Posts
It is hard for me to believe that I've reached 1,000 posts on eGovAU - all talking about Government 2.0 and related topics.
That's well over half a million words I've written on the topic in around three years - around 5 decent-sized novels.
Now I'm here I'm indulging in the opportunity to look back and forward.
Think on the world a decade ago, in early 2001.
The twin towers still stood, Australia had just celebrated 100 years of Federation and John Howard was soon to be re-elected.
The Internet bubble had collapsed a year earlier, leaving people deeply suspicious of investing in dotcoms and creating a global tech depression. There was no Google, YouTube, Facebook, Myspace or Twitter.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 web browser (still used 10 years later by some government agencies) ruled the web with around 90% market share. The web was dominated by brochureware and surviving ecommerce start-ups like Amazon and eBay.
There was no such concepts as social media, Web 2.0 or Government 2.0 (only eGovernment) and the Australian government had only recently mandated accessibility standards for government websites. Some Departments didn't have websites yet.
There were about 458 million internet users globally (in March 2001) - compared to today's 477 million internet users in China alone, or over 500 million active Facebook users.
The world has changed a great deal since 2001, geographically, politically and socially. Every living individual in the world has changed - some more than others.
Governments have also changed - however much has remained the same.
The next ten years promises to only bring more change, at a faster pace, than the last ten.
The challenge for all of us is to consider these changes strategically, their opportunities and consequences, whilst still living through them. The future has always belonged to those who can anticipate, act, react and adapt - and the future of government will equally belong to those who embrace and drive positive change, not to those who let it happen to them, or despite them.
We live in a singular moment in human history, a moment ripe with potential for humanity and the planet.
We've thrown off the shackles of distance with cheap communications technologies and given more than 2 billion humans access to a global mind - a database filled with much of the world's knowledge and thoughts, a conduit to discover, create, share and collaborate to build empowered, engaged and effective societies and institutions.
How should we use this moment in time?
How will YOU use this moment?
Friday, May 20, 2011
1,000th post at eGovAU - looking backwards and forwards | Tweet |
Thursday, May 19, 2011
21st Century society vs 19th Century laws and policing | Tweet |
Laws have always struggled to keep up with society, however rarely in such a vivid and public way as in Wednesday's arrest of Sydney Morning Herald journalist, Ben Grubb, and the confiscation of his iPad.
The incident, well reported in the SMH, occurred when Queensland Police responded to a complaint regarding a photo hacked from one security expert's private Facebook page and displayed in a presentation at the AusCERT conference in Brisbane as an example of a major security hole in Facebook's system.
Grubb was attending the conference and received a briefing about the security hole. Seeing the public interest in telling the community that their supposedly private Facebook photos could be easily accessed, Grubb reported the matter in an article featuring the image, which I can no longer find on the SMH site.
The following day police questioned Grubb about the matter and then demanded he hand over his iPad on the basis that police wanted to 'search' it for evidence of a crime. When he was unwilling to do so, he was arrested and his iPad confiscated for a complete image of its content to be taken and analysed by police (let's not even explore the potential conflict with Australia's Shield laws, which incidentally also cover bloggers and tweeters).
The basis of police concern was that the image retrieved by the security expert and used in the SMH article was 'tainted material', stolen from a Facebook account and then passed on to others.
What is more worrying is that the Queensland police, in a press conference, then equated receiving an email containing a stolen image as 'like taking stolen TVs'. To quote:
Detective Superintendent Hay used an analogy to describe why Grubb was targeted.
"Someone breaks into your house and they steal a TV and they give that TV to you and you know that TV is stolen," he said.
"The reality is the online environment is now an extension of our real community and if we go into that environment we have responsibilities to behave in a certain way."
Let's think about this for a moment.
Firstly, when someone 'steals' an image - or music, movies, books or other online content - it isn't stealing if the content remains at the point of origin for the original owner to continue using. It may be a copyright infringement or privacy breach, but unlike stealing a television, where the owner of the television is left without it, there is no theft, simply replication.
On that basis any laws around theft simply don't apply online. You can copy my idea, my words, my images. However unless if you somehow delete the originals, you are not stealing them, you are breaching my copyright.
Secondly, when an email is sent to our email address it gets delivered regardless of the legality of its contents. We have no say in whether we receive legal or illegal messages and images. Sure there's spam blockers and the like, however these automated tools can't tell if content is legal or not, only if it violates certain rules, such as containing certain four letter words or phrases.
However, according to the QLD Police, if someone sends you an email containing a 'stolen' image, you are breaking the law. This is even though there is no way possible for you to refrain from receiving the email in the first place. You don't even have to open the email. If it has been stored on your device, based on the QLD Police's interpretation of Commonwealth law, you are a potential criminal.
This has enormous ramifications for society. Anyone can frame someone else by sending them an email. As it is relatively easy to set up a disposal email account, you can do so anonymously. This could be used against business rivals, political opponents, or even against the police themselves simply by sending them an anonymous email and then making an anonymous complaint.
Equally, if the person receiving the email is a potential criminal, then what about all the organisations whose mail servers were used to transmit the message?
When an email is sent from one person to another it can pass through a number of different systems on its journey. At each stop, a mail server copies and saves the email, checks the route then sends the email on.
In most cases these mail servers delete these emails again for storage reasons, however at a point in time each of them has received the email, making the organisations and individuals who own them liable, again, under the QLD Police's interpretation of the law.
Given the number of emails sent each day in Australia it's clear from the QLD Police's legal interpretation that most ISPs must be operated by criminals, receiving, storing and transmitting illegal content all day and night.
