Keep an ear out for 2SER's program on data journalism & open data this morning

Part of a conversation I've had with 2SER's Charmaine Wong about data journalism and the role of open data and Government 2.0 is being broadcast this morning on 2SER between 9:00am and 9:30am  as part of a program on data journalism.

You can listen online via the 2SER website (http://www.2ser.com) or via an actual radio if you're in Sydney.

A podcast of the broadcast will be available from The Fourth Estate (http://www.2ser.com/shows/the-fourth-estate) sometime afterwards, and I'm amend this post with a direct link once it becomes available.

UPDATE: The direct link to listen to this segment is: http://fourthestate.org.au/data-journalism-comes-to-australia/

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How the internet makes governments look worse (and what agencies can do about it)

One of the major impacts of the internet on society has been the reduction on barriers to communication. Suddenly people didn’t need to be a trained journalist, media license holder, a wealthy individual or company or to be in the right place at the right time (often just luck) to have a significant public voice.

This has largely turned mainstream media from being a story leader into a story follower, reporting news that was already in the public domain via social media.

It has similarly allowed politicians and government agencies to become their own real-time media outlets, with email newsletters, RSS feeds, Twitter accounts, Facebook Pages, blogs and more allowing them to easily and quickly make facts and figures, or their side of a story, public.

However in lowering the barriers to public communication, the widespread use of the internet has also lowered the barriers to public complain.

Often this has been invited by organisations – both private and public. It is far more cost-efficient to have an online complaint form than people on telephones, responding to letters or sitting in shop fronts.

Most organisations seeking to improve their efficiency and reduce costs have moved their complaints and comment processes largely online.

Additionally many organisations have put a lot of information online, with the aim of addressing simple complaints and enquiries. Again an FAQ or Q&A online looks very tempting to organisations as a way to reduce staff time on common questions and issues.

However there’s a downside that often isn’t considered to these efficiencies. It has also become far more efficient for people to complaint.

The barriers to a complaint used to be quite high – people had to physically travel to a specific location between specific times; or write a letter, put it in an envelope, buy a stamp and go to the nearest postbox. While phoning seemed easy, navigating computerised call systems, waiting on hold and having to actually communicate with a real person in a confrontational manner often dissuaded people from trivial complaints.

However an online complaints has very low barriers to use. The vast majority of people in Australia have ready access to a computing device and internet connection. Most online complaint forms in organisational websites are designed to be easy to find and respond to and where they are not, a person can quickly complain on Twitter, Facebook, a blog or other social channel, not only responding to an organisation but also informing their peer group – which can lead to further amplification of their complaint, plus many other people emboldened to complain as well.

Suddenly, enabled by the internet, there can be a huge increase in complaints, which makes it look as though a government or agency is performing extremely badly – particularly compared to earlier times, when such easy routes to complaining were not available, or complaints were kept out of the public eye.

A further factor amplifies this even further. Due to all the FAQs and other information organisations have been putting online, suddenly people, even those who had trivial or no complaints, can easily find out what they should be getting or what their experience should look like. They can inform themselves through organisational sites and sometimes also through community-run forums, blogs and websites, making their complaints far more detailed and specific.

This adds to the complexity of enquiries and complaints, often making each more individualized and requiring greater effort to resolve.

In other words the efficiencies gained by organisations by putting information on the internet to reduce the incident of simple enquiries and complaints can be more than offset by informed customers and citizens with detailed and individual issues, which require far more staff time to resolve.

Now lets be clear about one other thing. I’m not saying that people are complaining more because government is performing worse than in the past (which may or may not be the case). However because the barriers to complaining are lower, citizens who would have let things pass and coped with a policy or service ‘as is’ are now far more likely to complain than to remain silent.

So the internet has lowered the bar on complaining, while raising the bar on complaint complexity by informing citizens of their rights and obligations – how can an agency use this to their own advantage?

Firstly, the internet allows agencies to conduct far more cost-effective testing of policies, processes and services before they are introduced. By using a citizen-centric approach to policy and service design, using online avenues to model and test scenarios and proposals before a policy becomes law, or a service is delivered, agencies can reduce their error rate and, therefore the number of complaints.

This can lead to real improvements in policies and services, where they are more fit for purpose with the community. It helps reduce the real rate of complaints – which we are only now seeing because the barriers to complaint are so low. In other words, it delivers better government.

Secondly, agencies should see citizens who complain as supporters who are helping agencies improve. Rather than just fobbing them off with generic forms or complex rectification processes, they should be ‘co-opted’ into advisory groups to help inform and improve an agency’s processes and engagement.

This can be done through a variety of approaches, but essentially involves building an understanding of the nature of the complaint, identifying what rectification activities are possible and proposing these in the next iteration of a policy or service’s development. This can be achieved cost-effectively by creating an online advisory group, selecting (complaining) citizens who are prepared to work with the agency in a productive and positive way.

