In action: Training.gov.au Project Blog

This is a fantastic example of how blogs and other Web 2.0 tools can be used to support government initiatives and help reduce project costs.

First I should note that I know Nathanael Boehm, one of the members of the project team. He's an early adopter of web technologies, with a great deal of experience in social media and user design areas.

What is Training.gov.au?

In the words of the project blog:

Training.gov.au is the name of the new system that the Australian, State and
Territory Governments are developing to ensure people can get the information
they need to make informed decisions about training.

What are they using?

To manage the development of training.gov.au the project team are using an open-source blogging product to provide an online communications and collaboration space for the various stakeholders involved.

The Training.gov.au Project Blog is very clean, simple to use and flexible. It currently contains some information on the project objectives, governance and deliverables and has been set up to also manage the project timetable and provide a central communications platform for the project.

It's very easy - and cheap - to set up this type of system and it has surprised me how little these types of tools have been used by government in Australia to support the management of complex projects with multiple stakeholders.

I'm going to keep a close eye on the development of the project blog - and on the project itself - and, with the agreeance of the project team, may provide a post-mortem of how well the blog worked to facilitate project governance, communication and cost management.

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How do you rate your agency online?

How do you rate your agency in the online world?

I currently use a lot of different tools to build a picture of how our agency is doing, but I have not yet unified these into a simple set of metrics that tells me how we're doing.

Tools I use to rate my agency online include:

Site metrics

• Webtrends for site performance and detailed analysis (unique visitors, visits, page views, time on page)
• Hitwise for benchmarking and demographics (Ranking vs National Government sites/all sites, site demographics, Mosaic, search trends, upstream/downstream sites)
• Google analytics for reality checks (traffic trends, search trends, browser/resolution)

Search metrics

• FunnelBack site search engine reports (site searches, unsuccessful searches within the site, best bets)
• Hitwise (top terms, unsuccessful searches, other destinations)
• Google trends (search trends, top terms, site comparison, hot terms)

Customer metrics

• Technorati for blog posts (mentions, tone)
• Summarize for Twitter mentions (mentions, tone)
• Wikipedia entry status (accuracy and interest)
• Alexa (views)
• Manual forum checks (checking of mentions and tone across a selection of forums)

Media metrics

• Google alerts for media mentions including blogs
• Hitwise media alerts for commercial media mentions
  

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Here comes the (egovernment) New Zealanders!

New Zealand is a beautiful place to visit and I have fond memories of my last trip there.

It also happens to be one of the most happening places in eGovernment, at least in this part of the world.

In fact I feel a little disappointed in Australia's progress at the national level compared to the achievements of our nearest neighbour.

For instance, in New Zealand public officials are regularly blogging to share information across the government sector, such as in the Thorndon bubble and Eye of the Fish.

The Network of Public Sector Communicators in NZ also has the Network of Public Sector Communicators Blog to support and aid the discussion.

The NZ State Department runs not one but two official blogs, In Development and Research e-Labs, demonstrating central commitment to the online medium.

The Department also conduct their review of government Web Standards using a wiki, as well as their Guide to Online Participation (Australia doesn't have one of these yet for public sector employees).

In Australia these types of collaborative developments could be easily facilitated via the existing Govdex service (though in my view Mediawiki - as used in NZ - is a lighter, faster and more flexible solution).

New Zealand also uses the online channel for government initiatives, such as their Police Act wiki, when the public was able to provide input into the review of the NZ Police Act through a wiki. This was passed as an act of NZ Parliament as the Wiki Policing Act 2008.

Worst of all, New Zealand beat Australia in the Fullcodepress competition last year in front of a global audience.

I wonder if they have any jobs going?


For more of our neighbour's online initiatives, see this list of eGovernment initiatives in progress in New Zealand.

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Who reads blogs anyway?

I have to admit that for a long time I've been a blog skeptic.

Who actually sits down at their computer to read someone else's personal journal?

I think this has been one of the barriers I had towards blogging myself - I felt that I'd get better mileage out of talking ideas through with individuals face-to-face, or speaking at conferences, which I try to do a couple of times each year.

However I've seen decent growth in the readership of my own blog, which 'lives' within quite a niche topic in the weeks - not months - it has been live. It is already reaching 80 or more individuals each day.

The top blogs in Australia and the US are now close to rivaling the level of readership of print publication transplanted to the web.

Taking a quick look around the web, I've seen some compelling figures on the number of internet users accessing blogs, such as from Forrester, who published the following table in their Groundswell report.




















If you consider that Australia is more like Britain, but has touches of the US, lets say that around 14% of our online population read blogs at least once a month.

Based on an internet using adult population of 13 million, that's roughly 1.7 million people per month, as of a year ago (Q2 2007).

Those figures may not light up your world, but I find them fairly impressive given that blogs only really became reality around 10 years ago.

More recent figures are even more impressive.

In Charlene Li's blog there's a great video interview talking more about various approaches being taken by companies. Charlene is a co-writer of Groundswell and one of Forrester's lead analysts on the topic of social media).

There's also a social media profiling tool where you can review engagement by demographic group - including for Australia. The difference between under 35 years and over is profound.

I've been so impressed with the work done by Forrester in this area that I'm buying copies of the book, Groundswell, for our senior executive team.

So are you blogging yet?

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Social media initiatives at my agency - what is your agency doing?

Part of my interest in social media at the moment is related to how I'm encouraging its use within our agency.

I'm very interested in hearing about what other agencies are doing.


At work we have a team rolling out a community of practice using a wiki-based system, with an extranet to follow. I hope to replicate this for other areas of the business that could benefit from such a system.

We have a rating/comment system being implemented into our intranet to further help content authors and the intranet management team (part of my team) understand where our content requires significant improvement to meet staff needs. It's not quite social media, but it's a step towards it.

After our major 1 July deadline we will be documenting a strategy and approach for internal blogs and forums, with the support of our Internal Communications team - then hopefully introducing the enabling tools with ICT's assistance.

We are also preparing to engage more actively in public online discussions around our agency and its services, in a measured and structured manner. Around this I'm looking seriously at whether we should introduce online participation principles, as has occurred in the UK.

We have initial plans, with some buy-in from our Media group, to trial the enhancement of our media releases to make it easier to get them into Digg and Reddit, and potentially deliver them via Twitter or similar tools.

Finally I'm encouraging the members of my team (currently spread across several states) to make use of appropriate tools to aid contact and collaboration. Phone and email work reasonably well for us, however I want to explore how we can further improve engagement in a less interruptive way. Over time I'd love to extend this to other areas as appropriate - I'm already aware of more than 60 Facebook and Linkedin users in the agency, so the grassroots growth is already occurring.

If your agency has any social media initiatives underway that others could learn from, please let me know

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