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If you've ever been required to collect ideas from the public - or wanted to - have you considered the use of a 'ideas market' or similar system for collecting. allowing comments on, prioritising and reporting back on the use of ideas.
Dell and Starbucks both use these systems extensively to seek public ideas to improve their businesses and develop new products, and ideas platforms have been rolled out within US government departments (for staff ideas), such as by, as well as used publicly by the US President's office and in Australia by the Gov 2.0 Taskforce.
There are a number of these services out there, and Dustin Haisler and Margarita Quihuis have written a post at GovFresh titled, How to pick a citizen idea platform which provides a useful overview on how to pick the platform that works for you.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Picking a citizen ideas platform | Tweet |
Sharing your photo library | Tweet |
Has your organisation ever considered sharing your photo library with other government organisations? With the costs of conducting new photo shoots, why not share your images with other organisations who might use them - and encourage them to share their images with you.
Some agencies may even wish the public to reuse their images.
Some departments councils and museums are already doing this via services such as the the National Library of Australia's Picture Australia site.
If your department has a library service, keeps a register of particular images of historic or national significance, or simply wishes to promote the reuse of specific images, this might be a way to encourage takeup.
Frankly it could be even more beneficial to have a cross-government photo and even video sharing library internally. With appropriate consents and licensing it would allow government to save significant funds by supporting reuse of images and snippets of visual media across departments and levels of government.
Saturday, February 06, 2010
BarCamp Canberra 2010 - LiveBlog | Tweet |
I will be liveblogging as much as possible of BarCamp Canberra 2010, however note that I am also speaking and the other two rooms may not have wifi - so I will post my notes later.
This year BarCamp is standing room only, with around 90 attendees at the start of the day, and more likely to come - and go - through the day.
If you want to drop in yourself, we're at the Computer Science Building at the Australian National University in Canberra, or for the geeks, at GPS: 35° 16' 34" S 149° 7' 14" E.
Sessions are 20 minutes long with 10 minute changeovers between talks, with 5 minute lightening talks at the end of the day in the main room.
Audio is being recorded and many presentations will be put on SlideShare. Plus there is a video livestream in the main room at: www.livestream.com/barcampcanberra
A coffee van is outside, there's water, power and wifi inside, and lunch is on the way, so let's start....
Drop in at BarCamp Canberra - in person or online | Tweet |
BarCamp Canberra 2010 is on today, a free 'unconference' (meaning it is community organised and anyone can speak) focusing on internet and design related topics from technology through social media and edemocracy to culture (including Government 2.0).
If you're around the city today, why not drop in for a few sessions at the Computer Science building at the ANU.
More details are at the RSVP site.
Though be warned, we've had a huge level of interest this year and several rooms may be standing room only.
In case you wish to follow the event online, the hashtag for Twitter will be #bcc2010 and there will be numerous attendees liveblogging the event including, hopefully, myself.
Friday, February 05, 2010
Victoria launches VisualPlace pilot - demonstrating the value of sharing geospatial data | Tweet |
I was alerted to the release of VisualPlace at the start of this week, and have spent the last few days playing with the site to get a feel for its potential.
From the site, VisualPlace's purpose is to,
...show the value of an interactive GIS-enabled service for the visualisation of location-based government information.The site will test the appetite for online Graphical Information Systems (GIS) showing government data and both demonstrate what is possible and seek user feedback on what the public would like to see in such tools.
VisualPlace takes a wide variety of already publicly available data from sources such as the ABS and Vic Health and merges it into a layer-based view over a map of Victoria.
This makes the site highly versatile, you can search for services, transport links and health or educational information as well as check out population and economic data from across the state. These can be mapped as heat maps, 'vertical extrusions' or 'shaded icons' across local government areas or the entire state.
VisualPlace is also inviting people to submit ideas for additional data sets to model and is asking government agencies to make their data available to make the experience richer and more useful.
The site is built using Microsoft Silverlight - which may limit its reach due to Silverlight's low penetration rates. In fact it is possible that many large corporate and government offices do not yet include Silverlight as part of their standard desktop environment and it doesn't always work correctly across all major web browsers.
My only other concern is with the range of options available compared to the ease of use of the interface. There's simply so many selections - data to view, filters, visualisation techniques - that an average user may become confused or may simply not realise what is possible.
If the interface can be simplified I believe more people will find the application useful. For example by having three buttons for the different visualisation approaches that show pictures of what they do and can be easily clicked between rather than having them hidden in dropdowns without explanation of the end result.
Overall this is a very important experiment for government and hopefully will be widely promoted in order to gather as much intelligence as possible.
