How public is public information?

Over in California a controversy over the level of public access to public information flared up where the The Bee newspaper in Sacremento published a searchable online database of public sector officials and their salaries.

The newspaper simply pulled publicly available information together into a single source - no information was assumed or obtained illegally.

This has led to storm of protest which the newspaper responded to in a From the Editor Special: Response to questions about state employee pay database.

Over time we're also likely to see more Australian public information also being matched in this way - the tools to do so are readily available today.

For instance, it would require minimal effort for a media outlet or individual to mash together and republish information from GOLD (Government On-Line Directory) with APS salary ranges drawn from agency careers pages - providing a fairly accurate picture of the salaries of senior public sector officials in Australia.

Pulling together names of public servants listed in Hansard reports, media releases, websites and from published event attendence lists or meeting minutes, could also be combined with White Pages details, salary figures and office locations to identify and locate many public workers. Add a Google search and you can discover sporting affiliations, past roles, comments made online and further information about individuals - particularly those with distinctive or unique names (such as myself).

Each of the pieces of information by itself doesn't breach privacy - so can matching them together create a breach?

If so, how do you prevent information matching - shut down the internet and close the public libraries?

I'll leave the last word to an article from Government Technology, Web 2.0 Challenges Notions of Public and Private Information;

...everything we know about records management is wrong. Sure, that's hyperbole, but Barton [Founder of Glassdoor, now publishing salary information on the web] isn't exaggerating when he claims, "People's appetite for this information ... is effectively infinite." Once again, the Internet will show us what happens when public records are actually public.

Read full post...

View summary...

The growth of e-health in Australia

Futuregov has an excellent article, An Australia quest for e-health discussing progress in the Australian e-health scene.

It is good to see that there is a clear understanding of the need for a national approach - tying states into one consistent system, rather than individually building separate systems in each state at additional cost.

In the geospatial area, WA and QLD have launched state-centric systems, with other states considering their own systems. This has taken place while AGIMO plans a national geospatial system within the AGOSP program. They share the same standards, however I'm not clear on whether they have shared technologies and costs.

Read full post...

View summary...

Tools for user experience design - card sorting

In the last few years I've witnessed the rise and rise of design and particularly usability/user experience design as a professional area.

In the mid-90s, when I was conducting wireframe-based user testing, observing user behaviour in applications and asking users which functionality was most important to them before building websites, there was low awareness in Australia of the value of usability and correspondingly few people working specifically in the area.

Today, alongside the increase in the number of usability consultants we've seen the arrival of online tools that assist web teams in conducting their own testing. 

I'm going to do a series of posts on different topics in the area over the next few weeks.

For now, here's information on card sorting that your web team might find useful.

Card sorting

What is it

Card sorting is an approach that assists web professionals and information architects understand how their audiences group concepts, topics or items - people's 'mental model' of information.

This helps them build a structures that assist their audiences in finding what they are looking for when navigating information, websites and applications. 

It also identifies complex areas needing more work. This includes where there are significant differences in understanding terms or in the relationship between items.

It is one of the easiest and cheapest design processes to use, can provide or validate key insights early in projects (before design work takes place) and can be quite fun for participants.

How is it used

Traditionally card sorts are conducted using cards (or sticky notes) in a physical space. 

Tools and resources

Card sorting is well documented online.

• The card sorting topic at the Society for Technical Communication's website is one of the best central resources for card sorting information
• Card sorting: a definitive guide is also a fantastic resource from Donna Maurer and Todd Warfel.
• The Eurostar Card sorting Case Study (also by Donna Maurer) is a fantastic example of a card sorting process

There are now ways to conduct card sorting online, through tools such as:

• Websort - www.websort.net
  
• Optimalsort - www.optimalsort.com
  

Read full post...

View summary...

Australian Human Rights Commission prepared to name and shame government publishers failing online accessibility

On Friday the Disability Discrimination Commissioner, Graeme Innes, at the Australian Human Rights Commission released a media statement, Climate change secretariat excludes people with disabilities, indicating the Commmision was prepared to 'out' government publishers who did not meet Australia's mandatory accessibility requirements for online material.

“I recently said that, if things did not start to improve, the Australian Human Rights Commission would have to start naming government publishers that are not taking the effort to make their documents sufficiently accessible for people with disability,” said Commissioner Innes.

In recent weeks there have been several accessibility-related media stories in Australia which have helped emphasise the importance of accessibility, not simply as a tickbox for web design, but as a baseline requirement for government material - published online or in other forms.

In this particular case the Human Rights Commission was targeting a specific document released originally only in PDF format. All that was being requested was that it be also published in another format as well (such as HTML) to improve accessibility.

