Who is watching The Hollowmen?

For a fantastic (satirical) look into the halls of power in Canberra, the ABC's The Hollowmen is a great watch.

What does this have to do with eGovernment?

Well in Episode 2 it does suggest that 90% of what most of our overseas embassies do could be done remotely via the internet with a few local staff.

Now that's an interesting thought!

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Do people want the same things from council, state and federal government websites?

The UK recently held its annual seminar on How to build the perfect council website.

This discussed strategic approaches to egovernment at a local level and provided key insights into what local residents needed and expected from their councils and shires.

Carl Haggerty of Devon County Council, one of the presenters, has provided a synopsis of his observations and thoughts from the event in a post titled Thoughts on a “perfect council website”.

Reading his post, I do not see enormous differences between what it appears people want from local councils and what they want from state and Federal agencies;

• Get rid of those damn press releases (who the heck reads them).
• Stop the political messages (Our Leader).
• Nobody cares for this stuff, they are task focused and don’t have much time.
• We already take their money and if we take even more of there time we will only create more frustrated citizens and visitors.
• Delete most of your content as nobody reads or even maintains the stuff.
• 80% of web management is observing behaviour.
• Do the tasks your customers do and experience the “journey” yourself.
• Personalisation doesn’t work, most people don’t want to do it - interesting considering i was on the panel about web 2.0 techniques with “Steve Johnson” from Redbridge and “Suraj Kiki” founder of Jadu CMS, more on this later)
• Start with your top tasks and get them on your homepage to stop people having to search for them.
• Don’t force “corporate” crap at your customers, they don’t really care

Presentations from the 2007 seminar are available online and I am hopeful that the 2008 presentations will be as well soon.

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What's next for your agency's search tools? Google testing user rated search

Some readers may be aware of Digg, a site where the users vote on news stories and those with the most votes get listed on the homepage.

It's an approach based on a news site's users knowing more about what they want to see than the professional news makers - and it has been relatively successful to-date (valued north of US$100 million).

Google has been testing similar features, allowing individuals to rate search results and make comments, then in future searches only see the results they prefer.

This would also be an interesting feature within websites and intranets, providing a human way to validate the search acronyms in use and ensure that the most relevant result - as determined by a person - is displayed at top.

Now this is still in 'bucket' testing at Google - meaning that a small select group of their users get to see the function. However TechCrunch has provided a video on what users see and how the system works.

Take a look below, or read the article Is This The Future Of Search?



Can you see uses in this for your website or intranet?

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Should there be paid advertisements on Australian government websites?

The Investments blog posted a thought-provoking post a few days ago, asking Should Government Websites Be Allowed to Post Google Ads to Offset Deficient Budgets?

This was based on a question put to 'Father of the internet' and Google head evangelist, Vinton Cerf, who was asked at an eGovernment seminar,

"if he thought that there was a way for Google to have special “Google AdSense” for government websites. He smiled one of his famous smiles and indicated he liked the question very much."

This post went on to raise the point that certain advertising may be appropriate on government website, related to not-for-profit support organisations and services that help users of government services.

The hosting of these ads would provide a revenue stream for government sites, helping to offset their costs. Ads could be carefully placed with a disclaimer to ensure it was clear to visitors that these were advertisement and manage any legal issues around endorsement.

It is an intriguing concept, and not entirely dissimilar to how CSIRO commercialises intellectual capital or agencies such as ABS have monetised their reports and products.


Now I'm not the first to suggest this be considered for Australian government sites.

Net Traveller author, Tom Worthington, made a slightly different suggestion in a post on January 2007,

Governments may not wish to have paid commercial advertising on their web sites, but perhaps they could have internal government advertising. Each government web page could have a space reserved for advertising. Normally this would be used to promote government initiatives and publicize web sites (in effect the Government's own Google AdWords). The reserved space would also be used to advise the public of emergency information (emergency information is an area where Federal and State Australian governments do poorly online and as a result are placing the lives of citizens at risk).

There is also at least one government site in Australia already featuring paid commercial advertising. Ourbrisbane.com, owned and operated by the Brisbane City Council.

This site features ads for services such as Seek and RSVP as well as other advertisers.


Looking around the world, there are other examples of the acceptance of advertising on government sites.

US experience
In the US while there is an overall policy that government sites should not feature paid advertising, exemptions can be granted, as detailed in Webcontent.gov, the guide to managing US government websites.

I've found evidence that advertising has government sites in the US offering paid advertising for at least four years, as evidenced by this article in Slashdot on 27 July 2004, Advertising Hits Arizona County Government Website,

Maricopa County, home to 3.4 million people in the Phoenix metropolitan area, has seen their GIS website "become an every day tool for realtors, developers, mortgage and title companies, appraisers, inspectors, attorneys and many other professionals associated with the real estate industry." As a result, they are now accepting bids for Web advertisements. As the county is one of the best-run in the nation, this could set quite the precedent.

The Maricopa County website is still delivering paid advertising to Phoenix's citizens today.


UK experience
In the UK there is an even more pragmatic approach.

Within the UK Cabinet's guidelines for web site management is included a guide for buying and selling advertising and sponsorship space which states;

Advertising on the web is envisaged as being a revenue stream for government websites. It can reduce the cost of providing government information and services, which saves the taxpayer money or results in better quality services and faster delivery of information and services on-line. It is a perfectly legitimate thing to do as long as the guidelines are adhered to.

This guideline was first written in 2002 and remains in force today, six years later, indicating to me that there has not been any major backlash by citizens towards advertising on government sites.


What do you think?
So what do you think of the idea of placing paid advertising on Australian government websites?
Would it be appropriate for your website?
Would a revenue stream help raise the profile of your site in the department?

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Promoting innovation - how can government tap Australia's creativity?

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?

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