Monday, February 24, 2014

Eight ways to create a top government tweet

I was pleased to hear last week at the Social Business conference in Melbourne that an increasing number of Victorian government agencies were competing to reach the highest place in the Great Oz Gov Tweets daily Top 50 Government Tweets list.

When this competition is healthy it helps encourage agencies to compare themselves against their peers, exchange tips and improve their tweeting style. This can result in greater reach and better outcomes as more people read the important messages government is distributing on Twitter.

At Delib we’ve also been keenly interested in the daily Top 50 Government Tweets. Of the hundreds of government tweets each day, these are the messages that have successfully cut through the white noise.

Recently we analysed the top five tweets each day this year, as rated by Great Oz Gov Tweets, to understand what made them stand out from the crowd.

Analysing the cut-through tweets from the 53 government Twitter accounts that have made it to the top five so far this year, we’ve identified eight things that make a government tweet stand-out.

1. Gorgeous photography

People like images, so it is no wonder than the majority of top 5 tweets feature some form of picture.

And the more gorgeous the photography the better – which gives tourism accounts like @Australia, @Melbourne, @sydney_sider, @southaustralia and @WestAustralia an advantage.

Each of these accounts makes excellent use of images to capture the spirit of their region and attracts a high number of retweets and favourites as a result.

Top Tweet from 6 February 
(within its first day received 61 retweets, 78 favourites and reached potentially 130,198 people)

2. Disaster news

Living in a natural disaster-prone country, it’s no surprise that tweets about the latest fire or flood situation attract a lot of attention.

Whether it be @CFA_Updates, @MFB_NEWS, @NSWRFS, @AmbulanceVic, @SAPoliceNews or @ACTPol_Traffic, when disaster strikes many Australians get onto Twitter to get the latest information on where to go and what to do from government.

So in the unfortunate event you have a disaster to manage, get on Twitter – and tweet regularly – to ensure that you’re getting the reach you want, with the messages you need to send.

Top Tweet from 20 February 
(within its first day received 76 retweets, 0 favourites and reached potentially 42,950 people)

3. Special events

Australians love a party.  Provided that governments are agile enough to tweet as things happen, people will happily retweet and favourite images and information about special or exclusive events.

This has worked well for accounts ranging from @ausoftheyear, @OzDay, @SydOperaHouse and @AuHCSouthAfrica.

Top Tweet from 16 February 
(within its first day received 25 retweets, 20 favourites and reached potentially 289,599 people)

4. Get edgy

This can be a tough approach for an agency or council to pull off, however if you can send a tweet that’s a little unusual or surprising you can often get a lot of attention from the public.

The standout in this area is @2011Census, however @CSIROnews’s dragon tweets and the ‘#shelfies’ from @Library_Vic have also done well.

Top Tweet from 3 February 
(within its first day received 61 retweets, 21 favourites and reached potentially 49,375 people)

5. Feel good

If you can’t do edgy, try for feel good instead.

Cutesy stories about lost teddy bears (@AusCustomsNews), of firefighters meeting Snoop Dog during a call and getting a photo (@MFB_NEWS) or of the many organ donations Australians make (@DonateLifeToday) humanise government agencies and make people feel good at the same time.

Top Tweet from 24 January 
(within its first day received 75 retweets, 27 favourites and reached potentially 63,474 people)

6. Iconic

What makes Australia Australia? There’s a raft of iconic places, foods and experiences that Australians, and often the world, associate with our country.

Using these icons in tweets is a sure way to gain the patriotic retweets, as @TroveAustralia found with the anniversary of the Tim Tam. This has also helped drive photos of Australia Day and the Sydney Opera House to the top – helping @OzDay and @SydOperaHouse reach the top five.

Top Tweet from 17 February 
(within its first day received 33 retweets, 9 favourites and reached potentially 79,569 people)

7. A chance to win

If you can give people an opportunity to win something they’ll flock to favourite your account (though the retweets may suffer).

@ZoosVictoria used this to good effect, topping the daily tweets lists for 9 January.

Top Tweet from 9 January 
(within its first day received 138 retweets, 18 favourites and reached potentially 36,131 people)

8. Follower frenzy

It is no surprise that the government Twitter accounts with the most followers are far more likely to be retweeted and favourited when sending out interesting tweets.

The classic example is @Australia, which made up 48.9% of the top 270 government tweets between 1 January and 23 February. While they do have great content, dominated by gorgeous images, their reach is magnified by having over 100,000 followers – far more than any other Australian government account.

If you’ve got a low follower count it’s a good idea to spend some time cultivating and building your following, forming alliances with other government accounts and otherwise growing your potential for reach.

Top Tweet from 1 January 
(within its first day received 2,399 retweets, 2,509 favourites and reached potentially 199,954 people)

In conclusion

If you aspire to cut through the noise of Twitter, try to cover off on as many of these eight things as possible.

The more you can manage in one tweet, the more likely you are to attract the attention and engagement of Australians.

We hope to see your tweets at the top of the Great Oz Gov Tweets list soon!

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By Craig Thomler at 4:32 PM 0 comments Bookmark and Share

A good community engagement professional understands their tools - and picks the right ones to meet their goals

I had an interesting conversation via Twitter with @hughstephens of Dialogue Consulting on Friday regarding how and when different consultation and engagement tools should be used by government.

His view was that online surveys should not be the default consultation method for government,
I found this a rather unusual thing to say - though I did agree with his follow-up tweet that,

There was an interesting discussion between Hugh and myself after this point, which you can follow via my Storify or directly on Twitter.

However I can boil my position down to one point: focus first on the goals of your consultation or engagement, then select the tools based on which will best suit your needs.

This approach works whatever your goals and whether you're consulting online, offline or both.

It causes me no end of concern when senior management, communication or community engagement professionals start from a position of which tool they prefer to use and then justify it within the goals they seek to achieve.

This can lead to distortion of the goals, poor outcomes and, potentially, significant pain for agencies, councils and governments or councillors when there's substantial pushback on the decisions arrived at via this process.

I'm also concerned when I hear engagement professionals state personal biases for or against specific types of tools. This can also bias an engagement process.

Someone who doesn't like, is unfamiliar with, or out-of-date on the capabilities of certain types of consultation and engagement tools may not be able to provide the best advice as to which tools and approaches will best meet an organisation's engagement goals.

I've been talking about this issue for around eight years now within and with government, exposing public sector professionals to a range of online approaches now available to them for engagement purposes to deepen and broaden their toolkit.

Only by understanding the capabilities, strengths and weaknesses of a good cross-section of the tools available today can communication and engagement professionals provide good advice to their senior management and elected officials regarding how to achieve their goals.

So for everyone involved in community engagement from the public sector - don't focus on the tools you like or dislike, focus on your goals.

Use your breadth of experience with different engagement and consultation approaches, together with evidence of past successes and failures, to select the right tools to meet your goals, whatever they happen to be!