Over time, where an agency can rectify certain complaints altogether, involved citizens can become public advocates for the way in which the agency has engaged and resolved the issues, turning a negative into a positive.

This approach can seem very difficult for agencies, however I have seen it used at bureaucratic organisations quite successfully when they committed to the process.

There are undoubtedly other approaches to turn complaints into positives, however it is also worth thinking about how an agency should empower its staff online to address complaints and concerns online.

While agencies have been extremely willing to provide FAQs and online complaint forms, they have been much slower to empower their own staff to engage with these complaints through the same mediums.

This can be scary for agencies – the concept of trusting staff to respond to the public online raises many risks in the minds of bureaucrats. However there are techniques to manage and mitigate these risks, employing similar strategies to the other channels agencies already use to respond to complaints.

For instance, many agencies already have staff tasked with responding to customer enquiries and complaints – whether contact centres or officials who write responses to Ministerials. Allowing these staff to respond in a managed way through a new channel is a challenge of degree, adapting procedures and preparing standard guidance just as call scripts are provided for phone conversations.

Many organisations in the private sector already have adopted various tools for fast and direct online responses to online enquiries and complaints – airlines, telecommunications providers, consumer goods companies, ecommerce providers and others – from text chat to online voice chat. There’s also been the use of automated agents, a ‘face’ on FAQ systems that provide a more interactive experience, as well as direct responses via social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

These contact approaches are increasingly supported by call centre software platforms as well as by many discrete online platforms, including approval and delegation controls as well as comprehensive logging of discussions.

In situations where online complaints and enquiries are rapidly increasing as agencies encourage the use of online tools for efficiency reasons) deploying appropriate systems for staff is a logical step to ensure these efficiencies are realised, rather than having agencies generate new inefficiencies as they attempt to use existing response approaches to address online issues.

What is needed now is the willingness of agencies to invest in these systems and the appropriate training and support of staff.

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Using social media in emergency and disaster management

I’m currently in Singapore, having just finished running a two-day masterclass for Singaporean public servants on how to use social media in emergency management.

It is a very interesting topic and one I don’t think is high enough on the radar in Australia or many other countries, although there’s now plenty of case studies on the topic.

Source: http://visual.ly/case-emergency-use-social-media

I’m not going to share the full two day master class (it is both too long and too complex to go through) – particularly as it includes several in-depth exercises where teams create their social media infrastructure for an emergency and then test it in a custom simulation exercise.

However I thought it worth sharing a few of my thoughts on the topic.

Firstly, in my view, not using social media for emergency management invites disaster.

Whether emergency service personnel and management ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ Facebook, Twitter or other social media and online channels is now irrelevant. Citizens, media organisations and other groups increasingly rely on them to share information, tactics and to organise outside of any central control by an agency and regardless of their wishes.

A clear example of this was reported in the Crisis Comms blog, which has a great example of a police department reaching out to media and the public to help them by checking surveillance footage, looking for a suspected murderer.

The media and public were so willing to help that the SB District Attorney then attempted to rein in the situation with a tweet ‘The sheriff has asked all members of the press to stop tweeting immediately. It is hindering officer safety. #Dorner’

Mumbai terrorist attacks (2008)

As the Crisis Comms blog points out, and I agree, it is ludicrous to ask people to stop engaging, particularly after they were specifically invited to help. This misrepresents the authority and influence held by official bodies in our new connected world.

In other emergencies where official bodies have chosen to not engage via social media channels, the gap has been filled by the public, such as in the Mumbai terrorist attacks. There’s simply no way for emergency services to prevent this – and nor should they.

For example after the London riots, some members of parliament suggested closing down the internet to prevent rioters from spreading information.

London riots (2011)

This was in apparently unawareness that rioters were actually using Blackberry’s encrypted message service which wasn’t connected to the internet, and overlooked how valuable the internet was in allowing authorities to elicit the public’s help in identifying rioters (via a Flickr group), helping London residents to inform police where riots were underway and to help other residents stay clear or in the cleanup efforts afterwards, where social media was used as a primary way to organize citizens to clean-up different parts of the city.

Social media also allowed London Police to monitor the relative intensity of riots and allocate their officers more effectively – essentially giving them more than six million additional pairs of eyes in Greater London, without the inefficiency of manning phone lines or sending police out as ‘scouts’ (with all the risks this would entail).

So how can social media help around emergencies and disasters?

Source: http://visual.ly/case-emergency-use-social-media

I believe social media can help in all stages – from helping to inform citizens of what they should do in case of a particular emergency, letting them know when one is emerging/impending (such as a bushfire or flood), sourcing intelligence and communicating information during emergencies to help minimise casualties and direct resources where they are needed and, in the recovery, to marshal the right resources and supplies to the right places via volunteer citizen labor and donations.

