Victoria police launches local crime stats online in MyPlace

I applaud Victoria Police for their latest foray into online engagement, MyPlace.

As highlighted in Victoria's eGovernment Resource Centre, the Victorian Police have launched MyPlace as,

An interactive mapping service provide by Victoria Police which is updated every three months so you can see what is happening in your suburbs and hear directly from your local police Inspector about the work being done by police in your neighbourhood.

It is great to see government making this type of public information more easily available to the public in more intuitive and usable ways.

The chat function is an extra bonus. Scheduled chats with the Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police are a great tool for raising community engagement. The general public do not often get to communicate with senior police in a convenient and open environment. I hope in future this will be broadened to include chats with other senior Police officers, and potentially an ongoing blog highlighting the good work done by Victoria Police.

However, and this is a small however, I am disappointed that all the wonderful data provided by MyPlace is not available as a standard geoRSS or XML feed or API so that people can reuse the data (under appropriate Creative Commons copyright).

Google launched a wonderful feature last Tuesday which makes it much easier for the public to access, interact with and understand data from US government - doing a fantastic job of integrating data from various different local, state and federal agencies into a seamless experience.

If Victoria Police had taken an open approach to their public data Google, Microsoft and other online services could have shared the 'heavy lifting' of modelling the data by postcode at no cost to the government. This would have then allowed developers across Victoria and across the world, to build innovative new applications using the data.

These applications could include heat maps of crime statistics, integrating crime figures into rental, home and business purchase listings or school selections or even allow high school students doing school projects to compare crime stats with employment and income levels and other ABS census data (if the ABS made its data available in this manner as well) to explore the factors that lead to crime. Many other useful applications are possible, however will, for now, remain unexplored.

At the end of the day MyPlace is a great first step for Victoria Police - and should be considered by every other police force in Australia - and it would be fantastic to see it taken further into openness and transparency, by Victoria or others.

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The daily hurdles government faces in attempting to engage online

Tim Davies from the UK has written an excellent post highlighting all the 'small hurdles' that government agencies face when attempting to engage online.

Entitled OpenGov: One big challenge? Or a thousand small hurdles, despite coming from the UK, the list reflects many of the hurdles faced in Australian government that need to be overcome for Departments to seriously use online engagement alongside other forms of communication and customer interaction.

A number of the hurdles are related to policies and behaviours which would not be tolerated by senior management were they applied to telephones, written correspondence or public appearances.

I am very curiously watching to see how long it takes government to move to remove these hurdles for the online channel as well.

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Senator Kate Lundy launches a public discussion on high speed broadband

Illustrating one of the ways in which parliamentarians are now actively engaging the public online, Senator Kate Lundy has posted in her blog about a series of online 'Public Spheres' she will be hosting to,

facilitate regular topics of interest to both the general public and to the government.

Discussed in her post, Public Sphere #1 - High Bandwidth for Australia, this type of online initiative provides a significant opportunity for broad participation from the Australian public on high interest topics.

This approach to public engagement is critical for the future of democratic governance in Australia. My thoughts on the topic are well stated in the following quote from a post by Matt Crozier of Bang The Table, Opportunity and Need,

The ways in which government have traditionally engaged, by hosing [sic] events that require attendance, by asking for submissions or by market research cannot engage most of these people [CT: The broader community] because there are barriers to participation. It is difficult to participate in a meeting if you are not confident and articulate or if someone who is more so is hogging the floor. Many people don't feel comfortable writing submissions, either that or they can't be bothered. Market researchers get hung up on by busy people so their sample (no matter how demographically representative) is always self selecting and biased towards more activist groups in the community.

The great thing about online engagement (as a compliment [sic] to these other techniques) is that it breaks down these barriers. People can get involved easily and at a time and place of their own choosing. My faith in the rest of the community has grown as we have watched them engage on all sorts of issues. We have councils talking about their management plans getting 400 people visiting, looking at the plan and occasionally commenting when previously there were meetings to which nobody turned up. We have raging debates about heritage issues, transport and anything involving pets. The minorities are there too, sometimes noisy, still trying to dominate the debate and very welcome but more and more people are joining in, visiting and having a say. Why? Because it's easy and they are interested. Its all very gratifying and will lead inexorably to greater community ownership of decisions and better more enduring results.

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New Zealand government releases guidelines for online participation and blog case studies

Following the examples of the US, UK, Australia and other countries, New Zealand has released principles for interaction with social media.

New Zealand has also gone a step further and released a guide to social media monitoring, to support government agencies in listening to the many conversations citizens are holding online and engaging in online conversations with citizens.

Also available are a set of case studies on how the New Zealand government has used blogs to constructively educate and engage citizens, although you must be a registered participant in the E-Initiatives wiki to view these case studies.

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Reaching fragmenting audiences and maximising online engagement

At about the time this post will appear on my blog I'll be speaking at the Hitwise/Australian Marketing Institute breakfast in Canberra on a topic related to Maximising engagement online whilst reducing costs.

My presentation will explore ways of identifying where audiences are going online to help organisations form appropriate strategies to target them with messages or for engagement.

This is an increasing issue for all communicators. Effectively media has fragmented, with tens of different media channels from traditional TV, newspapers and radio to a plethora of new channels such as Pay TV, console games, PC games, mobile devices and millions of websites.

Communicators have chosen several different paths to addressing this fragmentation challenge.

The first approach is the 'ostrich' - ignore all the new channels and focus on the 'traditional' mass media. This strategy continues to work - particularly for older demographics - although advertisers are paying more and more for smaller and smaller audiences.

The second is the 'spend more' approach - throw more dollars into communication in order to increase reach and frequency across different media channels. Unfortunately this also suffers from the cost curve - more money buys less media each year.

The third is the 'shout louder' approach - start spending on new media channels, but do so only to send out messages rather than encouraging conversations. Unfortunately this approach is often counter-productive. Just like shouting at someone who does not speak English, it neither improves message cut-through nor demonstrates respect for the medium or audience.

The final approach I'll discuss I call 'go with the flow'. It involves finding out where your key audiences choose to gather and then respectfully engaging them in appropriate ways. This approach requires more upfront planning and strategising than the other approaches (which may be why fewer organisations employ it), however it reaps much larger long-term benefits. Rather than simply serving as an advertising tactic it serves to create a communications and engagement platform through which organisations can interact with their key audiences on an ongoing basis.

There's no secret as to which approach I prefer as a communicator.

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