second largest government user of Yammer - over 110 active networks | Tweet |
There's recently been some controversy in Australian government over the use of Yammer, a private and secure enterprise social network, which I discussed in my post, The ongoing struggles to balance IT security and staff empowerment.
I asked Simon Spencer, Yammer's newly appointed Asia-Pacific General Manager, how many government agencies in Australia were using Yammer.
I was expecting him to answer maybe 30-40 agencies.
He told me that, counting state and federal government, there were at least 110 Australian agencies now using Yammer - with a total of around 13,000 users.
I was surprised, I hadn't expected that much adoption.
However I was even more surprised when he gave me the global figures on take-up.
Simon said that Australia represents 29% of all government networks using Yammer. The US represents 33% and the UK about 26%. The rest of the world accounts for the other 12%.
I checked this with Simon three times and yes, it was correct. Despite our relatively small population, Australia as a nation is the second largest government user of Yammer in the world.
I was quite surprised. While I knew the NSW, Vic and QLD governments were all rapidly adopting Yammer, I had no idea that so many public sector organisations had found the service useful.
Admittedly Yammer is no newcomer. The company counts over 90,000 organisations as its customers across about 130 countries (Yammer now supports 94 languages). Around 80% of the Fortune 500 companies now use the service.
However for Australia to be the second largest government adopter of the service suggests there's a few things going on under the hood.
Firstly, this indicates to me that we're earlier adopters of social media tools in enterprise environments than I had expected. Speaking to Simon, he believes that Australia has adopted social media much faster than other countries, including within organisational networks. He said that he believes that Australia is on the leading edge of collaboration and use of social media.
Secondly the figures suggest to me that Australian public servants are seeking to use the tools they find productive in their personal lives.
Finally, given the example in my last post and other examples brought to my attention by staff at other agencies, it suggests to me that senior management and ICT are finding it challenging to meet their staff's needs within current infrastructure and policy settings.
ICT teams are finding that more and more of their effort and money is spent on maintaining ageing mainframes and legacy systems. This leaves less and less of their capacity available to discover, assess and implement productivity saving tools.
Equally senior managers are busy keeping Web 1.0 informational websites running effectively and managing all the other responsibilities of their jobs. They are struggling to find the time to research, understand and grasp the opportunities of Web 2.0
The Yammer example indicates to me that many public service knowledge workers want to keep improving their performance and agency productivity.
Clearly they aren't sitting back and waiting until ICT or senior managers are able to assess whether staff could be more productive with a particular tool. Public servants are going out and finding the tools themselves.
Want to learn more about Yammer?
Ross Hill's post Watching a Yammer network explode, is an excellent place to start.
I also recommend the following post and video from Deloittes following up Ross's post, How to keep a Yammer network exploding.
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