PS: I'll shortly be crowdfunding a product designed to help community engagement and communications professionals to understand and select the right online tools for their goals. It is based on the training tool I developed and have been using successfully around the world for the last eight years.

Keep an eye out for more information in my blog and at socialmediaplanner.com.au

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By Craig Thomler at 11:21 AM 1 comments Bookmark and Share
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Wednesday, February 19, 2014

What governments can teach businesses about social

Below is the presentation I gave at Social Business 2014 today on what governments can teach business in Australia about using social media and digital effectively.

There's plenty of good examples of how government is using social well - for policy development, service delivery, engagement and more.




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By Craig Thomler at 10:32 PM 0 comments Bookmark and Share
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First the internet, then social media and now crowdfunding is disrupting government

Government has proven no more immune to disruption by digital than any other industry.

The internet changed the model for governments in delivering information and dealing with pressure groups. It has been a largely positive disruption, facilitated billions in savings as government moved services online in egovernment initiatives. At the same time it has seen governments able to provide the same, or more, services to citizens without growing staff numbers at the same rate as population growth.

In Australia the Australian Public Service employs roughly the same number of staff as in 1990, despite a 30% increase in our population. While not all attributable to egovernment, I think it is fair to say that considering the range of services and activities of the Australian Government today, compared to 40 years ago, digitalisation has had a substantial impact in respect of job numbers.

Social media has been a more uncomfortable disruption for government, thus far providing for a mixed experience. Governments in Australia have rapidly adopted the use of social media - as I track through the proxy of Twitter accounts (over 920 today compared to none in early 2007) - using social platforms for activities from communication to engagement, customer service, codesign and policy development.

At the same time social media has challenged government by giving millions a more public voice and way to organise groups - from simple petitions for bank notes usable by blind people through to connecting people and facilitating the organisation of mass rallies during the Arab Spring.

Governments have found it more difficult to ignore self-organising groups than single isolated individuals, and have begun to face continual critiquing of every decision as soon as it is announced - an unprecedented environment of scrutiny and noise.

However the clamour of critics on social networks can be ignored - we've already seen several elected politicians cancel social media accounts and put much greater constraints around how their staff use these networks.

The next disruption, crowdfunding, is already showing some signs of having a material impact beyond that of raised voices and organised protests.

Historically when governments stopped funding activities or services, or changed what they delivered - as a result of electoral and policy changes - the media would comment, the public would talk about it for a few weeks, maybe even protest, and then generally governments could get on with delivering their new mix without significant disruption.

Governments were in control - they chose where their budget was spent and things that were cut remained cut.

Of course some form of charity or other provider might choose to find alternative funding to continue delivering a service on a small scale, however this could be safely ignored, or even declared a win by government as it was clear that government didn't need to fund that service anyway.

This line was actually used very recently by the current Australian government after it defunded the Climate Change Commission (a government-funded body for providing expert advice on climate change to the public) and the commissioners went out to find alternative funding.

However something was different on this occasion.

Rather than having a few organisations or wealthy and concerned individuals provide funds to keep the Climate Change Commission alive under a new name, the Climate Council, the Commissioners used a crowdfunding route.

The first donation to keep the Climate Council live was $15. Over the first 12 hours it raised $160,000 - literally overnight.

At the end of the first week the Climate Council had raised one million dollars, and the donations continued to arrive.

For awhile it was unclear whether this was a once-off event. The Climate Commission dealt with an emotive topic - climate change - and was led by prominent and well-respected Australian, Professor Tim Flannery. It was an existing body with an existing purpose, so already had structure and goals.

This was a useful combination for crowdfunding, providing a leg-up for marshalling the right crowd to provide the donations required to continue operations.

However we're now seeing crowd funding used to underpin the completion of another defunded Australian Government project, the Blueprint for an Ageing Australia.

While it is unclear whether this project will meet its goal, it is beginning to suggest that crowdfunding may become a regular tactic used to counter government decisions.


Effectively communities could use crowdfunding, in certain casesm as an alternative to government funding. The approach allows them to self-organise and finance public initiatives that they feel are important but governments, for funding or ideological reasons, do not.

The impact of this crowdfunding may be benign - communities simply getting the services they wish, regardless of the government's priorities - or may be considered highly political.

If a government defunds something and then supporters find the funds in the crowd to keep it alive, what does that say about the community's view of the government's priorities and decisions? Will governments be forced to back down or change their approach? Will it affect elections?

This is still very early days, however it is worth governments beginning to build their awareness of crowdfunding and how it is beginning to be used - as well as how it can be used for the benefit of government, such as by seeking some public crowdfunding for an initiative before agreeing to put public money into the mix.

At the end of the day an individual putting down their personal cash to back a crowdfunding project is a significantly greater commitment of belief and value than a signature on a petition, a social media backlash or even a march on the street. Governments need to appreciate and understand this and treat it accordingly.


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By Craig Thomler at 8:59 AM 1 comments Bookmark and Share
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Monday, February 17, 2014

Help me create a crowdfunding video for a social media planning tool

I need a little help from folks in Canberra for an upcoming project.

I'm crowdfunding a social media planning tool I developed to help people increase their social media expertise and assist teams in planning effective social media strategies.

I've used the tool with hundreds of people to great effect, however need a little funding to make it more widely available to social media professionals and organisations.

To improve my chance of raising the necessary funds, I'm creating a video demonstrating the tool in use.

I need 3-4 people to help out in Canberra on Saturday 22 February (between 9am and 3pm).

You will be filmed using the tool, and the video will be published online.

I will cover your lunch and you'll have my thanks, plus I'll keep you informed about the progress of the project.

So if you're interested in being involved in a crowdfunding process, in trying out a social media planning tool, in getting more video experience and/or in helping me out, then:

Please get in touch with me via email: craig@socialmediaplanner.com.au

BTW - you can follow progress on Twitter at @socmedplanner

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By Craig Thomler at 8:17 AM 0 comments Bookmark and Share
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Sunday, February 16, 2014

Register now for BarCamp Canberra (on 15 March)

Register now for BarCamp Canberra 2014

What is BarCamp Canberra? An annual event now in it's seventh year, BarCamp Canberra is part of the global movement of self-organised conferences, of which thousands have been run.

As a free event, BarCamp Canberra covers topics from science and social media to design and democracy, inviting attendees to network and interact with each other through the day.

Speakers are not pre-organised, but determined on the day, with the three rooms available meaning there will be up to 40 presentations to choose from.

To see what others think about BarCamp Canberra, view the videos below.

For more details on what you can expect at the event, visit the BarCamp Canberra website.

Note - I am one of the 'unorganisers' for the event.

The view of an attendee at BarCamp Canberra 2013



A presentation from BarCamp 2013: Where's my jetpack?

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By Craig Thomler at 11:40 AM 0 comments Bookmark and Share
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Thursday, February 13, 2014

What's beyond transparency? Find out at the next Code for Australia event in Melbourne

As part of the CodeAcross2014 series of global events (over 44 events in 9 countries), Code for Australia is holding a free event on Friday 21 March from 5:30pm in Melbourne.

