UK establishes digital mentors to reduce the divide

The UK government is working towards the pilot of a 'Digital mentoring' system to support people on the wrong side of the digital divide to cross over.

As discussed in Connected Republic, Digital Mentors, the white paper for the initiative states,

Government will pilot a ‘Digital Mentor’ scheme in deprived areas. These mentors will support groups to develop websites and podcasts, to use digital photography and online publishing tools, to develop short films and to improve general media literacy. The Digital Mentors will also create links with community and local broadcasters as part of their capacity building, to enable those who want to develop careers in the media to do so. Depending on the success of these pilots, this scheme could be rolled out to deprived areas across England.

More information is available at http://digitalmentor.org

It could be an interesting program to consider for Australian communities.

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How does government convince IT contractors to work for less?

One of the recommendations of the Gershon report was that the number of IT contractors be cut by 50% - replaced by full-time staff.

Given the cost of contractors, it makes enormous sense to take this step. 

However, with virtually full employment in the IT industry, falling IT graduates and a lack of talented IT people in cities such as Canberra, how does the government go about enticing contractors to shift into staff roles?

Certainly there are perks for being employed rather than contracted - sick leave, security and more of a traditional career path.

However these perks are less relevant for GenX and GenY workers, who have a different view on what are and aren't perks than do older, more established and more security conscious baby boomers.

In the current environment the majority of the benefits for being employed rather than contracted are on the employers' side - a stable workforce, less on ramp (and off ramp) costs and reduced payroll costs.

So I will be very interested in seeing how government will go about meeting this recommendation without high unemployment, a depressed private sector or a surplus of IT workers.

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Do collaborative online groups need to be successful?

I have been reading a paper by James Robertsen of Step Two entitled Successful collaboration requires support. It discusses the need for central support and nurturing of online collaboration within an organisation rather than simply a 'build it and they will collaborate' approach.

While I agree with James' points, I do not feel that it is necessary for all collaborative groups to succeed. Sometime failure can be more educational, or can provide an organisation with insights into the actual priorities of staff and management - or can simply be due to changing communities and situations.

Considering an organisation as an ecosystem, with different operational units being different niches, each with their own specific characteristics and environments, over time some groups will thrive, some will survive but with less success and some will fail (particularly as the environment changes).

I see collaboration as an intersection of communication and knowledge, therefore any collaborative community is keenly affected by changes in its composition, the people, the organisational environment and priorities.

For example if a community leader leaves, or is simply not present, a community may fail, or one or more people may step into these shoes and take a community to new heights.

Sometimes the community leaders are not the obvious candidates, those who make the most 'noise' (the most posts or the most controversial). Instead they are often people in the background who provides the 'engine' of the community - as a critical source of knowledge, as a mediator between strong personalities or by asking the questions that make others reconsider what they believe.

Equally when an organisation changes structure, direction or priorities, some communities grow in significance and interest and others will fade. This is a wholly natural progression in the 'life' of an organisation and does not represent failure by the leaders or administrators of collaborative communities. Nor does it imply that the concept of collaboration is flawed.

My personal experience of collaborative communities over more than ten years of operating and participating in them is that they all ebb and flow over time. Often only a few individuals are required at their core, however without a mosaic of participants, who often are transient or contribute little to the discussions, the communities do not provide the knowledge transfer of value to an organisation.

Therefore, in my view, the best way to foster collaborative communities and support an environment where they can be successful (based on their own characteristics and niche) is to expose them to as large a group of participants as possible, thereby enabling others to learn from and share their own experience - even if it is not directly relevant to their current job.

To make communities fail, the best approach is to restrict participation to a small group, avoid cross-fertilisation and suppress active discussion and left-field ideas.

In other words, collaborative communities, in my view, thrive in open systems and die in closed ones, just as trapping two spiders in a glass jar over several months is not conducive to having them thrive.

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Intranet Innovation Awards come to Canberra

Step Two will be running a free information session discussing the winners of the 2008 Intranet Innovation Awards in Canberra on Tuesday 11 November from 2-4pm.

According to James Robertson of Step Two, the event will include a look at,

• Transfield Service's uniquely effective approach to rolling out
  SharePoint team spaces.
• Highly successful collaboration amongst cabin crew at British Airways.
• The rich suite of functionality delivered by this year's Platinum winner, Fuller Landau (Canada).
• The Competitor Wiki at Scottrade in the US.
• An intranet that speaks the news when postbus drivers ring an 0800 number in Swiss Post.

