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I've done a review of the registration dates for Twitter accounts from agencies at all levels of government in Australia and identified what I believe to be the oldest account.
Established in November 2007, the oldest government Twitter account in Australia is from Narromine, a small local council in Central West NSW.
You'll find them still tweeting regularly at @Narromine
The second oldest was @rfsmajorfires, providing automated updates about major fire risks in NSW since December 2007 and the third was @questacon in May 2008, providing educational and exhibition news.
The full timeline is available as a tab in my Australian governments Twitter accounts spreadsheet.
Chart of the timeline for government agency Twitter registrations by month and a cumulative registration rate is below.
It excludes three suspended accounts (for which I cannot determine registration date).
Thursday, July 28, 2011
What's the oldest active government Twitter account in Australia? | Tweet |
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Outcomes from ACT Virtual Community Cabinet | Tweet |
I've run the conversation from the ACT Virtual Community Cabinet, held yesterday, through some statistical systems to look at how the event went.
Based on the CoverItLive session I recorded, there were 92 participants using the #ACTvcc hashtag between the beginning and the end of the Virtual Community Cabinet. I excluded conversations outside the period of the Cabinet as not being 'on the official record'.
During the Virtual Community Cabinet there were a total of 299 tweets, an average of 3 tweets per participant and approximately 5 tweets per minute.
The top 13 tweeters accounted for 50% of tweets, and the top 63 for 90% of tweets during the event.
I divided the tweets into the categories below based on the type of content. This is not precise, but gives an approximation of the types of conversations that occurred.
- Question to Cabinet (Such as 'Can the ACT government please fix my road?')
- Directional tweet (Such as 'The event starts now' or retweets without extra content)
- Spurious comment (Such as 'Can we have more penguins?')
- Action request/statement (Such as 'We need more buses')
- Thank you (Such as 'You're doing a great job!')
- Statement (Such as 'Look at what NSW is doing on Health')
- Ministerial answer (Minister answering question 'We are expanding services')
Another 51 tweets (17%) were directional - many alerting people to the start, middle and end of the event, or retweeting Ministerial answers.
Another 28 tweets (9%) were action requests which directly asked or told the government to take a specific step or decision. 33 (11%) of tweets were statements, providing information or a view without any direct question or action request.
There were 18 tweets (6%) expressing thanks for the event or actions of the government.
Finally there were only 19 tweets (6%) that were spurious (sorry to the dolphins, the peacocks and James Scullin).
Was the event a success?
Was the Virtual Community Cabinet a success? I would say yes, for a first attempt.
Looking over the Twitter stream (as I was unable to access Twitter through most of the event), overall my view is that the event was quite chaotic, with no clear format set for questions or for responses.
It was often very difficult to identify who Ministers were responding to and there were some big questions left unanswered. However I reckon the Ministers did quite well to answer 53 questions in the time they had.
A number of people indicated they'd like to see broader social media engagement. While the Cabinet Ministers stated they were on Facebook, the members of the public participating were asking them to use blogs - to post regularly and allow comments.
I think this difference in viewpoints may reflect a difference in social media sophistication between some politicians and some members of the public.
I stand by my previous statement that there were better tools the ACT Cabinet could have employed for this form of community engagement.
However, overall I think the event went OK, most participants left reasonably happy and several asked for further events (though using a broader set of social media tools).
I hope that the ACT government continues developing its social media and Government 2.0 sophistication, tapping into the experiences of other states (such as Victoria and Queensland) and within the Australian government.
View the record
View the ACT Virtual Community Cabinet Google spreadsheet here or the embedded version below.
As it would be easy to modify specific tweets or statistics, I've left it read-only for now.
To understand the colour coding and highlights, view the Legend (link from the bottom bar of the embedded spreadsheet).
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Live ACT Virtual Community Cabinet feed | Tweet |
Below is a live feed of the ACT Virtual Community Cabinet, on from 12.30pm to 1:30pm today, Tuesday 26 July, 2011
By capturing the tweets via CoverItLive they're stored publicly beyond the lifespan for tweets.