Featuring four guest speakers, the event will approach the "Beyond Transparency" theme by discussing how citizens, civil servants and entrepreneurs can move beyond open data to come together and build new ways of solving problems.

For more information, or to register, visit canbook.me/codeforaustralia

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By Craig Thomler at 8:12 AM 0 comments Bookmark and Share
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Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Use open data from the Victorian Government to improve awareness and literacy for social and safety issues - potentially win $2,500

The Spatial Industries Business Association (SIBA) in conjunction with the Victorian Department of State Development, Business and Innovation (DSDBI), have launched a data competition to identify approaches using Victorian government open data to improve awareness and literacy for social and safety issues.

The competition is open for registration, with entries closing 28 February and winners to be announced at the Connect Expo in Melbourne on 14 March this year.

So what makes this different to past data competitions held by or with Australian governments?

There's a little prize money ($10,000 split across four $2,500 prizes), but more importantly there's the offer of support for the winners to develop their entry over the next year.

The four winners will have an opportunity to consult with the Victorian government to continue development, with mentoring from leading SIBA members.

This is a step in the right direction for open data competitions in Australia - not just giving out prizes for using open data, but helping foster great projects so they can become sustainable and, where appropriate, commercial.

There's been thousands of websites, apps and services created out of open data competitions around the world in the last five years, but only a handful have seen ongoing development and success.

As governments get better at understanding the value proposition for open data, I hope they begin appreciating the need to provide a support system for open data entrepreneurs - who often have little or no traditional start-up field and require additional support to take an open data prototype into a sustainable product.

Start-up incubators, Angel investors and even early stage venture capitalists may also want to look at how they can foster these 'accidental entrepreneurs', whose mindset can be more focused on social good or simply an interesting data challenge, than on profiting from their open data work.

One thing is certain to me - if governments don't learn to be better at fostering the ongoing success of services developed from open data, at some point politicians and senior public servants will begin to see the open data space as an unsuccessful fad. A waste of public sector time and money, littered with the corpses of cool app ideas which never translated into economic returns or improved social outcomes.

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By Craig Thomler at 6:46 AM 0 comments Bookmark and Share
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Saturday, February 08, 2014

The art of 21st century political protests - and preparing for when it is turned on government agencies and companies

The right for citizens to express political views and to protest (within limits) against specific acts, or inaction, by politicians is one of the fundamental and defining principles of democratic government and has been in place for, well, as long as there's been democracies.

In fact this principle is one which democracies frequently use to differentiate themselves from other governance systems.

However the methods by which this principle is expressed is constantly changing - driven by the creativeness of individuals, changes in social values and the advances of technology.

Why is this so interesting?

Political protests are a fertile ground for innovations that are later applied to other protest movements, against industries, companies, social groups and directly against government agencies.

Protests directed against politicians and their ideologies are often a 'canary in the coalmine' that can be used to inform senior management, communications specialists and social media professionals what they may expect to be directed against their own organisations in the future and give them an opportunity to proactively take steps to mitigate any emerging issues.

This is why it is fascinating to watch the internet become one of the primary channels for political protests, with a range of new twists on old approaches.

We've seen significant use of older forms of protest adapted to the web. Platforms like Change.org have taken petitions and supercharged them by removing the need for collectors to travel widely to collect signatures and becoming the platform not only for the fast and simple act of signing, but for ongoing organisation and communication across issue-based groups to 'maintain the rage'.

Some governments have even adopted online petitions approaches for their own purposes - taking back some influence and control, with the UK and US the best examples.

We've seen a virtual transformation of the physical blockade approach, favoured by activists and unions to deny companies labour, supplies or customers, and also used to prevent or add difficulty to staff and politicians entering political offices.

Online blockades, termed denial of service attacks, are however treated as criminal offenses rather than civil protests in many nations. This position reflects the importance of online commerce and the blurring of lines between activities which could be legitimate protests or criminally motivated activities by individuals or coordinated groups.

The old chestnut of ridicule is, of course, used widely, from parody tweets and videos to reusing the actual words, photos and videos of some politicians against themselves.

Politicians have even used parody as a tool to show their sense of humour and stand up to detractors - my favourite being the deliberate self-parody video of George W Bush at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner, an approach repeated, but not equalled (in my view) by his successors.

We've also seen new forms of parody emerge that could not easily be replicated in the physical world. From sites that allow people to virtually throw a shoe, water bomb or even punch a politician, to browser plugins that transform the words or photos of a politician. 

Use of the Stop Tony Meow plug-in on the
Australian Prime Minister's website
The most recent of these is the Stop Tony Meow plug-in, which automatically replaces photos of the Australian Prime Minister with cats and kittens.

As most communications professionals understand, unless these protests go far 'beyond the pale', make criminal accusations, are relentlessly negative and defamatory, are provably untrue or extend beyond common standards of social decency, often the best approach is to deny them oxygen. They can be ignored or laughed off while respecting the rights of others to hold differing views.

In many cases this 'higher ground' approach will blunt the impact, or even turn the protest in favour of the politician or issue.

In some cases acknowledging or taking actions in response to a protest might be counterproductive - leading to an escalation of protest actions, greater and more organised opposition to an agenda, or leaving a politician looking ridiculous and weak for 'overreacting'.

Of course there are also many times when politicians should take note of these protests - where there is a clear groundswell of views on a particular matter, or the politician can satisfy the wishes of a group without compromising their agenda or other interests. Protests are legitimate and are a valid way to influence policy in a democracy after all.


So why should government agencies, companies and other groups take note of these protest activities?

Because, inevitably, some or most of these techniques will be turned on them and their interests.

It is important for all organisations to keep a watching brief on the evolving art of 21st century political protests and how politicians respond (or do not respond) to different techniques.

Being aware of the forms that protests can now take helps senior managers and communications professionals to proactively prepare their systems and processes to mitigate or blunt the potential impact of new approaches.

It helps them to prepare and select appropriate responses and thereby mitigate much of the risk and cost their organisations might face when these protest techniques are turned against them.

So keep an eye on how political protests evolve in the next few years, it may help you reduce stress, reputational or economic damage or even help preserve your organisation intact, should your organisation face similar forms of protest in the future.

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By Craig Thomler at 9:50 AM 1 comments Bookmark and Share
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Wednesday, February 05, 2014

How Cancer Research UK is using mobile gaming to conduct medical research

Recently the World Health Organisation announced that cancer had overtaken heart disease as the number one killer of Australians, as well as being the number one killer of people globally.

The WHO had another message as well. That cancer was a largely preventable disease.

Humans have lots of medical data about cancer. With millions of cases each year there's a vast amount of data available to researchers that can help them understand how to prevent and treat the disease.

Much of this data needs to be analysed by the human eye as computers are not flexible or sophisticated enough to recognise the patterns that humans can detect.

This is where the bottleneck occurs. Lots of data, but few paid researchers.

