Australian first - Court documents served by Facebook

As reported in Friday's Sydney Morning Herald in the article, Australian court serves documents via Facebook,

Today in what appears to be a first in Australia and perhaps the world, Master Harper of the ACT Supreme Court ordered that a default judgement could be served on defendants by notification on Facebook.

Previously both email and SMS text messaging have been accepted as legitimate means for serving certain court papers.

However this appears to be a world first, lifting the status of Facebook in the eyes of the law.

It has some potentially interesting applications by government. For example where people are travelling or otherwise have no fixed address, but do keep in touch with friends via online social media, this is now a potential channel for sending at least some forms of official documentation.

Certain Australian agencies already use internet tools to track schemes and persons of interest - both for fraud and for criminal investigations, and in the future the platform may become more accepted, particularly as more people drop their landlines or in the case of people who are difficult to track down physically.

Read full post...

View summary...

The learning curve for Web 2.0 - resourcing is the key

I'm closely watching (and reading) the new Department of Broadband and the Digital Economy blog. It is seeing a number of thoughtful and constructive comments from organisations and individuals.

The blog is highlighting to me one of the often overlooked key issues for organisations when implementing Web 2.0 tools - resourcing.

With 912 published comments as of Friday morning (7am), and an unknown number of unpublished ones (including several from me), the task of moderating the comments is enormous.

Add to this the complexity of actually responding and you're looking at an enormous resourcing cost for an organisation.

So should organisations steer clear of Web 2.0 due to resourcing issues?

I don't think so. I think it means that we must re-assess government processes and business models to meet the needs of our constituents, clients, customers and community.

If engaging and interacting with our audiences is regarded as important (as it should be), then government, and private organisations, need to appropriately resource and fund the right capacity to service this function, rather than attempting to funnel the public into channels that government feels comfortable with.

Perhaps this means reducing the number of staff working phones (to put them on online), or using outsourced contact centres for the online channel. It may mean totally reshaping jobs, policies and legislation to suit the needs of community.

There's nothing new about this. Where are the typing pools today? We've totally reshaped the workplace in the last 30 years - it will be totally reshaped again in the next 10.

While I see many fighting a rearguard action to defend 'the way we've always worked' - the bottom line to me is that, as public servants, our obligation is to serve the public, under the guidelines of the APSC.

When the public changes, so must the public sector. That's what is known as being 'customer centred'.

Read full post...

View summary...

WCAG 2.0 (finally) released

The W3C has finally released the final version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0.

Announced in a press release this morning Australian time, W3C Web Standard Defines Accessibility for Next Generation Web, the W3C states that,

This new standard from the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) will advance accessibility across the full range of Web content (such as text, images, audio, and video) and Web applications. WCAG 2.0 can be more precisely tested, yet it allows Web developers more flexibility and potential for innovation. Together with supporting technical and educational materials, WCAG 2.0 is easier to understand and use.

AGIMO was surveying Government agencies regarding their views on mandating WCAG 2.0 for the Australian government. I'm looking forward to the outcomes from this.

Read full post...

View summary...

ABS to release most website data under Creative Commons licensing

In a first for an Australian Commonwealth government agency, the ABS is set to release most of its website data under Creative Commons licensing on 18-19 December.

Announced in their Website changes coming soon page, the ABS states,

Creative Commons provides a spectrum of licensing for the use of intellectual property between full copyright and public domain – in essence 'some rights reserved'. The ABS is poised to introduce Creative Commons licensing for the majority of its web content.

The relevant Creative Commons logo (which will link to the Attribution 2.5 Australia Licence) will be included at the bottom of every page on the ABS website.

This will allow greater legal reuse of ABS data, placing the organisation inline with similar central statistical agencies in other democratic countries.

This was previously recommended in the VentureAustralia report, reviewing the National Australian Innovation System. Released by the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Recommendation 7.8 stated that,

Australian governments should adopt international standards of open publishing as far as possible. Material released for public information by Australian governments should be released under a creative commons licence.

Is this a big deal for Australia?

I think so, it makes it legal to make greater use of Australian public sector data from the ABS and, through the Bureau's trailblazing, provides a case and greater comfort for other Commonwealth departments considering the same route.

The Queensland government already supports Creative Commons, and I've previously talked about the topic in the post, How does the government maximise information distribution while minimising copyright risk?.

Read full post...

View summary...

UK wikipedia ban dropped

In one of the more misguided approaches to internet regulation, the UK government banned the majority of UK citizens from editing Wikipedia earlier this week.

This was done, according to the SMH article, Wikipedia added to child pornography blacklist, due to the identification of a photo in one article (of the more than 2.6 million articles in Wikipedia) as being of a sexual nature and the entire site being added to the child pornography blacklist (ironically the same list that Senator Conroy has discussed using in Australia).

Fortunately this block was dropped very quickly, as reported in PC World, U.K. Wikipedia Blacklisting Dropped.

The image in question, of a 1976 German album cover, has not been banned elsewhere in the world, was publicly available in a physical form (as the cover of an album) and is digitally available at many other websites including Amazon.

Per the PC World article, in a facesaving effort, which ironically emphasises the difficulties of filtering the internet, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), the nonprofit group that blacklisted the Web page, stated that,

The image in the Wikipedia article is hosted outside the U.K., an issue addressed by the IWF in its statement Tuesday. "Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted abroad, will not be added to the list. Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted in the U.K. will be assessed in line with IWF procedures."

The IWF lamented that while its goal is to minimize the availability of indecent images of children on the Internet, its decision to blacklist the Wikipedia article "had the opposite effect."

Read full post...

View summary...