App My State a major Victorian Gov 2.0 success

Victoria's App My State competition has now closed to entries, and has already been an enormous success for the Gov 2.0 efforts in that state.

The competition attracted 171 entries, 75 applications and 96 ideas, over 12 weeks.

Judging has now commenced - with the public able to vote for the 'popular choice' award and other awards now being considered by judges, with winners announced on 7 June.

The Premier has personally tweeted his thanks, showing a level of high-level engagement with the competition,

@vicpremier: Well done to all the @appmystate applicants. Top quality entries. Looking forward to giving out the awards. JB

Regardless who wins the competition, the event has already proven to be a highly cost-effective method to gather useful ideas and generate meaningful approaches to using public sector data.

Is this a once-off success? The evidence argues otherwise.

NSW is in the process of holding a similar competition with a similar level of prizes. While the competition didn't include an ideas category (EDIT 24/5/10: the competition did include an ideas category, which received 64 submissions) and occurred during a changeover in Premiers and with significantly less online promotional support, it still attracted 55 app entries over a 14 week period.

App competitions in the UK and US have also generated significant returns for governments - in particular the first Apps for Democracy competition in Washington D.C. estimated that the value of the apps produced was over US$2.2 million, for less than US$100,000 in prize value.

There is even a set of guidelines on how to run an apps competition to support agencies and states produced by Apps for Democracy.

Below I've included a video where Victorian political leadership introduce the App My State competition. Below that is a list of some of the other App competitions that have been run worldwide.



Apps competitions
Involving public sector data - there are many other examples in commercial spaces.

• MashUpAustralia (Australia)
• App My State (Victoria, Australia)
• Apps4NSW (NSW, Australia)
• Apps for Democracy (United States)
• Apps for America (United States)
• Apps for Army (United States)
• INCA – the Innovative and Creative Application Contest (Belgium)
• Apps competitions in Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands and Spain
• Apps for New York (United States)
• Show Us A Better Way competition (Great Britain)
• Apps for Climate Change (British Columbia, Canada)
• Apps for Development (World Bank)

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Register now! Gov 2.0 Canberra lunch - 31 May

After some interruptions I've now organised the next Gov 2.0 Canberra lunch, featuring two fantastic speakers, Senator Kate Lundy and Kate Carruthers.

Being held at the Parliament House Members' Guest Dining Room on 31 May, Senator Lundy will be speaking on the Gov 2.0 Expo she's attending in Washington - giving a round-up of the event, what is happening in the US Gov 2.0 scene and providing an international perspective on the Government 2.0 trend.

Also speaking will be Kate Carruthers, one of Australia's foremost online strategists. Kate's talk will cover some of the social media learnings from the corporate sector - what government can learn and build on to create more successful Government 2.0 initiatives.

If you wish to attend, please register at http://egovaugov20lunch0510.eventbrite.com/

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Australian Gov 2.0 showcase launched

If you've not on Twitter, or regularly visiting AGIMO's new Govspace blog, you may not yet be aware of the Australian Gov 2.0 showcase.

The showcase has been established as a place for the Australian Government to publicly share case studies, videos and information about various Government 2.0 initiatives taking place.

The first goal of the showcase is to allow the Australians attending and speaking at the Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington on 25 May to demonstrate what is happening in Australia in the area.

If your department has any public Gov 2.0 initiatives, you should consider listing them in this showcase, to increase awareness of what your Department is doing, to support other Australian Government Agencies in understanding and planning their own initiatives and to help highlight the successes Australia has achieved on the global stage.

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Nudge your public sector colleagues about Government 2.0 - today!

Contrary to some media and public perceptions, most public servants are hard working and dedicated to their jobs.

This makes us busy people - sometimes too busy to keep an eye on what is going on at the peripheries of our professions.

That's why it is important for those of us who understand and follow what is happening in the Government 2.0 scene to occasionally nudge our colleagues. This is so they don't miss out on the opportunity to understand what is going on and figure it into their strategic and tactical planning.

This week - despite being enormously busy - I've found a few minutes to nudge three groups of my colleagues about ground-breaking Australian Gov 2.0 initiatives that will impact on their areas.

This including advising one group about a new research paper that used Australian blogs and forums in its literary review, concluding that these forms of citizen media offered enormous potential to build a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of community issues than could be derived from quantitative research alone. That's important for good policy.

It involved bringing to the attention of another group the release of the Australian Government budget under Creative Commons licensing, and of the Government's other statements about copyright and FOI. These policies will influence how we release public information into the future. That's important for good organisational strategic planning.

Finally it involved flagging a set of blogs and social media discussions which demonstrated how the public was using new media to talk about government services. This led to some healthy follow-up discussion on whether potentially defamatory and/or negative comments by individuals online should be given 'oxygen' by government or media. Regardless of the substance of posts it highlighted that people were very actively using online media to publicly share their thoughts and opinions about Government in ways that could influence others' views, rightly or wrongly. That's an important tool for Government communicators, policy and service delivery staff to monitor customer sentiment and address misconceptions or service issues.

Which of your colleagues have you nudged about Government 2.0 this week?

Why not nudge some of them today!

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Australian Government releases historic budget - under a Creative Commons copyright license

Media commentators have called the Australian Government's budget "austere", "responsible" and "boring but good".

I call it historic.

Why so?

Look at the copyright information in Budget Paper 1: BUDGET STRATEGY AND OUTLOOK. Budget Papers 2, 3 and 4 have been released on a similar basis.

What is different?

For the first time in history the Australian Government has released major parts of the Federal Budget under a Creative Commons (CC BY) copyright license.

This means that the public has the right, without first asking permission via the Attorney-General's office, to copy, mash-up, reuse and publicly republish data from appropriately licensed parts of the budget. They are legally entitled to use this material, provided they attribute the source, to create new and innovative works and insights.

This differs from previous Australian Government budgets where the contents were locked up tight under Commonwealth Copyright. While substantial rights were granted for the reuse of material in news reporting and private study, there was no right to otherwise mash-up or republish material publicly without asking permission.

Is this only historic from the perspective of past national Australian Governments?

I don't think so.

To my knowledge this is the first budget released by any government in Australian at any level under a license permitting reuse in this fashion - federal, state or local.

That's a lot of governments over more than 200 years.

Is this only historic from an Australian perspective?

Internationally this may be even more remarkable.

While copyright provisions vary around the world, Australia well be the first nation in the world to publish a national government budget under Creative Commons licensing.


That make the 2010-2011 Australian Government budget a truly historic budget.

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