Registration for the event is available online at: www.steptwo.com.au/seminars/iia-canberra

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Putting Australian government web traffic in perspective

In August I analysed traffic to our agency's website in July 2008 using Hitwise's data measurement service, comparing our share of web traffic against the total to Federal government websites, other government websites and the top websites visited by Australians.

The results provided me with a view of how important government websites are in peoples' online lives - not very. Less than 2.5% of website visits were to government sites.

It also helped me form some ideas as to how Australian government departments can make their online channels more effective means of engaging citizens.

Reviewing Hitwise's reports from July 2008, tracking around 2.95 million Australians' visits to over 647,000 websites (using ISP logs), the total government sector (6,634 sites) accounted for only 2.26 percent of all tracked website visits by Australians.

Of these,

• Federal government's 2,094 sites accounted for 57.61% of all Government traffic and 1.3% of visits to all tracked websites,
  
• State government's 2,183 sites accounted for 30.82% of all Government traffic and 0.70% of visits to all websites,
  
• Local government's 1,596 sites accounted for 6.51% of all Government traffic and 0.15% of visits to all tracked websites,
  
• The other 761 sites (often foreign government agencies) accounted for 11.4% of all Government traffic.

In comparison, Google.com.au and Google.com  together  accounted for 9.64% of Australian visits to all tracked websites, four times as much as the total government sector (Google.com.au, the number one site visited by Australians, accounted for 7.85% and Google.com for 1.79% of visits).

Facebook, the fourth most visited website, received 2.36% of total tracked visits - slightly more than the entire Australian government.

MySpace, the seventh ranked site, received 1.78% of total visits - almost 50% more than Federal government sites.

Only one government website regularly reaches Hitwise's Top Twenty list of Australian sites, the Bureau of Meteorology (coming in at 16th position with 0.51% of traffic in September 2008). In fact, this site alone accounts for almost a quarter of the visits to the total government sector.

To put these figures into perspective, I roughly estimated from my Agency's actual web traffic that each Australian web user in July 2008 made 270 visits to Hitwise tracked websites (note that at an average visit duration of 10 minutes, this is significantly less that the figure reported by Netratings in March 2008 (PDF) - of 13.7 hours/week online).

Of these estimated 270 visits,

• 26.6 visits were to Google,
  
• 6.3 visits were to Facebook
  
• 4.8 visits were to Myspace
  
• 3.5 visits were to Federal government sites,
  
• 2.4 visits were to State government sites,
  
• 0.4 visits were to Local government sites.

Even if you discount my estimate and take another measure of the average number of website visits per Australian each month, the proportion based on Hitwise's tracked websites remains the same.

What does this mean for government?
Even a few visits per month by Australia's estimated 11 million plus regular internet users users adds up to a significant online audience for government in Australia.

However my conclusion is that Australian government departments should not rely on reaching our citizen audiences simply via our official websites.

We need to reach out and engage our customers via the websites they choose to use.

These non-Government websites account for over 97.5% of regular internet usage by Australian (per Hitwise's July 2008 figures).

If Australian government wants to effectively communicate with citizens online, our departments need to invest in understanding where our audiences spend their time, reaching beyond our official sites to engage them in the online communities they choose to frequent.

How do we engage citizens on their own turf?
There are many different ways that private organisations reach out to user communities, and government can learn and use many of these approaches, such as

• using search advertising to promote Australian government services prominently across top search engines and community sites,
• providing web feeds (RSS, Atomic, etc) that other sites can merge into their own information channels,
• providing data feeds that can be mashed up into widely used sites and new functions (as the Bureau of Meteorology does so well),
• creating, and promoting, useful portlets and widgets on popular platforms (Google Gears, Facebook, Blogger, Ning) that can be added to  individual and group social sites,
• white-labelling services that can be embedded in other sites (Slideshare, Youtube),
• reaching out and participating sensitively in forums, blogs and wikis relevant to our communities,
• engaging online advocates and supporting them as we do media representatives (as US consumer goods firms engage 'Mummy Bloggers' and US political parties engage political bloggers),
• creating and supporting themed community spaces for citizens (as Huggies has done in Australia for mothers).

Note
Hitwise checked the numbers drawn from their web reporting service (thank you Alex and Rebecca). The idea for this post, the conclusions drawn and any calculation errors are mine alone.

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