To address this issue Cancer Research UK, a charity focused on cancer research, held a GameJam in March 2013 in London hoping to come up with game concepts that would help analyse cancer data.

Within 48 hours they had 9 working games and 12 game prototypes, different approaches combining cancer data analysis with fun and replayability.



Over the last year the charity has been working with a game developer to refine several of these games to the level where they could be publicly released.

Now, Cancer Research UK has just launched the first free mobile game (for Android and iOS) that has players analysing cancer data while they're having fun.

Named Genes in Space, players must map their way through subspace then fly the route in a custom spaceship, collecting a fictional substance called Element Alpha and dodging or blowing up asteroids on the way. The more Element Alpha they collect, the more money they make, allowing them to further customise their ship.

Meanwhile cancer researchers harvest the data created by players at two points, when they map their route and when they fly it. The subspace that players map is real genetic data, and while Element Alpha is fictional, what players are actually collecting is data that helps researchers make sense of the genetic structure.

I've long been a fan of combining data with gameplay. We need to make research and science fun to lead more people into the area. If people think they're simply playing a game rather than doing science, that's fine too.

I hope that one day soon we'll see an Grade A game developer take an interest in this area and set out to integrate elements of science data research into a high quality game.

However to get here, we'll also need to see research institutes and governments, who hold the data, interested in pursuing new ways to analyse data, rather than relying on a few expensive researchers.

Until that happens, I guess we'll have to be satisfied playing Genes in Space.

Or Cellslider, or FoldIt...


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By Craig Thomler at 6:21 PM 0 comments Bookmark and Share
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Tuesday, February 04, 2014

Social media doesn't threaten people, people threaten people

It feels bizarre to me to use an argument popularised by pro-gun lobbyists to counter claims of the risks of social media, however there's some very real parallels worth considering about when agencies and corporations debate the risks of social media.

Yesterday there was a story in the Brisbane Times about a man who was arrested for making death threats against the Queensland Premier and his family.

How did he make these threats? In person at an event or rally? Via a rock through his home's window? Via postal mail to his electoral office? Via a mobile call to the Premier?

No, it was via social media, using a Facebook account.

On Twitter I've seen multiple claims that this demonstrates one of the risks of social media. Based on past form I expect the news media to pick up on this over the next few days and wail about how dangerous social media is as it enables disgruntled or mentally unstable citizens to make threats hiding behind a cloak of anonymity.

Well sorry, this actually isn't a risk of 'social media'. It's a risk every public figure in history has faced.

People threaten people. People say nasty things, photoshop images, make ranty videos about all the people they hate. People sign epetitions, write pleas for mercy, fight about 'left' and 'right' and often ignore facts and evidence which contradicts their values and beliefs.

In a world without social media, which those of us old enough can recall, people did exactly the same things they do not with social media. They made death threats, they character assassinated their rivals, they spread rumours and they gawked at sideshows.

They did these things via older technologies, phone, mail, at public gatherings, on radio and TV - even in books.

In other words - social media doesn't threaten, abuse, belittle, bully, lobby or otherwise behave in anti-social ways. People do.

This isn't to say that social media hasn't contributed to negative behaviours by humans. The internet and social media has given far more people a public platform and global distribution than has ever before been possible in human history.

Communications are far faster and harder to contain, resembling a pandemic for which humans have no immunity. A single comment can become a movement. A single photo can become a cyberwar, a single slap can lead to the overthrow of governments.

The internet has contributed to these issues and the concerns that many organisations have when engaging online, however the risk remains the same it has for all of human history - the risk of bad behaviour by individuals and groups.

So how should organisations manage the real risk - of 'bad eggs' ruining engagement for everyone, of activists and lobbyists hijacking a cause or of commercial interests using their dollars to inflate their influence?

By making the engagement guidelines clear and transparent, clarifying the scope of the engagement and actively managing the community the risk of disruptive or destructive people can be managed, whatever the medium of engagement being used.

So in conclusion, social media doesn't threaten, bully, discredit or otherwise hurt people. People do.

Social media is an accelerant and amplifier, but humans load it with content and pull the trigger.

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By Craig Thomler at 8:24 AM 0 comments Bookmark and Share
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Friday, January 31, 2014

It's all about recovery - tech disruption and government

My post yesterday on Has Gov 2.0 in Australia got too boring too fast? (thanks @sandihlogan for the title correction) attracted some good debate on Twitter and in comments, including from @chieftech who said:
Disruption, or the 'throwing into confusion', is a common occurrence in times of major social or technological change.

The discovery of agriculture disrupted man's nomadic lifestyle around 22,000 years ago - dramatically changing the shape of human society, how we lived, worshipped and organised ourselves.

When humans learnt to smelt iron, roughly 3,500 years ago society was again disrupted, with more advanced civilisations able to outfight and outproduce their bronze-dependent neighbours, causing larger cities and states to form and leading to greater productivity and more time for creative thought.

Gunpowder and then handguns changed society again in fundamental ways, ushering in the end of castle fortresses, making warfare far more bloody and deadly. Incidentally Genghis Khan, known for his horse archers, may have used gunpowder bombs fired from Chinese catapults in his wars.

Further disruptions occurred with the printing press, oil drilling, tanks, computers, television, nuclear weapons, satellites, and the internet - amongst thousands of other technologies. Each time societies had to adapt how they operated, governments rose and fell, the balance of power between states shifted.

In other words disruption is normal. Society is constantly adapting to new technologies, rejecting some, embracing some and tolerating the others.

Governments have never been immune to this disruption. They also have had to constantly adapt their approach as technologies changed. We've seen time and time again how more technologically advanced civilisations have colonised, absorbed or destroyed less technologically advanced ones - and, on a few occasions, have seen civilisations falter when they advanced their technology too far too fast and it became out-of-step with social values, or caused unintentional harmful side-effects.

So has the Australian government been disrupted by technology - yes, many times even in our short 113 years as a nation.

Is there anything special about how technology is disrupting government right now? Anything that makes it different to how major technologies disrupted our government in the past?

Well yes and no. Certainly the speed of technological change has increased, which means that government has less time to understand the impacts and consequences of new technologies before deciding how and when to adopt them.

Also 'now' is the time when we are alive. Watching change occur is very different to reading about how changed occurred in the past. It's always more visceral to live through change then to observe it remotely through another person's eyes.

But also no - disruption is disruption. While the type of disruption may change or the speed increase, the potential range of responses remains limited.

In my view societies and governments only have four options when facing disruptive change - embrace, accept, absorb or oppose.

They can embrace the change, adopting it enthusiastically and quickly, throwing out old ways for the new.

They can accept it, adopting it in a more piecemeal 'as needed' way, without any resistance or dissent.

They can ignore the changes, passively rejecting them by clinging to 'traditional' ways, but gradually absorbing them over time into their traditions and making subtle adjustments to maintain the semblance of the status quo.

Or they can actively oppose the changes, actively seeking to suppress them through laws and actions - successfully or otherwise.

