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This is a great presentation on exploiting location-based information, following on from my post on mashups.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Baby steps into extranets | Tweet |
When I joined the public service a few years back I was very pleased to discover that my agency was very proactive about engaging stakeholders when creating products and services for our customers.
The agency was still using 20th century methods to achieve these outcomes and was making no use of online collaborative groups or extranets.
This isn't a criticism of the people or the systems - the agency had developed the skills to manage this collaboration using the readily available technologies - email, mail, phones, faxes and face-to-face meetings. Since these were working well there had not been the need or money available to innovate new ways of engaging.
However over the last few years the tempo has accelerated.
The agency has placed a greater focus on stakeholder consultation, the level and complexity of engagement has increased and there has been the need to involve more players in approval processes. At the same time the agency has needed to manage its staffing levels carefully.
When most types of system double in size the effort required to manage and maintain them increases much more than double. This is because the connections between the different parts of the system increase exponentially.
For example, if you draw four dots on a piece of paper they can be connected in 6 possible ways (3+2+1), however 8 dots can be connected in 28 possible ways (7+6+5+4+3+2+1).
While it could be argued that as all these extra stakeholders deal with the agency as the central organiser the complexity doesn't increase that much - theoretically all these interactions can be fed into a central point at the agency, like spokes on a wheel.
However in reality the interactions between the stakeholders are an important factor and this is where all the additional potential connections come into play.
So with increasing need, increasing complexity and fixed or diminishing resources an important questions becomes;
How does the agency manage this on an ongoing basis - and do so cost-effectively?
This is where my Online Communications Team been able to add value to the process. We've worked with the stakeholder managers to introduce an approach that is both freely available and totally government approved - an online collaborative wiki.
We've established two collaborative communities for my agency using the Govdex platform provided by AGIMO. This wiki-based system is secure, readily configurable to agency needs, has support available and is free to use by government departments. Best of all it's easy for the relevant groups in the agency to manage themselves, with my team simply providing back up and account managing the Govdex relationship.
As we're in early days yet and learning as we go, the two communities we've established are internally focused. One is supporting the ongoing development of our intranet and helping the agency's online team understand the capabilities of such a system (so we can stay a few steps ahead of other users).
The other is a knowledgebase and discussion forum for the agency's stakeholder engagement officers across Australia. This is the prototype for a future system for engaging with our stakeholders across the country.
The experience of setting up these systems has been largely painless. Other than some issues with the access speed within our firewall, which appear to be due to government networks not playing nice with each other and are rapidly being resolved, our Govdex experience has begun as a positive one.
I'd particularly like to commend the customer service provided by Govdex - they have helped us get the sites up and running in record time.
I'm now in the process of beginning to promote Govdex as a business tool within my agency so that anyone who has the need to deal with a set of internal and external stakeholders can consider it as a potential solution to their communication and collaboration needs.
Note that Govdex and similar online collaboration systems aren't a replacement for face-to-face meetings, phone calls or emails, but they are another tool that can be used to facilitate and manage complex collaboration situations in a cost-effective manner.
By the way - here's a great presentation on GovDex from the Web Directions Government conference on May 19 2008 - Ralph Douglas - GovDex: Collaborating online in a secure environment
Happy birthday Mr Internet... | Tweet |
This year is the 50 year anniversary of the creation of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency(ARPA) in the US in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik I, the world's first artificial satellite.
ARPA went on to create ARPANet - the first computer network and the genesis of the internet.
It is also the 15th anniversary of Mosaic, the world's first graphical internet browser (there was no 'world-wide-web' before Mosaic).
Vanity Fair has published an article drawing from interviews with some of the pioneers of the internet entitled, How the internet was won.
It's an interesting glimpse of how the 4th mass media came to be and a great read for anyone who wants more context on why the internet has developed as it has.
I also found it very interesting that this article was in the Entertainment and Culture section of Vanity Fair NOT in a Technology section.
Here in Australia - particularly in the public sector - I've noticed the tendency to consider the internet and websites as a technology tool or IT application.
In the US thinking has progressed further and the internet is recognised as a communications and interaction medium that enables communities and cultural development.
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 coming in August | Tweet |
It's always been my view that organisations needs to ensure that their websites are fully usable and accessible in the most commonly used web browsers.
This makes it critical for online professionals to keep a weather eye on developments in the web browser market - particularly on the market leaders, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.
Microsoft has just announced when the second beta of Internet Explorer 8 will become available, making this a good time to begin preparing your organisation's external websites to be compliant.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Set the data free! Mash it up! | Tweet |
Mashups are, in my opinion, a fantastic tool for allowing people to creatively use data to solve problems or create value.
For those unfamiliar with the term, it refers to situations where individuals or organisations combine (mashup) data from different sources, often in real-time across the internet to provide hybrid applications.
Some of the more interesting mashups I've seen have involved adding real-time public transport, job vacancies, photos, house sales or rental data from one or more websites to maps stored on another website.
Some of the better known mashups include:
- Flickrvision - photos on maps,
- Bikely - cycle routes around the world,
- HousingMaps - drawn from Craig's List and Google maps to create a location-based view of properties for rent or sale,
- Twittervision - tracking real time 'twitters' (mini blog posts) around the world - I find it a very zen experience to watch, and
- WAPetrol - a mashup showing the cheapest places to buy petrol in WA.
There are plenty more listed at the Google Maps Mania blog.
The only recent example I've seen even nominally in the public arena within Australia was Google's Australian election mash-up last year. This was a world first, combining electorate information, news stories, video and Google maps into an interactive picture of Australian politics.There's an introductory video to this mash-up at YouTube.
I expect we'll see an even more slick version for the US election this year.
The Bureau of Meteorology does makes its data available to third party websites for use in mashups. While I was at ActewAGL we used this data (with their permission) to provide weather information about the ACT - though it functioned more as a feed than a mashup.
We were also working towards creating internal mashups of our sales and customer details to gain a better picture of the demographic spread, effectiveness of location-based marketing and to give us another axis with which to develop customer insights. I do not know if this project has progressed since I left the organisation.
There's plenty of other private sector mashups emerging - some used for commercial purposes, such as the maps in RealEstate.com.au, but the public sector is strangely silent.
I'd love to see the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) mashup some of its data, or make data available in a form usable in mashups. I'm sure it would stimulate some interesting uses which in turn might lead to new insights.
I've also been slowly moving my Agency towards using some of our publicly released data, together with Google maps, to provide a basic social picture of Australia. This is information is already provided in list form so it's an easy first step.
Unfortunately there's plenty of more important activities on our radar, so we're not there yet - though I did manage in my own time to create an electorate map of Australia and embed some of our public data within it.
Over in the US there's a lot more activity, dating back several years. The mid-2006 article Emerging eGovernment mashups provides an early look at some of the uses the US public sector is developing for mash-ups.
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