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Wellington city in New Zealand is preparing for its next ten year plan (2009-2019) and has launched a website, Wellington long-term plan, to facilitate citizen involvement in the planning process.
The site features an ideas market-based discussion area allowing citizens to suggest ideas, then vote on different suggestions to provide their vision and priorities for the city's future, as well as a budget simulator where you can try your hand at balancing the trade-offs a city government needs to make when allocating funds.
There's also various documents and other information provided to inform citizens on different planning topics and a great introduction by the Mayor (below).
A side benefit, through the budget tool, is to better educate citizens in the hard choices necessary in government. After you've attempted to balance the budget and read about the consequences of the choices, it provides citizens with a clearer view of why the government makes certain decisions. This can help when selling a revised budget to citizens (they even make the budget comments by citizens available online).
Now if you consider that the main tools used to deliver this site are available online freely or at a very low cost (ideas market, budget simulator, youtube and poll tool), even factoring in overall website integration, moderation and the need to guide people to the site via other media and promotional channels, this is an extremely cost-effective form of consultation for government at any level.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Wellington city government begins online consultation for long-term plan | Tweet |
Integrating online media into a persistent channel | Tweet |
There's been a lot of 'bitsa' initiatives in Australia around the online channel as both the private and public sector come to terms with the new online options to support communication, collaboration, consultation and engagement.
However it's been rare to see effective integrated use of online channels in a co-ordinated fashion to support ongoing initiatives.
I'm not quite sure why this is so - perhaps the newness of the channels and relative inexperience of local online practitioners, the process of piloting new approaches in organisations (one step at a time) or the need to overcome resistance and achieve buy-in across various groups and management levels.
I think this change in thinking is just beginning to take root. Rather than simply posting a video, creating a short-term blog or taking steps into online conversations through forums, I am seeing more initiatives making use of a diverse set of online tools in a more consistently integrated fashion.
I have been doing a lot of thinking around how to implement an integrated department or agency level online channel, integrating various tools from blogs, forums, wikis, video and podcasts through to idea markets, social networks, virtual worlds and micro-blogs (plus new media as they become available and grow in usage - such as mobile platforms).
The aim is to create an ongoing conversational channel with citizens and stakeholders rather than a short-term promotional 'flash-in-the-pan'. This would become an established engagement channel for an agency, facilitating long-lasting customer relationships.
This channel would sit alongside and support existing channels such as face-to-face, other media avenues and various stakeholder and citizen groups to enable an agency or department to research, test, review and deliver initiatives and campaigns while receiving constant intelligence from the public to help it understand and maintain appropriate alignment with community values and needs.
This is the 'end-game', so to speak, that I've been interested in achieving since joining the public sector - making government agencies more accessible and responsive to the community they serve while ensuring appropriate transparency and accountability is maintained.
I'm interested in chatting with anyone who has been thinking in a similar vein, or has implemented such a system. Please drop me a line.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Vic government releases Facebook/Myspace widget for bushfire support | Tweet |
Capitalising on the huge Australian audience on Facebook (over 4 million people) and MySpace, the Victorian government has bolstered its online response to the Victorian bushfires by developing a widget that provides news and updates while encouraging donations.
The widget is available from the Premier's website and is also in Vic Premier's own Facebook profile. It is down the page in the left-hand column.
For those of you who use social media, you can install the Facebook application from http://bit.ly/4mGlr4 and the MySpace application from http://tinyurl.com/c4s6v3.
The widget was developed using SproutBuilder, a (currently free) tool for creating widgets.
Just in case you were wondering how long it takes or how hard it is to build these widgets, Dave Fletcher has posted in his Government and Technology Weblog, v. 2.0 that he built a widget as a practice for an eGovernment Product Management Council meeting. Using SproutBuilder for the first time, it took him about 15-20 minutes. These widgets can be embedded on any website or leading social media site, such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Friendster, Blogger and Typepad.
The Vic government is also using YouTube, Twitter and blog-like comments pages via the Vic Premier's site to help engage and communicate with people in relation to the bushfires.
I hope that other governments across Australia will learn from these examples and do more themselves to better engage people via their most preferred channel for interacting with government.
After all, in these cost-conscious times, it's also the most cost-effective channel for getting direct messages to the public.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Journalists leaping onto Twitter - should government? | Tweet |
The micro-blogging platform Twitter was the breakthrough social media tool for journalists in 2008. It became a pipeline for breaking news for both professional reporters and citizen journalists, with the massacre in Mumbai, the Hudson River plane crash and Obama's inauguration highlighting its effectiveness as a source of live, user-generated online content.The statement above, from a recent article published in MediaShift, How Journalism Students Used Twitter to Report on Australian Elections, highlights how rapidly Twitter has become a relevant and important tool for media and citizens to tell stories and share news.
The story provides a good case study on how Twitter can be used by journalists (albeit from an educational standpoint) and leaves me with one main question.
If Twitter is increasingly important as a tool for news dissemination and citizen engagement, should government be making a solid commitment to the platform?
We do have government 'twitterers' in Australia already. On the political level Malcolm Turnbull, Kevin Rudd's office and the Greens are all twittering.
At a Department/Agency level, the Training.gov.au project twitters, as does Mosman council and QLD government's SharemyStory.
It has also been used to share information during the Victorian bushfires by CFA - which I avidly followed during a trip back from Sydney where Twitter on my phone was my only media option.
However these initial toes dipped into Twitter pale alongside the uses the US and UK are now putting Twitter to in government circles.
So how should government determine if it should make greater use of Twitter (and in what ways?
I'm a fan of the hands-on approach. I recommend that you set yourself up with a Twitter account, find a few interesting people from one of the many top twitterers lists out there, then listen to them using the service.
Don't simply use it once then leave, that's like turning on a TV for five minutes, only catching ads and walking away with the impression that all television is advertising. Instead use it for several weeks, or even several months, particularly during a major news event. You will gain an appreciation for the benefits and downsides of Twitter - without having to necessarily start 'twittering' yourself.
What will it cost you? A bit of time and in return you'll be able to properly assess the value of the system and become the strategic expert on the topic for your agency.
Surely that's worth the investment of a few hours.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
How well do Australian government sites meet WCAG 2.0? - still some way to go states new report | Tweet |
While I've not yet seen an official statement confirming whether Australian government will support the second version of the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0), there has been a report released by UsabilityOne reviewing 12 Federal Government websites against the guidelines.
The Accessibility Industry Report found a number of issues across the sites that would need to be addressed for them to be WCAG 2.0 compatible.
To quote UsabilityOne,
None of the websites audited adhere to all criteria in the latest accessibility guidelines.
Have you looked into making your site compliance with WCAG 2.0?
Or are you waiting for the official government position?