This leads to what I feel is a far more interesting question. How will our governments cope with, or recover, from the present round of disruptive change?

Answering this question will also answer the question of which nations will dominate the 21st Century. Governments that embrace new media and Gov 2.0, adapting themselves into the new forms necessary to thrive within empowered societies, will have a strategic advantage over governments who lag or refuse to use them.

We're already seeing this in the adopting of broadband around the world. Nations with faster broadband will have a significant economic edge over their slower and less connected neighbours. Similarly governments that are more connected and able to tap more brains for ideas, more citizens to undertake small civic acts, will be far more economically and socially acceptable than nations that restrict use of these channels to small elite, or stifle discussion through laws and censorship.

Of course there are risks with embracing disruptive changes - moving too far too fast can uncover new issues that societies don't yet have the experience to solve. However in many cases the governments that uncover these issues first may also resolve them first, sometimes putting them even further ahead of other nations.

So the really interesting question for me is how are Australia's governments doing at coping with the disruptiveness of Government 2.0, the impact of social media on public debate, of open data on accountability and economics, of citizen activism on state leadership?

Which of our governments are embracing these changes, which are accepting them and which are resisting, or actively legislating against them?

The answer to this question will tell Australians which states will be the most successful in the next twenty years and whether Australia as a nation will remain one of the wealthiest, safest and most successful in the world, or be overtaken by more nimble peers.

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By Craig Thomler at 10:30 AM 0 comments Bookmark and Share
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Thursday, January 30, 2014

Has Gov 2.0 in Australia got too boring too fast?

Clay Shirky once said, about social media, that "These tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring."

Over the past year I've seen extremely encouraging signs across government in Australia that the use of social media has reached this point, become boring, as it has been normalised into agency operations.

Most federal and state government agencies now have multiple active social media accounts (with councils lagging a little behind), the majority of government communications campaigns involve social media - often in a central way.

Formal and informal support for social media use by government is now widespread. For example the Victorian Government has appointed a senior person in Premier and Cabinet to lead the education of the public sector in using social media. The Australian government's Secretary's Board has also recommended that agencies make greater use of social media channels in their operations and public engagement. The APS Cross Agency Social Media (CASM) group in Canberra is flourishing, as is the Emergency Management Social Media group in Victoria and other states have well-attended groups meeting semi-regularly - from #SocAdl in South Australia to NSW's IPAA Social Media Special Interest Group.

In fact any state and federal agencies who aren't engaging via social channels are now tail-enders - you know who you are.

Agencies have also made firm, if cautious, steps into crowdsourcing, sponsoring independent events like GovHack and, in some cases, running their own crowdsourcing campaigns, like Victoria's Seed Challenge, the ACT's Digital Canberra Challenge and NSW's AppsForNSW.

Governments across Australia are now actively considering mobile, both when designing websites and for specialist apps, with a long list of federal agency apps at Australia.gov.au. Victoria has a similar list, as do various agencies in other states, such as WA Health and QLD's Department of Education, Training and Employment.

Open data is on a slower path, but has momentum. Most states and territories (excluding Tasmania, Western Australia and the Northern Territory) have open data catalogues, with varying degrees of sophistication. The federal data.gov.au site has taken major steps forward recently, reorganising its approach and starting to release more data. I still feel there's a patchwork approach to open data, with explicit mandates similar to US and UK examples rare and many agencies conspicuously absent from these catalogues, but progress is being made.

With all of this going on, we are stepping into a situation where the use of Gov 2.0 techniques, at least in pockets across government, is becoming business as usual - everyday, boring, humdrum.

Potentially as a result we've seen a reduction in the level of conversation on Twitter via #gov2au, with the volume of tweets well down on previous years. Social media and Gov 2.0 conferences for government are also finding it harder to attract attendees using the same formulas as in past years - with people seeking more sophisticated and specific information.

We've seen attendance at free Gov 2.0 events (such as the ones I run for several years in Canberra), fluctuate more widely - with less of a core base and more 'one-timers' coming to sessions that specifically interest them.

There's been no increase in the number of public servants blogging about the topics. Frankly I see more fear of speaking out on social media across the public service today then existed four years ago when the Gov 2.0 Taskforce's lead-by-example approach was still influencing public servants to actively discuss their successes and professional challenges online.

So has Gov 2.0 become boring too fast in Australia?

Harkening back to Shirky's statement from the start of my post, with Gov 2.0 now less concerned with the technology and more with engagement and behaviours, shouldn't we see more conversation, innovation and experimentation online by governments now that the basics of Gov 2.0 are largely accepted?

Shouldn't we see more conversation, more voices, more blogs, more tweets, more people packing out events seeking the latest information in what is one of the most rapidly changing environments in history - the internet?

I can see this happening in the UK, US and across Europe and South America, where public servants are increasingly excited about the potential for Gov 2.0 approaches to save money, engage citizens and improve outcomes. The first wave of enthusiasts is still involved as thought leaders and in more senior roles, which successive waves of public servants have kept agencies driving forward to improve and extend their social media capabilities.

In Australia, however, the voices appear to be falling mute. The first generation of Gov 2.0 enthusiasts (including myself) have either moved out of government to  other things, have taken on broader duties or are burnt out and disillusioned (the fate of many first wave enthusiasts across many areas).

The second wave, who have been left to implement the 'standard' social media channels now accepted and widespread in government, are busy with the machinery of running day-to-day channels - content, tone and crisis management. They often have less time to look at new developments or the bigger picture, or less interest in stepping up after seeing the first wave move on.

And the third wave - who bring a renewed sense of wonder and passion to the area, who stimulate the next set of leaps forward - don't appear to have emerged to any great extent. I hope they are simply waiting in junior roles for the opportunity to step up and reshape the public sector in new ways.

Technology is advancing faster than ever, new options and challenges for governments are appearing every day - how do we foster the continued enthusiasm necessary for agencies to continue to evolve their approaches and tools to generate better outcomes for old issues and to meet the challenges that emerge?

How do we cultivate the spark of Gov 2.0 in Australia, so that it doesn't get 'boring', frozen in place and time?

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By Craig Thomler at 12:12 PM 4 comments Bookmark and Share
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Wednesday, January 29, 2014

The decline of national sovereignty and impacts on society

The concept of national sovereignty has evolved over the centuries however has retained at its core the notion that nations, defined by geography, have the right to manage their own affairs and movements across their borders as they see fit, as well as to interact as recognised state entities with other states and other legal entities (individuals, corporations and not-for-profits).

The modern concept of national sovereignty was agreed to in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, following the thirty-year war, where the economically exhausted states of Europe agreed to establish the notion of territorial sovereignty as a norm of noninterference in the affairs of other nations, a principle that, more or less, holds to this day globally.

 This was the point in time when modern nation-states, based on geographic boundaries, started to take a dominant position in how human society was organised, leading to today's situation where every square inch of land is claimed by at least one nation.