"The Garnaut Review Supplementary Draft Report, Targets and trajectories, was released a week ago, but many people with disabilities still can't access it because it is still only available in pdf format", said Commissioner Innes. "These sort of documents should be published in RTF or HTML as well as pdf so that they can be read by all Australians."

For the record, I had a quick look at the Garnet Climate Change Review website and most of their documents are available in HTML as well as PDF.

It is possible to make modern PDF documents accessible, using the accessibility features in Adobe Acrobat Professional 7 or later. This requires an understanding of the tool and some time for larger documents - a straight PDF conversion of such documents from another format (such as Microsoft Word) generally doesn't meet Australia's legislated accessibility requirements.

Why is achieving accessibility so hard?

Given that PDFs can be made accessible, why does accessibility seem so elusive?

In my experience, across both private and public sector, I've found that generally that the webmasters, content publishers, designers and developers have a clear understanding of their obligations under Australia's mandatory accessibility requirements. They also generally understand and have access to the processes required to achieve it - although sometimes funding and timeframes are very tight.

Outside the web area it is often a different story. Generally most people across the rest of the organisation are less aware of the requirements. This can include document authors, communicators and senior executives.

There's no blame attached to this - accessibility isn't a large part of their jobs. These staff rely on the organisation's web specialists and graphic designers to tell them what they must do and assist them in meeting the requirements.

In fact this media release is a good tool to use in this education process.

Read full post...

View summary...

A compelling reason to ensure government website and intranet information is current

On Monday this week United Airlines in the US experienced a 75% drop in their share price (from $12.30 to $3.00 per share).

This was due to a 6-year old news story on a newspaper website that was accidentally tagged as current and distributed across the US financial press through Bloomberg's online News Service.

The story has received widespread US coverage, such as this report in Wired, Six-Year-Old News Story Causes United Airlines Stock to Plummet.

An accident some would say - but a very disruptive one. The stock price rebounded when the error was uncovered, but only to $10.19 by the end of Monday. That's a 20% loss in investor money (much more for investors who had sold in a panic) because of old news. The longer term damage will include a loss of reputation and trust in the news provider.

What's the learnings for government - or for any organisation?

One of my takeaways is that it is critical that your website and intranet content remains current. Out-of-date information can lead to financial loss for customers as well as media and political pain for organisations.

It has always disturbed me how poor most organisations are at maintaining current information in their websites.

Senior executives get extremely concerned if staff are providing out-of-date information to telephone or face-to-face customers on a one-to-one basis.

No reputable media team would release material to media outlets that they knew was out-of-date.

Printed publications are regularly assessed to ensure that they provide the right information. If they don't, and the mistake is critical, they are recalled, pulped and replaced quickly - costing tens or hundred of thousands of dollars to do so.

However organisational websites often remain dank swamps of old and inaccurate information.

This is despite their ability to be publicly accessed enmasse and have the information they contain trusted and acted on by any customer, citizen, media representative, community group, corporation, public agency, Minister or Head of State in the world with internet access. That's over 90% of Australians and over 1 billion people who can access your website information at home, office or public location.

Intranets are not much better. Your staff rely on having access to the correct information to make the correct decisions. Mistakes can have serious impacts on peoples' lives, on the organisation's reputation and on peoples' careers.

Organisations place enormous attention on training customer-facing staff - the intranet is a critical tool for the between times, for managing ongoing job training and information dissemination that is difficult and expensive to deliver on a periodical basis.

In the communications stakes an organisation's website and intranet are, in my view, the most important tools for presenting accurate and timely information to outsiders and to insiders.

No organisation can afford to rely on having the media publish releases, or fund a dedicated team of face-to-face communicators in every office to answer staff questions.

We rely on digital tools to communicate outwards (and increasingly to collaborate inwards). So let's use them appropriately, rather than half-ticking boxes and creating a larger and more dangerous mess.

Outsiders and insiders alike rely on an organisation's website and intranet for a clear picture of its activities, intentions and approach. People judge an organisation's commitment to openness and honesty from what they see as well as what they hear.

So if an organisation's website is evasively written, shallow or out-of-date, that's the message customers and media take-away, act on and react to. Silence breeds contempt.

Yes it is hard work to keep organisational websites and intranets up-to-date and it requires significant awareness, engagement, support and appropriate resourcing across an organisation.

Business areas need to be aware of where (and when) their material is available and be held accountable for maintaining it.

Executives must appreciate the importance of communication as a concept and specifically of the online channel as a delivery tool for communications - and collaboration, but that's a different story.

This doesn't require just a change in processes or business rules. It is a cultural shift in mindset - a challenging change for many people and possibly a generational one.

But it's one we must make, and the pain caused by not changing continues to grow with time.

Read full post...

View summary...