Posts
The UK has moved forward from its recent Digital Britain report to release an Implementation Plan. This details how the government proposes to turn the actions within Digital Britain into reality.
A very interesting, and not overly long, document, the plan lays out clear governance structures, responsibilities and accountabilities for rolling out Digital Britain.
It's a model other governments could choose to use to take the step from Gov 2.0 vision to actualisation.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
From concept to implementation - Digital Britain | Tweet |
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Are you making a submission to the Australia Gov 2.0 Taskforce? | Tweet |
The Government 2.0 Taskforce has been requesting submission in response to their recently released, Towards Government 2.0: An Issues Paper.
So far there are four submissions listed on the Taskforce's website.
Now while these may not represent all the submissions received to-date (as it may take time to process and put them online), it does worry me that out of Australia's 1.2 million public servants (based on Public Sector news) that there appears to have been so few submissions received to-date.
If you are involved with, affected by or interested in how government should change to face the challenges of an increasing digitalised society, than please read the Issues Paper and respond with your views via the submission process.
Or at least read the submissions thus far and reflect on whether your views have been reflected.
Your views may influence the direction the Taskforce and government takes in the Gov 2.0 space.
You have until the start of business, 24 August.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
US Army testing redeveloping manuals via wikis | Tweet |
The US Army is running a 90 day trial allowing service men and women to directly comment and edit seven of their 550 manuals online via a wiki-based approach to test crowdsourcing in the military.
Reported in the Army Times, Army to test wiki-style changes to 7 manuals, the article states that,
The people who write doctrine say that with things changing so fast in the field, it has been hard to keep the Army’s 550 manuals up to date and relevant.I wonder how many Australian government publications could benefit from crowd sourcing the wisdom of their audiences?
By letting the entire Army update the manuals, they say, more and better information can go out to a wider population of soldiers.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Government 2.0 Taskforce holding Open Forums in all states | Tweet |
Australia's Gov 2.0 Taskforce will be holding Open Forums in every state and territory of Australia over the next few weeks, seeking input from a range of audience groups - government, industry, academics, NGOs and interested others.
If you wish to influence the future of the Australian government's Gov 2.0 agenda, look for details and RSVP for one of these meetings from the Taskforce's website at http://gov2.net.au/roadshows/
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Introducing a common web reporting platform across federal government | Tweet |
Over the last few years I've often thought about the value of having a complete picture of web traffic to the Australian government.
This would require a common way to track and report on the usage of each discrete government website and the ability to track and measure the traffic between them over time (using anonymous user data).
I see enormous value in this approach. Firstly it would help government departments holistically understand how citizens see the inter-relationships between different government services and information across agency boundaries.
Secondly it would support smaller agencies to cost-effectively develop appropriate reports and access the data they need to improve their online presence and provide ROI for online initiatives. Rather than web reporting sophistication being a factor of agency size it would become a consistent core whole-of-government capability, regardless of agency size, budget, technical skills and inhouse web expertise.
Thirdly this approach would help executives and web professionals moving between government departments as they could expect a consistent level of reporting for the online space no matter where they worked. This would cut down learning curves and help improve the consistency of online channel management across government.
Finally, having standardised and consistent web reporting would lead to consistent and more accurate reporting to parliament of the overall size of the government's online audience, and the share held by each department, supporting decision making for the use of the online channel.
So could this be done?
I think it could.
We have precedents for whole-of-government licenses in the use of technologies such as Funnelback for search (which crawls all government sites for Australia.gov.au and is available for departments to use for their web search) and Adobe Smartforms for business forms (via business.gov.au).
The technology for whole-of-government online reporting is readily available without requiring major changes to how any department operates. The reporting could be deployed simply by requiring the addition of a small piece of code to every web page on every site, as is used by systems like Google Analytics and WebTrends On-Demand. Departments could even continue to also use their existing in-house tools if they so chose or exclude websites where special circumstances applied.
Through aggregating the reporting function, more funds and expertise could be focused on producing more meaningful and useful reports. Standard report templates could be developed for departments to use - or not - as they preferred.
Finally, this approach would provide cost and procurement efficiencies for government. Only one procurement process would be necessary to select the product, rather than individual processes being conducted by various agencies. The scale of the federal government means that government could purchase and maintain the tool at a much lower cost per department than it would cost a department to purchase an appropriate tool.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