Applying this type of 19th Century policing and legal approach clearly isn't going to work in the 21st Century.
When everyone can publish and illegal content can be received without your consent or knowledge, laws need to change, as does police training and practice.
Without these changes government bodies will become more removed from the society they are meant to serve, unable to function effectively and efficiently in today's world.
By the way, the security analyst who originally 'stole' the Facebook images hasn't been questioned, arrested or charged. And Ben Grubb still hasn't received his iPad back.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Gov 2.0 Canberra lunch with Allison Hornery on Gov 2.0 around the world - 27 May 2011 | Tweet |
For May's Gov 2.0 Canberra lunch we're joined by Allison Hornery, co-founder of CivicTEC and co-host of Gov 2.0 radio
Allison will be speaking about the Government 2.0 trends and activities that she's observed around the world in recent travels and projects.
Note that due to issues caused by no-shows at previous lunches, I am now charging for Gov 2.0 lunches on registration.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
How much do your agency websites cost - and are they cost-effective? | Tweet |
I have long struggled with techniques for costing websites in Government. Due to how resources and budgets are allocated - with program areas funding and conducting some content work, corporate areas other and infrastructure and network costs often rolled into a central budget in IT teams (which provides excellent economies of scale, but makes costing individual web properties harder) - it can be very hard to come to a complete and accurate figure on what any government website costs to launch or maintain.
Regardless, we are all driven by budgets and must determine ways to estimate costs for planning new websites and set management, improvement and maintenance budgets for existing ones.
A step further than costs is value, a necessary part of any cost-benefit equation. In order to assess whether a website is cost-effective - or at least more cost-effective than alternative tools - it is vital to be able to demonstrate how websites add value to an agency's operations.
Unfortunately value is an even more nebulous figure than cost as it often has to measure qualitative rather than quantitative benefits.
Sure you can count the number of website visits, visitors or pageviews, or in social media terms, fans and followers, however this is much like judging a meeting's success by the number of people who show up - the more people, the more successful the meeting.
This metric works when you can place a commercial value on a visit - so this may work effectively for ecommerce sites, but not for most government sites.
Another approach is to look at the cost per visit, with a presumption that a lower cost is better. However this relies on fully understanding the cost of websites in the first place, and also assumes that a cost/value ratio has meaning. For some websites a high cost might be appropriate (such as a suicide prevention site), whereas for other sites a lower ratio might be appropriate (such as a corporate informational site).
Perhaps the key is related to that ecommerce site example, where the sales of goods is an outcome of a visit, therefore the commercial value of a visit is effectively a site outcome measure.
The next challenge is assessing the outcomes agencies desire from their websites and giving them some form of quantitative value. Completing an online form, rather than an offline form might be worth $5 to an agency, reading an FAQ and therefore not calling or emailing an agency might be worth $30, reading FOI information online rather than making an FOI request might be worth $500, whereas reading emergency news, versus having to rescue someone might be worth $5,000.
Of course this quantitative measure of values for outcomes is relative and has very large assumptions - however it does provide a model that can be tweaked and adjusted to provide a fair value of a site.
It also has a far more valuable purpose - it forces agencies to consider the primary objectives of their website and how well their most important outcomes are satisfied by site design, content and navigation.
If the main purpose of a site is to provide information on a program such that program staff aren't responding to calls from media and public all day, then the appropriate information needs to be front and centre, not hidden three levels deep in a menu. If the main purpose is to have people complete a process online, then the forms must be fillable online and back-end systems support the entire process without having gaps that force people to phone.
Are there other more effective ways of measuring cost and value of websites? I'd love to hear from you.
And for further reading, the posts from Diane Railton at drcc about UK government website costs are excellent reading, How much does your website cost?
Monday, May 16, 2011
Omega to Alpha - a new start for UK government online | Tweet |
The UK government last week launched alpha.gov.uk, an experimental site that explores different ways of presenting government information online to better support citizens.
Designed based on recommendations from the 2010 Review Report led by Martha Lane Fox, which was intended to revolutionise the UK Government’s online services, the site provides a glimpse into a citizen-centric future that takes a very different direction to Directgov.
The site is designed to seek comment and feedback from citizens and public servants. As the site's about page states,
What Alpha.gov.uk does do is trial a selection of new, simple, reusable tools aimed at meeting some of the most prevalent needs people have from government online. The aim is to gather feedback on these new approaches from real people early in the process of building a new single website for central government.
The site does away with the crowded index-based navigation approach of Directgov (which is internally the more common approach for central government sites) and instead focuses on a search-based mechanism for most enquiries, with top enquiries listed below the main search window.
Search results are formatted in more useful ways, such as calendars (which you can add to your own), such as this one for a search on "Holidays" and instant forms - such as this result for "Lost passport".
Note that many searches will not currently provide relevant results as the site is a prototype, however there's already an impressive range of 'top of mind' searches supported.
Below the fold is a set of 'latest news from government', however laid out with lots of white space and with a simple, well-structured side menu.
The note stating 'EXPERIMENTAL PROTOTYPE - This section will almost certainly not be up to date after 10th May, it is for illustrative purposes only' demonstrates how experimental the site truly is.
The site blog talks about the aims of the site and allows comment and discussion and there's a tool for providing feedback enabled through the GetSatisfaction service.
All in all this site is an excellent research tool and it will be very interesting for governments around the world to view the public comments and criticisms of the site to inform the future development of their own central government and departmental sites.