 National sovereignty was, and remains, and extremely important and defining characteristic of modern civilisation. It not only grants powers to national governments, to the exclusion of external bodies, but also places responsibilities on them to provide some level of security, education and support for the people born and living within their sovereign borders. It creates the notion of citizenship, laws and taxes over property, income and commerce - measures that provide the security and public infrastructure that underpin society today.

However national sovereignty was developed at a time when the fastest form of transport was a horse, when messages were sent between locations by courier, smoke signals or carrier pigeons, when money only existed in your wallet and every business was tied to a geographic location, or an itinerant wandering tinker or merchant who could be physically tracked down.

There was little understanding of lightening, let alone electricity and even the invention of the Leyden jar, the first primitive capacitor (the word 'battery' hadn't been coined) was almost a hundred years in the future.

National sovereignty on the basis of geography made sense in 1648. The majority of people did not travel more than 100 miles from their birthplace, except during war, and it was possible to calculate a nation's wealth by adding up all the physical 'stuff' which in its borders (as the English had began doing in 1086 with the Domesday book - primarily for taxation purposes).

Today the majority of communication is electronic, as is the bulk of the money supply. While we still make lots of physical 'stuff', more and more of our services are delivered online and more and more physical stuff is imported and exported across national borders enable by electronic transactions.

While our garbage, roads, electricity and water are still delivered locally to where we live, more and more of our interactions with governments and companies, with welfare payments, education and even significant portions of health care able to be delivered remotely from any location on the planet - to peoples' homes directly or via virtual operators in physical offices (which Centrelink is already experimenting with).

This means that governments could theoretically outsource much of their service delivery to low cost areas within their jurisdiction - or to low-cost jurisdictions elsewhere in the world.

Beyond service delivery, a great deal of policy development could similarly be outsourced. There's really no need to employ locals to develop local policy - it is simply important to employ the best qualified staff and provide them with the best quality information and access to locals to understand their needs and concerns. Theoretically policy could already be developed anywhere in the world, using specialists with the experience to understand a jurisdiction's citizens and conditions in order to provide the best recommendations.

We see this on a small scale already - public officials at councils may live in neighbouring council regions. State and territory officials may live across a border in another state or territory. National governments tap foreign specialists and consultancy companies for expertise they cannot find in their own jurisdiction.

This outsourcing approach can even impact on geographically specific services - from emergency management to road maintenance. When digital networks can be used to supply information and cheap transport can be used to relocate assets to where they are needed on a timely basis, why should individual councils, or even state departments run road crews or location-specific emergency services?

Services can be delivered from wherever is reasonable and cost-effective - regardless of artificially imposed borders, with emergency services, road maintenance. We already see this in effect in emergency scenarios when specialist teams are moved around countries, or between countries, to assist in major disasters or provide expertise in unusual incidents.

With all of this sharing between jurisdictions, the notion that any geographic territory is sovereign unto itself is rapidly becoming a convenient fiction. Certainly when we shuffle public workers between jurisdictions we also expect them to abide by local laws - however why should those laws differ measurably anyway? It may simply leads to inefficiencies, productivity loss, even unnecessary injuries or loss of lives.

This gets even worse when services are delivered remotely - a surgeon in one country remotely operates on a patient in another, or a citizen calls a government help desk located in another jurisdiction and a staff member behaves in a manner that is inappropriate in the citizen's jurisdiction but legal in the jurisdiction they work in. Which jurisdiction takes legal precedent?

Add to this the continuing rise of transnational corporations - who may be domiciled in a particular state, but that deliver services globally - and we see further erosion of national sovereignty as a concept.

Recent free trade agreements, particularly those involving the United States of America, have begun pushing the notion that foreign companies may sue a national or state government should they change their laws in ways which may reduce the company's profit potential. This type of litigation has already begun in Canada and Mexico under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and looks to be extended to many more countries under the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which involves Australia and New Zealand. 

While the draft treaty remains secret and in negotiations, leaked sections of the TPP suggest it proposes the same conditions on signatory governments across the Pacific region. This would allow non-state entities to sue states, as we are already beginning to see occur in North America.

While this may be supported by large corporate interests (who naturally wish to insulate their interests and shareholders from unfavourable legal changes), this is a further limit on the sovereignty of states. If a foreign domiciled company can sue a government for changing the law then there is far more pressure on states to step cautiously around large corporations, weighing their interests more closely than that of citizens who may be denied the same opportunity to sue states.

There's also increasing cross-border environmental impacts becoming apparent from our still rapidly industrialising global civilisation. Huge fires in Indonesia cause live-threatening smog in Singapore. Electricity generation in China using coal leads to pollution which could affect neighbouring countries - and certainly contributes to atmospheric carbon levels and climate change. What value is the sovereignty of small South Pacific islands if the actions of other nations could see them regularly innundated by rising sea levels. Sovereignty doesn't help nations manage environmental impacts due to activities in other sovereign states.

On top of this trend is the rise of mass spying on the citizens of other nations - best exemplified by the practices of the NSA uncovered through Edward Snowden's leaks. These have brought to light the enormity of the US programs for monitoring foreign interests via literally scooping up all of the data travelling between Google, Microsoft and Yahoo data centres (amongst others), tapping into mobile apps and integrating intelligence provided by friendly governments (such as Australia's under the Five Eyes program).

In the past spying was limited to known 'persons of interest' who were usually already suspected of wrongdoing or held sensitive positions. 

With the rise of the internet and mobile devices it has now become easier and more cost-effective for nations to suck down as much data as possible and then attempt to identify patterns which indicate people they should watch - apologising for any information they shouldn't have touch later (if indeed they even let people know they have it). 

In theory any specific individual is unlikely to have their profile flagged for examination by foreign intelligence analysts - the technology simply isn't able to store and build profiles on everyone as yet (as far as I know).  However intelligence agencies are in the business of collecting and interpreting intelligence and have an ongoing interest in improving their systems. They want the ability to tell which 18 year old is likely to become a senior corporate executive, political leader, cutting-edge scientist or a terrorist so they can take appropriate steps to head off the threat or cultivate their national interests as early as possible.

The data is there - the software is rapidly improving - meaning that we all now live under the gaze of foreign interests who may choose to watch our every comment online.

While the NSA is getting the current attention regarding this mass spying, other governments have been taking similar steps, for national and commercial advantage. China and Russia are both sophisticated users of online systems, with Russia suspected of having engaged in state-sanctioned cyberwars against its neighbours.

Where nations are taking a copy of all data passing through their jurisdiction, this technically fits within their sovereignty - however with the way the internet operates data simply follows the fastest path. Unless you are using a VPN, it is quite possible that data distributed online may pass through several jurisdictions its way to its final destination.

Governments around the world have been tightening their own criteria around online hosting, encouraging (but usually not forcing) agencies to use locally hosted online services and favouring locally domiciled services, however citizens are in a completely different boat.

Anyone who uses Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Microsoft Office365, plays games via Xbox or Playstation, has their data travel through a range of jurisdictions and governments have little ability to enforce or even legislate for the rights of citizens who choose to use online services - particularly where there is limited cooperation between the hosting nation and the end user's jurisdiction.

