The myth of mass media - it is only a flash in the pan

Paul Budde (former journalist and Australia's leading telecommunications researcher) has published a fantastic piece on how mass media - which anyone born since the 1960s takes for granted - is really an anomaly, titled The anomaly of the mass media.

Niche-based media is more reflective of human communications activity in the longer-term.

The piece also discusses how telecommunications developments, led by the internet, are fragmenting media back into niches - not only geographic, but also interest-based.

It is very thought-provoking for any communications professionals seeking to use media outlets to reach their audiences.

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The future of government - global mega-trends

IBM recently released it's 3rd biannual The enterprise of the future report for CEOs, identifying five global mega-trends fundamentally affecting the nature of business and public sector governance. The video is available here.

The five trends can be paraphrased as:

• Change is accelerating
  Organisations need to culturally attune to continuous change, supporting visionary champions who are empowered to effect meaningful change and embed innovation and change management at the core of their activities
  
• Customers demand more - collaboration is essential
  In a world where citizens have almost instant access to information and services, organisations must become transparent, accountable, collaborative and responsive or lose the trust and respect - and therefore the business - of their customers.
  Existing silos and command and control cultures need to develop permeable edges, allowing free interaction between groups and individuals inside and outside the organisation.
  
• The world is your constituency
  Leaders must think and act globally, considering global best practice and seeking opportunities to collaborate, innovate and integrate across nations. For government this includes sharing functions across traditional sovereign boundaries to serve constituents better.
  
• Successful organisations are bold and disruptive
  Organisations need to have a disruptive mindset - supporting and empowering internal entrepreneurs and new ways of doing business that cut into the heart of organisational cultural traditions that lock organisations into old and wasteful patterns of behaviour.
  
• Social responsibility must be internalised
  Environmental and social responsibility need to be integral to the organisation's mission, vision and behaviour - a key factor in all organisational goals and strategies and part of the organisation's culture at all levels of management.

These challenges for organisations are not substantially different from those outlined in 1999 by the OECD in the policy brief Government of the Future (PDF) or in a 2002 article in the OECD Observer, What future for government?

Do you think your organisation has taken the steps it needs to succeed into the future?

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Is a busy website really that bad?

A theme I often hear in Australian web design circles is "make the website less crowded".

It's accepted wisdom that a website should have plenty of white space, clearly separated parts - and as little text as possible - particularly on the homepage.

Similar to Google's 28 word limit, Australian communicators seem to consider the best homepage design as the one with the least on it.

Certainly in the user testing I've done over the years with Australians I've heard the terms 'too busy' and 'too crowded' come up frequently.

Those are, however, perceptual measures. What about actual usage?

I have never specifically tested for the 'busyness limit' (the theoretical limit when text, link or graphical density begins to negatively impact on user task completion) - nor am I aware of any testing that has ever been done on this basis.

I am aware, however, of cultural differences in website design and use.

Look at the difference between US or Australian and Chinese or Japanese websites for example. In China and Japan, as well other Asian countries, the density of graphics, links and text is up to five times as high as in the US or Australia.

These high-density website countries also have high populations for their geographic size - which may form part of the difference in approach. Perhaps the amount of personal space people expect is related to the amount of whitespace they want to see in a website - although some high density European nations do not exhibit quite the same trend.

With the changing demographics in Australia it's important to keep an eye on what our citizens are looking for - our communicators and graphic designers may not always represent thecultural spread of the public.

So is anyone aware of research undertaken to look at the differences in expected information and graphical density of websites across different countries or cultural groups?

It could be an interesting (and useful) thesis project for someone.

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Why do some local councils in the UK have better websites than some Commonwealth agencies in Australia?

The question in my title is of course a little provocative - who is to say whether a website is better or worse?

The answer, in my view, is our users.

For some reason in Australian we have never, to my knowledge, asked our citizens to compare government websites against universal categories such as awareness, ease of task completion, information depth and quality, findability, usability or design aesthetics.

There are few objective standards or comparison processes in use in government - although Global Reviews has a good stab at rating local council sites. Having worked with them before, their methodology is robust and well developed.

Users aside, I do feel safe in saying that the UK is far ahead of Australia in the field of egovernment. While some Australian Commonwealth agencies are still struggling to introduce Web content management systems some UK local councils are now adding advanced Web 2.0 features as below (and it's not the only example, just currently the best one).


Redbridge-i
Redbridge Borough's website is a leading example of user customisable government websites in the UK and is recognised as a world leader.

As a London Borough with roughly 250,000 constituents, Redbridge's site was developed on the basis that the public own the local administration and should have the ability to comment on services and engage on an ongoing basis with the council.

It drew from best practice private sector websites, incorporating features from sites such as Amazon, Google, eBay and Facebook.

Part of the design philosophy was to allow the public to decide what was most important to them. Therefore, except for a fixed space in the upper right, the website's homepage can be reorganised as desired by individual citizens, with sections able to be dragged and dropped to other locations on the page and content hidden or show.

The site can also be customised by postcode to show the services most relevant to individual households.

Another decision was to continuously innovate, develop and release new features and let citizens decide how valuable they are. This taps into actual citizen behaviour, rather than anticipated behaviour and provides a uage-based measure of what the website's users will use than do focus groups and wishlists.

One particularly successful feature of the site are the forums supporting community consultation. Councillors are active at responding and use the forums to identify comment trends and useful stakeholders to inform council decision-making processes.

The site also has a growing transactional function and has demonstrated cost saving by transferring business from phone and face-to-face channels.

The site was developed in-house over a nine month period by a team of up to 6 people, with up to 500 staff consulted about the development, and released in 2007.

The best way to learn to learn the site is to play with it. It really is easy to use and effective at task completion.

More information about the site is available from the Innovation in local government services awards page.

A very good 5 minute video about the Redbridge-i website is available at Localgov.tv.

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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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