Do agencies unfairly assume that households have working printers?

While chatting with government folk in Victoria yesterday, the topic of printable PDFs in websites came up. Many agencies have them - large documents designed to be read on paper, rather than screen, and designed accordingly.

It made me ask the question: How many households actually have working printers and are able (and willing) to print large documents or forms?

The folks in the meeting couldn't answer, although one admitted that he didn't actually have a printer at home (despite working in an online capacity for the government).

This has now begun to intrigue me. is there an assumption in government agencies that every household that owns a computer must own a working printer as well?

Is there any evidence to justify this?

I've done a bit of looking today for statistics that might answer this question.

What have I found? Nothing that really answered it.

We have plenty of statistics from the ABS, Finance and other agencies and corporate entities on the number of households with computers and with internet access.

However none provides information on the number of printers in a household, whether they work or whether (given the cost of ink and supplies) people are prepared to print out those large documents with beautiful glossy full-colour images.

The most recent information I could find was from an e-waste brochure from Manly council, quoting the ABS as saying that in 2011, between households and businesses, Australians had around 5 million printers.

Given there's over 1 million businesses and around 9 million households in Australia, that means that as many as 5 million households, over 50%, may not have printers and be unable to print out those lovely documents on government sites.

How realistic is that figure? When I consider my wife and I as a sample of two, it actually appears plausible (and I understand how statistically unreliable that is).  While we are both professionals and knowledge workers, using computers and the internet as our primary tools - neither of us need to print often.

In fact my wife hadn't had a printer for years before we married, she either did things online or printed individual forms at work on the unusual occasion where this was required (and it was usually a form for work anyway).

I have a working printer now as I need it for work purposes. However until February this year I had also lived for several years quite happily without a working printer.

I had, however had a non-working printer. Why non-working? Because supplies were expensive and scarse. Printer manufacturers changed their cartridges when they changed their printers - making older printers harder to buy for. Why did I keep it? Because I might need a printer (although I never did until the supplies for it became impossible to buy).

So should agencies provide big documents on their sites under the belief that people will print them out at home?

Should they expect people to fill in forms online, and then print and sign them?

Perhaps - perhaps not. However it would be nice to see agencies making this decision based on evidence, rather than based on the assumption that every household with a computer has a working printer.

UPDATE:
Trevor Clarke has just let me know that his employer, IDC, tracks the movement of printers into Australia every month and quarter and reports on the number of households with printers. He tells me via Twitter that:

"IDC research shows 76% have 1 printer, 18% have 2. Only 7% don't use. Survey of 2000 Australian households in 2012"

So there's is some evidence that most Aussie households have printers. Good to know!

Read full post...

View summary...

Sharing policies, patterns, recipes & code across government

This morning at the Drupal Downunder event I learnt about the New Zealand Features site which shares recipes for re-usable Drupal code and patterns across NZ government.

To me this is representative of one of the significant opportunities I've seen for government in Australia emerging out of Gov 2.0 thinking and tools is the ability to share between agencies.

Sharing, as a concept, has allowed humans to move from the savannahs of Africa to our current position as the dominant species on earth. We taught each other how to create tools, how to farm, how to build and how to aspire.

While competition is often seen as the key driver of progress, under every competition is sharing - shared concepts, shared goals and, often, shared resources and knowledge. So even in the midst of the most ferocious competitions sharing is going on behind the scenes.

For organisations, sharing is also essential for survival and success. Organisations that configure themselves or act to successfully limit sharing will, by default, be slower to learn lessons, adapt to changing environments, cost more to operate and deliver less in the way of outcomes.

Unfortunately, through siloisation, this sits at the basis of the organisational structures that became popular following the success of the US railway corporations in the 19th Century.

This hierarchical approach for organising unskilled labour to deliver enormous achievements was very effective for managing large numbers of semi-skilled and semi-literate workers performing simple repetitive tasks, such as building a railway or operating a basis production line. Higher level managers, with greater education levels, provided the brains, innovation and held the broader view of the goals.

This hierarchical structure has become less and less valuable as an approach as populations have become highly educated and moved from performing repetitive physical activity to complex and multi-faceted knowledge work. 'Shifts' and 'gangs' became 'teams' and 'branches', where individuals were expected to perform a diverse range of tasks well - and to swap in for a colleague where necessary with limited time to train.

As modern organisations remain a hybrid of 19th century railway hierarchies and self-managed teams and networks, they have struggled to balance the needs of activity segmentation - leading to siloing - with the needs to share knowledge.