Which nation's sovereignty takes precedent when using an overseas hosted service, how can Australia enforce privacy, security or other legal requirements that it mandates local services meet for the safety of citizens?

The answer is that without global agreements and treaties, no nation can effectively enforce their sovereign position or laws - with the fallback being that citizens use these services 'at their own risk'.

So what does this mean for sovereignty in the 21st century, if a digitalised world and changes in power between governments, corporations and citizens mean that nations can no longer enforce their sovereignty in the ways envisaged in centuries past?

It is likely that most nations will continue to attempt to preserve the illusion of sovereignty - while it may not exist in fact, or to the extent it existed when geographic borders were 'solid', it is a convenient fiction that allows legal systems and state-based services to continue to perform their functions for the majority of systems.

However there will be increasing pressure on this illusion as transnational and stateless entities gain strength - whether through trade agreements (such as the TPP), remotely delivered services (either privately or publicly delivered) or through digital services that exist 'in the cloud' for real - not on a set of servers in a given jurisdiction but software that actually runs across the internet, with fractions of it operating on mobile devices, home and work computers all over the world.

At some point sovereignty will simply snap, probably due to technological advancement, but potentially also due to the constant demand for increasing profits and the need to minimise cross-border barriers to its generation.

What happens next is the question. Will states attempt to renegotiate the concept of sovereignty in a more limited form within broad global guidelines - a global government with local variations and customs?

Or might we see a division of services between geographic and non-geographic states - where geographically relevant services are delivered by geographic governments, or contracted commercial providers, while we reorganise ourselves into digital states for the provision of non-digital services - with the ability to easily change digital nationality, voting with our feet for the best offer as we do for commercial products.

We could even see the contracting of government to professional (commercial) providers, with citizens become shareholders and able to 'vote out' an entire public service and replace it with another. Like a body corporate approach, people would retain the right to vote for their representatives, however their role would be to manage the various commercial services that develop policy and deliver services for their constituents.

I wouldn't like to predict any specific outcome - we're still too early in our digital revolution to really know where things are likely to go.

However I do expect that people being people, no matter how we organise ourselves for governance and public service delivery some things will remain the same. People will identify with 'tribes' or communities, both those based on geography and those based on common interests (which might be non-geographic). These tribes will form the basis for our social organisation even if they don't form the basis of our public service delivery.

The young adult of 2090 will still identify as an Australian and a Victorian - even if his education was provided electronically through a Indian education provider, the local roads maintained by a corporation based out of the US, his 'local doctor' accessed virtually from a Brazilian medical centre (who also provides the nearby medical clinic's remote surgeon) and his student support payments organised and paid via a Phillippino service desk. He will still follow his favourite football team - Real Madrid - attending their games remotely via his 3D headset, and socialise with friends from around the world in virtual nightclubs (with no closing hour).

He will attend university online and work virtually, using office software hosted in the cloud that is designed by a stateless entity, charging for time used and paying for the use of his devices' processing cycles (where it is virtually hosted across millions of devices).

He will even vote digitally - not just every three years but on every major topic for which he is interested and has met the qualifying conditions (based on his knowledge of the subject and its impact on his life), with government services divided by tier into a local geographic council and a digital non-geographic state.

He will still be an Australian - even if (or when) his government, and many public services, are delivered via the cloud.

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By Craig Thomler at 11:42 AM 0 comments Bookmark and Share
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Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Being mindful of personal social media use in the APS

Senator Abetz, the Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service, has written a fantastic blog post commenting on the need for Australian Public Servants to be mindful of what they say (and how they say it) on social media.

The post, Public Servants should exercise care with social media, is in the Senator's blog and has also been highlighted in the media.

Regardless of personal view as to whether the current APS guidance goes too far in limiting public participation by public servants in policy matters which affect them as a citizen, or in their ability to participate in public political debates, it is great to see the Minister responsible for the Public Service taking a measured public position which aligns with the current guidance.

Government today makes extensive use of social media in communication, engagement and customer service and public servants, like other Australians, are likely to use social channels personally and professionally to maintain their networks and express their views.

Social media use is normal throughout our community and within the Australian Public Service. It isn't something to be feared or suppressed and the fears of widespread misuse have not been realised in practice.

Instead, for the most part, people have used social media well, although certain agencies still restrict access to and use of these channels - both personally and officially.

If agencies want to further minimise their perceived risks with social media, they need to focus on educating and supporting their staff to use these platforms wisely and within clear guidance.

To achieve this agencies need to have guidance and education in place. Later this year I'll be asking them to see how many (at a federal level) already do, and comparing it with my research two years ago (when under 25% did).

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By Craig Thomler at 11:04 AM 0 comments Bookmark and Share
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Thursday, January 16, 2014

Canberra University launches Graduate Certificate in Social Media and Public Engagement

Universities in Australia have lagged behind public and commercial use of social media and need for their staff to be trained in effective development and implementation of online engagement approaches.

However this looks to be changing with the launch of Canberra University's Graduate Certificate in Social Media and Public Engagement.

As a one year part-time primarily online course the Graduate Certificate aims to give participating students the practical skills and theoretical knowledge they need to work in rapidly changing online and social media environments - with a particular focus on a public sector context.

Each semester involves a face-to-face masterclass with academics and social media professionals, with ongoing lectures and coursework delivered online. This means the course is accessible to potential students right across Australia.

Designed to support public servants who are new to online engagement, or are seeking formal qualifications to back-up their existing experience, the course is rated as relevant for a broad range of public sector professionals including communications and information communications technology staff, policymakers and stakeholder/community/online engagement managers.

It may also be valuable for people working in other sectors in roles that touch on or who are interested in social media and social technologies, change, e-government more broadly, public policymaking, the media and society, and the formation of public opinion.

I'm pleased to say that the course developers have consulted extensively with senior public servants and public sector social media practitioners. I've also been involved in providing input into the program (and will help out in some of the course delivery).

More information on the course is available at Canberra University's website (http://www.canberra.edu.au/faculties/arts-design/courses/postgraduate/social-media) - and there's still time to enrol for the 2014 intake!

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By Craig Thomler at 2:44 PM 1 comments Bookmark and Share
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Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Rethinking government IT to support the changing needs of government

We recently saw a change in the federal government in Australia, with a corresponding reorganisation of agency priorities and structures.

Some departments ceased to exist (such as Department of Regional Australia), others split (DEEWR into two departments, Education and Employment) and still others had parts 'broken off' and moved elsewhere (Health and Ageing, which lost Ageing to the (renamed) Department of Social Services).

This isn't a new phenomenon, nor is it limited to changes in government - departments and agencies are often reorganised and reconfigured to serve the priorities of the government of the day and, where possible, create efficiencies - saving money and time.

These adjustments can result in the movement of tens, hundreds or even thousands of staff between agencies and regular restructures inside agencies that result in changing reporting lines and processes.