Social media, in helping people share their experiences during a disaster, can also help with psychological recovery, something strongly reported in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake, where its been reported that social media has replaced churches and community centres (many of which were destroyed) as the place where people support one another and share experiences.

Christchurch earthquake (2011)

To conclude, social media is now part of the fabric of society, normalized into how many people communicate and share information.

It needs to similarly be normalized into emergency and disaster management plans and activities, used productively and effectively to aid professional emergency workers in their roles and to inform and engage citizens as appropriate in specific situations.

Emergency authorities who are still stand-offish about social media, because their management and staff don’t use these channels themselves, or because they have particular concerns or fears, need to bring in the appropriate talent to help them normalize social media in their own operations, otherwise they may be placing lives at risk.

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Special Canberra Gov 2.0 lunchtime event with Twitter next Tuesday

Several of Twitter's US staff are in Australia next week and Pia has managed to lasso them into providing a special presentation to Canberra's Gov 2.0 community.

If you're in Canberra on Tuesday 12 March, I strongly recommend that you head along to this special Gov 2.0 lunchtime event - just make sure you RSVP first by booking your seat at: http://gov20actmar2013.eventbrite.com/

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Pre-pubescent hackers - what are governments doing to protect their systems?

Hacking is child's play - or so it seems as young people, some aged only 11, are beginning to use various tools and instructions online to hack into online games (as reported by Mashable).



The rise of state-based hacking (whether for political or commercial reasons) has profoundly changed  challenges facing government agencies, both in terms of their own security and in terms of how they protect the citizens and businesses that exist under their jurisdictional protection.

It is interesting to consider that if foreign troops or terrorists invaded a business's building in central Melbourne, or Sydney's north shore the government would be expected and obliged to respond with its own armed police and troops, however if the same business's computer systems were invaded by a similarly malicious foreign power, terrorist group or criminal syndicate, the business is almost alone, held almost totally responsible for their own security and protection - despite the potential for severe economic disruption or damage to the national interest.

That situation becomes even more complex if the foreign troops behind the digital attack are children.

With a seven year old first grader now the youngest person to develop a mobile app, with other children around that age now developing coding skills and with potential motivations, such as unlocking special pets, levels or privileges in online games and social networks, how long will it be before young children are trained and put to work as hackers by criminal or state organisations?

Not too long, in my view, which comes back to the main question - what should governments be doing to protect their systems, and the systems of citizens and businesses, from a rising tide of state-sponsored hacking, particularly as it becomes child's play?

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Gov 2.0 Canberra lunch event videos from February

Gavin Tapp has done his magic and so, with the assistance of the ACT Government, I'm happy to present both videos from the Gov 2.0 event I ran in Canberra on the 14th.

I've embedded both videos in order below with the bios of the speakers.

Darren Cutrupi

Darren Cutrupi has been the Manager, Media and Community Information at the ACT Emergency Services Agency for the past nine-and-a-half years.

In that time he has taken the ESA from having no real system to provide the community with alerts, updates and warnings to now be an industry leader in the provision of timely and accurate public notifications of emergency incidents.

This includes the ESA website, social media accounts, an internal process the ESA calls THE SPOT (The Single Point Of Truth) and an internally designed app to take care of all the technical side of publishing and distribution information to a range of sources, platforms and people in real time.

Before joining the ESA, Darren spent fifteen years working in commercial radio in NSW, ACT, QLD and TAS, initially as an announcer then as a journalist at stations including 2UE, 2HD, 2CC, 2CA, 104.7 and MIX 106.3. Darren reported from the scene of the Old Canberra Hospital Implosion and won a radio industry award (RAWARD) for his work as the local journalist at 2XL Cooma during the Thredbo Landslide.

Darren has built several websites using WordPress and is also a massive Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles fan.

Ben Fowkes

Ben Fowkes leads the consultancy team at Delib UK, a digital democracy company based in the UK, helping governments, the NHS, the police and local authorities to take part in meaningful citizen consultation and engagement online. He has worked extensively with Scottish, UK, Canadian and Australian Governments, as well as private sector clients such as National Grid.

Ben speaks regularly to bodies in the UK about online engagement, most recently presenting to the UK police foundation at their third annual conference on connecting the police with the public.

Ben will be speaking about the Gov 2.0 situation in the UK. He will unfortunately not be able to speak about the UK GovCamp as it was delayed due to snow.

Disclaimer: This event's organiser, Craig Thomler, operates Delib Australia, a subsidiary of Delib UK, and is hosting Ben in Australia. Ben will not be giving a corporate presentation, instead focusing on the development of the Gov 2.0 movement in the UK.