As the internet has done for many other activities it has taken sharing and put it on steroids. Suddenly you can source knowledge and expertise from anywhere in the world, sharing experiences, skills, lessons and outcomes.

This should likewise have a profound effect on government agencies, who seek to draw on the experiences of other jurisdictions and the knowledge of experts to inform their policy recommendations.

Also important is the ability to share within government between agencies. While a percentage of every agency's activities differ from those of other agencies, another percentage - frequently the larger number - involve repeating similar activities - HR, procurement, IT management, finance - as well as patterns of activities such as policy development processes, website development processes, internal communications processes.

This is all well and good - and clearly as the internet exists by default people can and will share.

The problem, of course, is that often public officers (like other people) need more motivation to share than the joy of giving. They need time and support, a framework in which to share and guidance on how to do it.

The US government has set about solving some of these underlying needs for a framework in which to share through the GovForge and MilForge initiatives. These sites support the sharing of code between agencies by providing a framework and mechanism whereby code can be provided, categorised, make available and the owners of the code reimbursed - through recognition.

I learnt this morning about the New Zealand site, where public officials have taken steps in the same direction, with the Features site sharing recipes for re-usable Drupal code and patterns.

In Australia we're a little further behind. While sharing definitely goes on, with some agencies, such as DEEWR, happy to share their web code and patterns with other agencies. I'm aware of code and pattern sharing for tenders, for research and for other activities where agencies go through the same processes, though often for different ends.

However we've not yet seen a central site within government for sharing these things. A place where agencies can store their staff policies, communications plan templates, business planning processes, emergency management frameworks, tender documents, research surveys, website code and patterns and more, so others across government can learn from, build on, modify and/or repurpose them - then submit their improvements back into the system.

Effectively this would provide a best practice repository that goes far beyond 'case studies' to support government agencies in standing on the shoulders of each other, improving their capability to serve government and improving policy and service deliver outcomes

Gov 2.0 makes this possible, and I hope that, with the example of the New Zealand Features site, these things are not too far away.

Read full post...

View summary...

Selecting the right tool for the job of online citizen engagement

This report was brought to my attention by Sandy Heierbacher in the Online Engagement Group at LinkedIn, and I thought it well worth sharing more widely.

Also blogged about by Sandy at the US National Coalition for Deliberation and Democracy (NCDD), in the post The Promise and Problems of Online Deliberation, the report provides a look at how online tools can be used in citizen deliberation, with recommendations on which tools to use when.

The report is available from: http://kettering.org/publications/the-promise-and-problems-of-online-deliberation/

There's even a supporting infographic as below:

Read full post...

View summary...

When does organised action turn into 'gaming the system' in online engagements?

It can be difficult to define the line at which organised responses to an online consultation or engagement change from being legitimate activity by an interest group to 'gaming' the system to influence the outcome.

For that matter it can be just as difficult in a paper-based or face-to-face process. Just who does a lobby group with the Minister's ear really represent, who is funding that thinktank releasing white papers, and who is organising and transporting people to a public protest of function (such as an anti-carbon tax rally or to a Olympic Torch relay)?

Should the line be drawn between personal self interest and financial interest?
How about when a financial interest is often just as personal, such as an impact on wages or jobs?

Should the line be drawn between organisations who fund activities versus those who involve volunteers only?
Even though this might marginalise people who can't afford a day off without compensation - making protests a well-off person's tool.

In this context, I've been watching the progress of Hangout with the Prime Minister. This initiative hosted by OurSay, an independent and non-partisan organisation that supporting democratic engagement between public figures and the public, Deakin University and Fairfax Media (who have promoted it through their newspapers) involves selecting three user submitted questions to ask the Prime Minister, based on an online vote.

The actual event occurs tomorrow (Saturday 21 July). It involves the Prime Minister meeting with the three top questioners to ask their questions on a live webcast - and hopefully have them answered.

The real interest for me is in how questions were submitted, promoted and voted up through the process.

OurSay has been doing this for awhile and has a fairly robust system. Anyone with internet access can register to the site (directly or via services like Facebook and Twitter) to ask questions and to vote for existing questions.

People may ask as many questions as they like, but may only vote seven times, dividing these between questions however they like (or blowing all their votes on a single question if they want).

