Do government departments have the right to refuse to engage citizens via the online channel?

Let’s assume you work for a government body that is deeply involved in highly contentious issues - issues that are very interesting (and frustrating) to communities both online and offline. Let’s also assume that your organization has very little chance of changing the fundamental policies and procedures that frame these issues in the public’s eyes.

...is it worth the effort to launch a blog or similar long term initiative if your comment fields will get filled with criticism, claims that your social media work is simply parroting or reinforcing your traditional media work, or growing references to critical reports, video clips and commentary that undermines the very point you were trying to make...

The extract above from a article in CanuckFlack titled Is a bad blog better than no blog at all? reflects a decision my agency is grappling with at the moment.

Many other government communicators across the globe are facing a similar choice - is it better to join online conversations, or avoid opening a Pandora's box of backlash?


Is this the right question for public servants to be asking?

My view is that we need to revisit the role of government agencies - which I characterise in its most basis form as to carry out the will of the elected government on behalf of citizens and the community.

If a government agency is tasked with implementing contentious legislation or programs then it is the role of that agency to build community understanding and engagement in order to best fulfil the requirements of the government.

This involves understanding and addressing community concerns, communicating and collaborating widely with stakeholders and the community and helping those affected to meet the legislative requirements by providing the tools and support they need.

Citizens need to understand what is expected of them and why, and have avenues to have their views heard and addressed by the agency within the limits of the legislation in place.

This role is not limited to the channels most comfortable to the agency - it needs to reach citizens in the channels most comfortable to them, within the resourcing restrictions placed on the agency.

If we trust the research we find,

• many Australian citizens use the online channel on a daily basis, some engaging with it to a greater extent than any other mass medium, including television - according to Nielsen Online’s 10th Australian Internet and Technology Report (PDF media release).

• Australian citizens would prefer to engage with government online rather than via any other channel, including phone - as found in AGIMO's report Australians' Use of and Satisfaction with e-Government Services – 2007.
  

So if online is one of the most used medium for Australian citizens, and the avenue of choice for engaging with Australian government, the channel needs appropriate weighting in resourcing and use by agencies.

There are issues remaining to be addressed - the speed of agency change, the scarcity of appropriate expertise and the cost required to implement this engagement.

But these are operational issues, we should have moved beyond the strategic question of whether the online channel is appropriate for government to use.

So my question becomes, not should we open Pandora's box, but rather:

Do we, as government departments, have the right to refuse to engage citizens via the online channel?

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Online government forms don't have to be boring

I'm one of those quirky people who finds forms intensely interesting.

I've had a great deal of past involvement with market reseach and online transaction sites which has emphasised to me how important effective and usable form design is in order to ensure that forms achieve the goals set.

In my current role I've guided my team into supporting a number of research projects and we're currently reviewing and redeveloping our website and intranet forms capacity - touching on every other area of the business.

So I was very interested to watch Jessica Ender's presentation at the Web Standards Group (WSG) in Canberra last week.

Jessica, who owns Formulate Information Design, a specialist form development consultancy in Canberra, gave a very professional and passionate talk focusing on the four layers of a form and the appropriate process to use when developing a form.

She brought it together with the four Cs of good form design, clear, concise, clever and contextual.

While much of this was not new to me, Jessica's talk placed it into a new context and I'll be revisiting our approach to the redevelopment of our forms based on her insights.

What type of methodology do you use for developing forms?

Are your online forms effective?

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Choosing a minimum resolution for a government site

In the good old days (around 1995), choosing a display resolution for a website was easy. Everyone had 640x480 monitors, so that's what we designed for.

By 1998 it was a little harder - many, but not all, people had upgraded to 800x600 screens. So if you wanted to target early adopters you could aim high and have all those additional pixels (over 170,000 extra!)

A few years later 1024x768 was building steam - finally overtaking 800x600 around 2004. However there was not a strong enough case to upgrade - 800x600 was still around 40 percent of the market.

This year I'm looking at an upgrade to our website's design, and are currently working through one of the most important questions - do we maintain the site at 800x600, or design it for 1024x768 (almost double the display real estate)?

To help answer this question I've had Google Analytics installed for my agency's website. This gives me a clearer picture of the display resolutions in use by our audience - and was simpler to implement than the method within WebTrends.

When I had it installed I told our web designer that if 800x600 (and smaller) was less than 5 percent of users, then I could make a case to switch to the higher minimum resolution.

Anyone using the lower resolution would have access to the same information, but right scrolling would be required.

After running Analytics for a while the display resolutions have stabilised as follows:

1024 x 768 - 43.76%
1280 x 1024 - 17.81%
1280 x 800 - 12.98%
800 x 600 - 6.01%
1440 x 900 - 5.91%
1680 x 1050 - 3.95%
1152 x 864 - 3.66%
1280 x 768 - 1.51%
1280 x 960 - 1.43%
1920 x 1200 - 0.69%
Others - 2.29%

Now clearly our website users are overwhelmingly using display resolutions larger than 800x600.

However the number of 800x600 users hasn't quite reduced to my magical 5 percent number.

So do I maintain a minimum of 800x600 to support the remaining 6 percent of people, but disadvantage the other 94 percent, or do I push forward to a 1024x768 minimum and potentially disadvantage that 6 percent?

Of course the decision isn't quite that straightforward - a 1024x768 screen doesn't actually offer all that space for a website - there's the browser frame to consider and many people do not maximise their browser screen.

Also it is possible to develop expanding websites that reconfigure for different resolutions - it just takes longer and costs more.

But it is an interesting question to consider - what's the official minimum resolution for your website, and why?

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Many different approaches to web marketing

I've just been directed to Jeremiah Owyang's post, A complete list of the many forms of web marketing for 2008.

It's quite a useful resource to draw on for innovative ways to use the online channel.

It's made me think on the communications approaches my agency has used in the last year - based on the categories and subcategories in Jeremiah's post.

Corporate domain

• Corporate site
• Microsites
• Intranet
• Extranet

Search marketing

• Search engine optimisation
• Search engine marketing

Outbound and syndicated web marketing

• Email marketing
• Syndicated content and RSS

Brand extension

• Web advertising
• Social networking, Forums, Wikis, Collaboration

Community marketing and social media marketing

• Online video

How many of the areas indicated by Jeremiah is your organisation engaged in?

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No future for paper invoices?

These days the majority of postal mail people in Australia receive is either advertising material or bill. In the future, this may be cut even further to only ads.

In the European Union there's a major project underway to create a whole-of-government standard for all EU government invoicing, that can also be propagated across the private sector, creating savings estimated at EUR65.4 billion per year for businesses.

That's a staggering amount of savings simply for removing those paper bills - not to mention the environmental benefits of saving all of that paper, printing and transportation.

If successful it will mean that the EU government will strongly encourage all of its suppliers to move to e-procurement - at some point mandating the change. This will be propagated out to national, regional and local governments in the EU area.

The impacts of this are likely to be global. Any business with a relationship with EU governments will have to move towards the EU invoicing standards to maintain their billing arrangements. In turn this will influence them towards adopting a standard system across electronic billing for their other government and private customers around the world.

It will be interesting to see how far-reaching the effects will be, whether other governments will mandate other e-procurement invoicing standards - raising new barriers for organisations dealing across national boundaries, or will support the EU approach to potentially create global e-invoicing standards.

More information about the initiative is available at the European Commission website in the e-Invoicing working group site.

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