Are Australia's emergency services ready to engage with social media? BushfireConnect unsuccessful in government grant bid

It's come to my attention that the BushfireConnect team were unsuccessful in securing a small grant under the National Disaster Resilience Grant Scheme to support their work in providing emergency support during Australia's bushfire season.

I've been told that the reason the grant was rejected was that, "as the VIC Emergency Services do not yet have a Social Media Policy, they did not 'feel comfortable with' being seen to 'endorse' Emergency Management Social Media projects by providing them with grants."

All three social media projects vying for a grant were rejected.

Reportedly, they are still working to get their heads around the use of social media in emergency management.

I wonder how many other social media initiatives across Australia have been knocked back due to government officials (at any level) not yet having their heads around the area as yet.

BushfireConnect was established in May 2010 and has been run by volunteers with no formal support from government.

They are currently seeking volunteers to help manage the service once the official bushfire season starts on 1 October.

As they said about the grant result,

We could probably spend hours chewing the fat on the why and the how, but this is the landscape we're all working in. In the mean time, the fire season is starting as early as September this year, so we have stuff to do :) Hopefully we can get sufficient traction this season so that we cannot be ignored in the future.

To learn more, watch the video below of Maurits van der Vlugt, one of the founders, speaking about Bushfire Connect and emergency management assisted by social media at Ignite Sydney 6.

Below this are Maurits's slides from an earlier conference (which seem to be very similar to those used for Ignite).

Bushfire Connect - Trust, Transparency & Timeliness

View more presentations from Maurits van der Vlugt

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TedXCanberra 2011 liveblog

I'm at TEDxCanberra 2011 today liveblogging the event.

It is also being livestreamed via the website, tedxcanberra.org and can be followed on Twitter at the hashtag #TEDxCanberra.

 What's TEDx? A global phenomenon that you can learn more about here.

 

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46 countries commit to the international Open Government Partnership

The Open Government Partnership is "a global effort to make governments better", led by Brazil and the USA.

The concept was announced a few months ago and countries have been rapidly signing up to the commitments required to demonstrate their willingness to take action to improve transparency and accountability in government.

As their website states,

Participating countries in the Open Government Partnership pledge to deliver country action plans that elaborate concrete commitments on open government. In each country, these commitments are developed through a multi-stakeholder process, with the active engagement of citizens and civil society.

The launch of the Partnership occurred a few days ago, on 20 September in New York. 46 countries signed up (about 24 percent of all countries), including about half of the G20, a number of Asia-Pacific nations and a number of European states.

Here's a list of the launch members:

Steering committee

• Brazil (G20)
• Indonesia (G20)
• Mexico (G20)
• Norway
• Philippines
• South Africa (G20)
• United Kingdom (G20)
• United States (G20)

Participants

• Albania
• Azerbaijan
• Bulgaria
• Canada (G20)
• Chile
• Colombia
• Croatia
• Czech Republic
• Dominican Republic
• El Salvador
• Estonia
• Georgia
• Ghana
• Guatemala
• Honduras
• Israel
• Italy (G20)
• Jordan
• Kenya
• Korea (G20)
• Latvia
• Liberia
• Lithuania
• Macedonia
• Malta
• Moldova
• Mongolia
• Montenegro
• Netherlands
• Peru
• Romania
• Slovak Republic
• Spain
• Sweden
• Tanzania
• Ukraine
• Uruguay

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What are the top things we can do to improve government websites?

The US has launched an interesting discussion asking citizens how they think the Federal government can improve government websites.

Run using Ideascale, an online idea management system, the National Dialogue on improving Federal websites is running for two weeks and involves both ideas submission and voting as well as live online discussions(or dialogue-a-thons) on specific website related topics.

I'd love to see this type of initiative organised in Australia, however in the interim it is worth looking at the ideas raised in the US, beginning with the use of Plain language on government websites, Creating content around topics/customers - not agencies, make usability testing and 508 testing (accessibility) required PRIOR to launch, Make Government Website Mobile Accessible and Commit to best practices (using modern web techniques).

If Australian government agencies applied these five top ideas to their own web development (or even applied standards from some of the excellent web links and comments for several of the ideas) we could see a very different level of engagement, potential cut the number of phone calls and ministerials, address hidden issues with incomplete forms and avoid agency embarrassment (when organisations publicly identify government websites that fail basic accessibility or mobile access requirements).

Of course this requires adequately funding and resourcing web teams to carry out these tasks - however this can be offset through mandating external developers to meet government's basic accessibility and content requirements and through using low-cost modern content management frameworks which support significantly greater functionality and require less customisation than the old backroom systems still in place at many agencies.

Even more valuable would be for the Australian government to similarly ask citizens what they thought should be improved about government sites.

I do wonder why Australia appears more fearful or risk-averse to asking citizens these types of questions and building an evidence base on which it can then assess actions. Or maybe it isn't risk-aversion and is simply due to cost (though the service the US uses costs only US$999 per year - and there's even a free version) or due to lack of resources or even interest.

However if the US government, where the political process is on the nose, unemployment is high, the economy is distressed and web budgets are in decline, can ask this question, surely Australia is in a much better position to do so.

To go a little further, to offset the perceptual risk that citizens may expect government agencies to act on specific improvement requests, the consultation could be shaped as an information gathering exercise, where the outcomes will be made available to various agencies to act or not act as they can within their budgets and resourcing.

Or maybe individual agencies can ask the question as part of their website surveys (if they hold them - as I've done regularly in past positions) and share this information across the APS.

What do you think?

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Toughen up - we need online anonymity

Rather than posting in my blog today, I am breaking one of the rules of blogging (always pull people back to your own blog) by pointing people to an opinion piece in Mumbrella that I wrote recently after reading a couple of other opinion pieces attacking the basis for allowing anonymous commentary online.

Toughen up - we need online anonymity

Please comment in Mumbrella (anonymously if you prefer) to continue the discussion.

Note that I wasn't paid for my opinion :)

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