There's different ways to view questions - by most recent, oldest, highest number of votes or comments - and generally the process is run simultaneously. People can ask questions and vote all the way through the process (though this does bias questions asked earlier as they have more time to gather votes).

For the Hangout with the PM, voting closed on Thursday 19 July with almost 2,000 questions asked and 109,000 votes cast (according to Fairfax). Assuming people spent all their seven votes, this means at least 15,500 people took part.

The top three questions were on same-sex marriage, on defense pensions and on school chaplains (submitted by the President of the Atheist Foundation of Australia). The top question was submitted three weeks ago, and rose to the top slowly. The next two were submitted only four days ago, and rose very quickly.

So, leaving aside the potential for people to register multiple times and vote (which OurSay has a policy and some mechanisms to manage), where does gaming the system come in?

I've watched two particular incident associated with this HangOut which could be considered gaming - but may not be.

The first involved Andrew Bolt, a newspaper and TV commentator with a large following amongst politically conservative Australians.

On Tuesday 10 July Bolt blogged in support of a question at OurSay about the impact of Australia's carbon price on global warming "By how much, measured in thousandths of degrees Celsius, will the Earth's temperature be reduced through the carbon tax?”

Within four hours this had become the top question on the site, driven by Bolt's supporters flocking to support the question.

Bolt bolstered this with a post the next day, Vote for an answer at last, where he commented that thanks to the support of his readers they'd gotten two questions into the top three.

Bolt's involvement was proclaimed by OurSay as a success, as covered in Crikey, OurSay gets a boost via a Bolt from the blue.

The second incident involves Get-Up who, six hours before the Hangout closed, sent an email to supporters prompting them to vote for an asylum seeker question:

Prime Minister Julia Gillard, when will our government stop placing asylum seeker children in detention? We could hear an answer from the PM on Saturday - but there's only a few hours of voting on questions to go. Can you place your vote for this question?

The question in question asked “Dear Prime Minister, when will your government stop placing asylum seeker children in detention?”

This time I was quick enough to grab a couple of screenshots of the question as its votes increased.

The first screenshot, about 30 minutes after Get Up's email was sent, showed the question with 3,178 votes.

The second, taken two hours later, placed the question with 6,467 votes. That's an increase of nearly 3,300 votes (or between 470 and 3,300 people voting).

Now how did the questions supported by Bolt and Get Up do in the final analysis?

The tally is in the image below, however Bolt's two supported questions came 5th and 6th with 8,308 and 6,919 votes respectively.

The question supported by Get Up came in at 7th spot with 6,467 votes (which would have made Andrew Bolt happy).

The top three questions received 12,749, 10.933 and 10,756 votes respectively.

You can see the tally below.

So were the efforts by Bolt and Get Up attempts to game the system, or legitimate uses of organisational power? Were other efforts at gaming going on that we're unaware of?

Both are hard to answer and, ultimately, it is impossible to prove a negative (that no gaming has occurred).

However we do need to keep thinking about what defines 'gaming' and similar activities such as 'atroturfing' and consider whether the actions of interest groups unfairly distorts the outcomes of engagements.

Read full post...

View summary...

Next Canberra Gov 2.0 event, 14 August - take a walk on the web side with two fantastic speakers

Pia Waugh is organising the next Gov 2.0 event in Canberra, which will be hosted by DEEWR in their Theatre at 50 Marcus Clarke Rd from 12:30-1:30pm on Tuesday 14 August.

This time the event features two fantastic speakers, and has a much larger limit due to the large size of the venue.

The speakers are:

• Michael (Mick) Chisnall (@michaelchisnall), the Director of the Australian Capital Territory’s Government Information Office, who will be talking about the ACT's efforts in the open government space, and
• Keren Flavell (@KerenFlavell), a founding partner of Wholesome Media and co-founder of Bushfire Connect - a community driven crisis alert tool for sending fire warnings between communities. She'll be talking about the social engagement strategy and TownHall Facebook application developed by Wholesome Media for the Parliament of Victoria

Both have done awesome work in the Gov 2.0 space and have many practical tips and experiences to share.

Alongside the speakers there will be an open mike for people to talk about their latest online initiatives and plenty of engaged attendees to share stories with.

Note that this is a food-free event, however this also means it is free to attend! For anyone seeking food,  there's a cafe next door and plenty of other options nearby.

So if you're looking for some good Gov 2.0 tips and insights, learn more about the event and register at:  http://gov2augustact.eventbrite.com/

Read full post...

View summary...