Gov 2.0 Canberra lunch with Edmonton's CIO

This year I've started holding events to help bring together Gov 2.0 practitioners and interested parties to encourage discussion and information sharing.

After a successful Gov 2.0 dinner in January, the next event is a lunch at Parliament House with Edmonton's CIO, Chris Moore.

Chris is well-known internationally for the work he's done to open up the city of Edmonton's data and introduce social media within the city's government.

He's in Canberra for a day and was interested in meeting the local Gov 2.0 community.

So if you're a local, or in town that day, consider coming along.

Places are strictly limited.

Event details are here.

(EDIT: This event filled up incredibly fast - I've been able to liberate a single extra spot and begin a waiting list in case of dropouts close to the date)

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Minister Tanner says "The government wants to blog"

Minister Tanner has been making statements in conference speeches about having public servants use social media to engage the community for at least a year now.

Yesterday he took this a step further and wrote an article, published in the Sydney Morning Herald, entitled The government wants to blog.

Given that the Australian Government has not yet responded to the Gov 2.0 Taskforce report, this article signals to me that there is a strong appetite for appropriate online engagement by the Australian Public Service (APS) and that forward movement is occurring behind the scenes.

Speaking with colleagues this year there is a growing groundswell of interest in using online channels to engage, however there still appears to me to be a low level of awareness across the APS of some of the enabling measures already in place, such as the APSC Circular on Protocols for online media participation.

I hope those public servants who are aware of this Circular, the Gov 2.0 Taskforce Final Report, Minister Tanner's speeches and articles and other sources are making all this information known across their agencies.

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Picking a citizen ideas platform

If you've ever been required to collect ideas from the public - or wanted to - have you considered the use of a 'ideas market' or similar system for collecting. allowing comments on, prioritising and reporting back on the use of ideas.

Dell and Starbucks both use these systems extensively to seek public ideas to improve their businesses and develop new products, and ideas platforms have been rolled out within US government departments (for staff ideas), such as by, as well as used publicly by the US President's office and in Australia by the Gov 2.0 Taskforce.

There are a number of these services out there, and Dustin Haisler and Margarita Quihuis have written a post at GovFresh titled, How to pick a citizen idea platform which provides a useful overview on how to pick the platform that works for you.

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Sharing your photo library

Has your organisation ever considered sharing your photo library with other government organisations? With the costs of conducting new photo shoots, why not share your images with other organisations who might use them - and encourage them to share their images with you.

Some agencies may even wish the public to reuse their images.

Some departments councils and museums are already doing this via services such as the the National Library of Australia's Picture Australia site.

If your department has a library service, keeps a register of particular images of historic or national significance, or simply wishes to promote the reuse of specific images, this might be a way to encourage takeup.

Frankly it could be even more beneficial to have a cross-government photo and even video sharing library internally. With appropriate consents and licensing it would allow government to save significant funds by supporting reuse of images and snippets of visual media across departments and levels of government.

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BarCamp Canberra 2010 - LiveBlog

I will be liveblogging as much as possible of BarCamp Canberra 2010, however note that I am also speaking and the other two rooms may not have wifi - so I will post my notes later.

This year BarCamp is standing room only, with around 90 attendees at the start of the day, and more likely to come - and go - through the day.

If you want to drop in yourself, we're at the Computer Science Building at the Australian National University in Canberra, or for the geeks, at GPS: 35° 16' 34" S 149° 7' 14" E.

Sessions are 20 minutes long with 10 minute changeovers between talks, with 5 minute lightening talks at the end of the day in the main room.

Audio is being recorded and many presentations will be put on SlideShare. Plus there is a video livestream in the main room at: www.livestream.com/barcampcanberra

A coffee van is outside, there's water, power and wifi inside, and lunch is on the way, so let's start....

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