UPDATE: Due to load issues with my blog I've removed the CoverItLive replay from this post. My archive of the ACT Virtual Community Cabinet, together my previous liveblogs, are all accessible from http://egovau.coverpage.coveritlive.com/index2.php/option=com_altcaster/task=viewaltcast
ACT Virtual Community Cabinet 12:30pm today (#actvcc) | Tweet |
The ACT government has announced that their first Virtual Community Cabinet will be held today from 12:30 - 1:30pm on the topic of Public Transport, using Twitter as the discussion tool.
To follow the discussion keep an eye on #actvcc, the hashtag for the event.
The ACT Cabinet will be in the Cabinet room, following the Twitter stream on a big screen and tweeting responses via their laptops.
Specific questions can be directed to Cabinet members via their Twitter accounts, such as @KatyGMLA (for the Chief Minister).
I have previously expressed my views on this approach - using a medium suited for light touches and news breaking for deep evidence-based discussion. No-one in the Australian Gov 2.0 arena has been consulted on the use of Twitter this event to my knowledge (or indeed on the timing of the VCC - good for ACT Ministers, but not for the 65% of Commonwealth staff and other ACT residents without access to social media at their workplaces).
I hope I am proven wrong and this event goes well.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Comments from the IPAA NSW 2011 State Conference - Session 3 | Tweet |
Fresh from my session (which was tweeted and filmed - will be up in a few days and Ross Dawson published a great article on James Kleimt's talk "The fabulous case study of Queensland Police on Facebook" and James Dellow has published his slides), I'm in the third session for the IPAA conference, in the room discussing collaboration.
Jo Lawrence from the NSW Department of Family and Community Services is talking about the topic from the perspective of how to build collaboration and co-creation with citizens for service delivery.
Her agency has developed an administrative structure for collaboration to support their reform process.
This has included the introduction of Regional Executive Directors to lead reform in regions, and the implementation of Regional Executive Forums chaired by the Directors to support engagement and conversation.
The agency has also developed a Knowledge and Learning network using social media tools to allow staff to come together, share information on particular practices, facilitate knowledge sharing and promote interactive debate across the Department.
Part of the approach is to reverse the approach used by the agency to be person-focused, rather than the traditional process-focused approach - focusing on individual needs and differences rather than forcing people into a narrow set of boxes.
Some of the challenges the agency is facing is aligning the 'walk with the talk' within bureaucracy, shifting entrenched values and practices and addressing the expectations of clients.
Jo says that if you reframe a cross-agency problem into a pitch - the benefits to specific agencies - it becomes easier to get them to engage and participate, even 'own' the problem.
She says that the traditional approach of having a central agency coordinate the involvement of other agencies to address client problems is evolving into a more decentralised approach where any agency might take the lead.
She says this can be very hard to achieve, but is well worth the journey.
Next up is Paul Ronalds from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.
Paul is talking about 'wicked problems' - those that involve enormous complexity and require significant involvement by a range of players to address effectively.
He says that non-government organisations are becoming very significant players in resolving these problems and have by some quarters been called 'the new superpower' (though he doesn't feel they are at that level).
Paul says there are cultural barriers in government around engaging community organisations and corporations to participate in public policy issues - including deep seated beliefs that they have limited skills in this area.
He also says there can be limited (NGO and corporate) stakeholder engagement skills in government, as well as political barriers and the challenges of a top-down hierarchy that can make it more difficult for government agencies to participate in genuine collaboration.
Now up is Monica Barone, Chief Executive Officer of the City of Sydney, talking about the challenges of achieving collaboration and policy alignment across city, state and federal levels.
She says that the challenges of urbanisation are best addressed by urban policy developed collaboratively by all levels of government.
She says that some solutions must be delivered 'in place' and requires a public sector that works collaboratively - local government holds much of the data needed to facilitate services delivered by other levels.
Monica is talking about the Sustainable Sydney 2030 ongoing consultation and ways they've built on this, such as the Matching grants program.
Monica is going through the policy areas which could benefit from policy alignment by all levels of government in Australia - including bike use, housing targets and greenhouse gas reduction plans. She is demonstrating the waterfall charts used to plan the progressive targets and goals in Sydney and discussing how to broaden the policy approach based on collaboration by all levels of government.
She is showing a fantastic 3D graphical model of the energy use across the City of Sydney, based on floor space and (confidential) electricity use. It clearly demonstrates the high and low areas of use in a geospatial sense, evidence very useful in policy formation.
We're now onto the Q&A session - then I'm back to the airport for the flight home.