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Where are Australia's tweeting councils and do they have enough followers

I've mapped the 222 local government Twitter accounts I track to their geographic locations around Australia (excluding NT), and it forms an interesting picture.

UPDATE: I've updated the map data to include NT data, thanks to the help of @Maxious, who found an ABS dataset which includes them.

Local government use of Twitter in Australia by tweets - zoom for detail
There was a direct correlation between population density and the propensity of councils to tweet. This was intriguing, but not surprising.

While Twitter is most useful as a real-time news and interaction service, and therefore has enormous value in sharing information across geographically large regional councils, a combination of limited internet infrastructure and experience using services like Twitter tends to create a digital divide between rural and metro councils. As a result, many of the local governments that could most benefit from Twitter's capabilities are the least likely to use it.

One of the most critical factors on Twitter is the number of followers an account has. This is because the more followers, the greater the impact of your tweets. This becomes particularly important when distributing information on disasters, consultations or even for customer service purposes, where more people can view and act on answers to questions.

In analysing how local governments have done in building their Twitter followings, the results were quite dim. Only the six largest council accounts, all from major city councils, had more than 7,000 followers, while the average number of followers for all local government accounts was only 1,043 - compared to 2,556 for Federal and 2,459 for state and territory government Twitter accounts.


The average number of followers by state varied quite significantly, with Queensland councils tending to have the most followers (2,073 on average), followed by Victoria (a long way back at 1,196) and NSW (on 873) . Tasmania and the Northern Territory did worst, with councils in those jurisdictions having an average of 448 and 239 followers respectively.


The data also suggested only a weak correlation between how active a council was on Twitter and the number of followers they had. As pictured in the chart below, the councils that tweet most frequently are not necessarily those with the most followers and there was only a slight correlation for councils with a higher than average (1,000) followers.

Note I used a logarithmic scale for Followers in all of the following charts to emphasise the spread.

Looking at account age, there was some indication that the longer a council had operated its Twitter account, the more likely it was to have accumulated more followers, however the chart for this (below) didn't really strike me as that impressive. Many older accounts still languished below average (1,000 followers) and local councils who had more than the average number of followers were only marginally older than the average account.

A slightly stronger correlation was with the number of accounts a local council followed. Councils with more than 1,000 (average) followers were significantly more likely to follow more accounts, however it was unclear if this was a cause of their level of followers or the effect of them following people back.


To provide a comparison on this last chart, below I've looked at Twitter accounts operated by state and Commonwealth agencies on the same axes. In this case it looks as though councils have done better than other levels of government in achieving a good divident of followers by following people.


So to sum up, it looks as though neither the length of time a council operates an account, the level of active tweeting or the number of people followed adequately, or together come close to explaining why some local councils do better at gaining Twitter followers than other.

So let's consider the two elephants in the room - council resident population and connectivity. Councils with small population bases will struggle to build their numbers significantly unless their content is either tourism-based or extremely entertaining. Equally councils with poor internet infrastructure are likely to have fewer people using social media and hence less Twitter users to follow the council.

Unfortunately I don't have detailed information on the population in every council region (though I am putting this together at the moment), nor do I have a map of internet connectivity speeds across Australia.

However I have reviewed a sample of councils in WA, NSW and Victoria, and from my understanding of this data (not yet sufficiently processed for publishing) population has a significant impact on Twitter follower numbers for councils and connectivity probably does as well.


So what should councils do to increase their follower count and improve the effectiveness of their Twitter engagement?

The first and most basic steps are to ensure the council has the right Twitter accounts in place and there's staff able to, and responsible for, managing them. They should also follow an active (and entertaining) tweeting program and follow people, to build awareness - these steps do appear to increase following, at least modestly.

Alongside these steps, local governments should take actions to inform their residents about their Twitter account and its benefits. This can be done via their other material (bills, pamphlets, websites, business cards, etc), and also provide classes and training on how to use the service - both for residents and their own staff.

Finally, while councils are unable to change their population numbers significantly in a short time, they are often able to take steps to improve internet connectivity and usage in their region. This can involve lobbying the NBN to provide or accelerate services, or installing their own networks to provide a solution where commercial providers cannot financially justify wiring a town.

This last approach has been taken in the US and, to a lessor extent in the UK, and I am aware of a few old examples in Australia. I think this is still a valid approach in Australia, particularly for councils receiving limited NBN wiring, and one that needs to be considered for the economic as well as the communications benefits.


Notes and caveats
All Twitter usage data was current at 25 January 2013.

The map has been updated to use ABS derived local government boundaries.
I may not be monitoring all government accounts in Australia. New ones are created regularly and while I update my list on a regular basis it is unlikely to include all goverment accounts at all times. However I am confident it contains the vast majority of accounts and is statistically accurate.

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