While these reorganisations and restructures - Machinery of Government changes (or MOGs) as they are known - often look good on paper, in reality it can take time for efficiencies to be realised (if they are actually being measured).

Firstly there's the human factor - changing the priorities and allegiances of staff takes time and empathy, particularly when public servants are committed and passionate about their jobs. They may need to change their location, workplace behaviours and/or learn a new set of processes (if changing agency) while dealing with new personalities and IT systems.

There's the structural factor - when restructured, merged or demerged public sector organisations need to revisit their priorities and reallocate their resources appropriately. This can extend to creating, closing down or handing over functions, dealing with legal requirements or documenting procedures that an agency now has to follow or another agency has taken over.

Finally there's the IT factor - bringing together or separating the IT systems used by staff to enable them to do their work.

In my view the IT component has become the hardest to resolve smoothly and cost-effectively due to how government agencies have structured their systems.

Every agency and department has made different IT choices - Lotus Notes here, Microsoft Outlet there, different desktop environments, back-end systems (HR and Finance for example), different web management systems, different security frameworks, programming environments and outsourced IT partners.

This means that moving even a small group of people from one department to another can be a major IT undertaking. Their personal records, information and archival records about the programs they work on, their desktop systems, emails, files and more must be moved from one secure environment to another, not to mention decoupling any websites they manage from one department's web content management system and mirroring or recreating the environment for another agency.

On top of this are the many IT services people are now using - from social media accounts in Facebook and Twitter, to their email list subscriptions (which break when their emails change) and more.

On top of this are the impacts of IT service changes on individuals. Anyone who has worked in a Lotus Notes environment for email, compared to, for example, Microsoft Outlook, appreciates how different these email clients are and how profoundly the differences impact on workplace behaviour and communication. Switching between systems can be enormously difficult for an individual, let alone an organisation, risking the loss of substantial corporate knowledge - historical conversations and contacts - alongside the frustrations of adapting to how different systems work.

Similarly websites aren't websites. While the quaint notion persists that 'a website' is a discreet entity which can easily be moved from server to server, organisation to organisation, most 'websites' today are better described as interactive front-ends for sophisticated web content management systems. These web content management systems may be used to manage dozens or even hundreds of 'websites' in the same system, storing content and data in integrated tables at the back-end.

This makes it tricky to identify where one website ends and another begins (particularly when content, templates and functionality is shared). Moving a website between agencies isn't as simple as moving some HTML pages from one server to another (or reallocating a server to a new department) - it isn't even as easy as copying some data tables and files out of a content management system. There's enormous complexity involved in identifying what is shared (and so must be cloned) and ensuring that the website retains all the content and functionality required as it moves.

Changing IT systems can be enormously complex when an organisation is left unchanged, let alone when when teams are changing agencies or where agencies merge. In fact I've seen it take three or more years to bring people onto an email system or delink a website from a previous agency.

As government increasingly digitalises - and reflecting on the current government's goal to have all government services delivered online by 2017 - the cost, complexity and time involved to complete  these MOG changes will only increase.

This risks crippling some areas of government or restricting the ability of the government of the day to adjust departments to meet their policy objectives - in other words allowing the (IT) tail to wag the (efficient and effective government) dog.

This isn't a far future issue either - I am aware of instances over the past five years where government policy has had to be modified to fit the limitations of agency IT systems - or where services have been delivered by agencies other than the ones responsible, or simply not delivered due to agency IT restrictions, costs or issues.

Note that this isn't an issue with agency IT teams. These groups are doing their best to meet government requirements within the resources they have, however they are trapped between the cost of maintaining ageing legacy systems - which cannot be switched off and they don't have the budget to substantially replace them - and keeping up with new technological developments, the increasing thirst for IT-enabled services and gadgets.

They're doing this in an environment where IT spending in government is flat or declining and agencies are attempting to save money around the edges, without being granted the capital amounts they need to invest in 'root and branch' efficiencies by rebuilding systems from the ground up.

So what needs to be done to rethink government IT to support the changing needs of government?

It needs to start with the recognition at political levels that without IT we would not have a functioning government. That IT is fundamental to enabling government to manage a nation as large and complex as Australia - our tax system, health system, social security and defence would all cease to function without the sophisticated IT systems we have in place.

Australia's Prime Minister is also Australia's Chief Technology Officer - almost every decision he makes has an impact on how the government designs, operates or modifies the IT systems that allow Australia to function as a nation.

While IT considerations shouldn't drive national decisions, they need to be considered and adequately resourced in order for the Australia government to achieve its potential, realise efficiencies and deliver the services it provides to citizens.

Beyond this realisation, the importance of IT needs to be top-of-mind for Secretaries, or their equivalents, and their 'C' level team. They need to be sufficiently IT-savvy to understand the consequences of decisions that affect IT systems and appreciate the cost and complexity of meeting the priorities of government.

Once IT's importance is clearly recognised at a political and public sector leadership level, government needs to be clear on what it requires from IT and CIOs need to be clear on the consequences and trade-offs in those decisions.

Government systems could be redesigned from the ground-up to make it easy to reorganise, merge and demerge departments - either using common IT platforms and services for staff (such as an APS-wide email system, standard web content management platform, single HR of financial systems), or by only selecting vendors whose systems allow easy and standard ways to export and import data - so that a person's email system can be rapidly and easily moved from one agency to another, or the HR information of two departments can be consolidated in a merger at low cost. User Interfaces should be largely standardised - so that email works the same way from any computer in any agency in government - and as much code as possible should be reused between agencies to minimise the customisation that results in even similar systems drifting apart over time.

The use of these approaches would significantly cut the cost of MOGs, as well as free up departmental IT to focus on improvements, rather than meeting the minimum requirements, a major efficiency saving over time.

Unfortunately I don't think we're, as yet, in a position for this type of significant rethink of whole of government IT to take place.

For the most part government still functions, is reasonably efficient and is managing to keep all the lights on (even if juggling the balls is getting progressively harder).

It took the complete collapse of the Queensland Health payroll project to get the government there to act to rethink their systems, and it is likely to take a similar collapse - of our Medicare, Centrelink or tax system - for similar rethinking to occur federally.

However I would not like to be a member of the government in power when (not if) this occurs.

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Tuesday, January 07, 2014

Save the date for BarCamp Canberra - 15 March 2014

The 7th annual BarCamp Canberra has just been announced and will be taking place on Saturday 15 March this year at the Gungahlin Library.

BarCamp is a free day-long event where several hundred people gather to share insights and ideas on a range of topics including design, IT, public service and more.

It's well worth attending and, if you're something you wish to say, presenting at as well.

The unorganisers (which includes me) are looking for people willing to help out on the day and we welcome sponsorship enquiries.

For more information on the event, what a BarCamp is and how to attend or help support BarCamp Canberra, visit barcampcanberra.org

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Monday, January 06, 2014

Farewell to the Victorian Government eGovernment Resource Centre

The Victorian Government eGovernment Resource Centre was launched more than ten years ago as a repository of news and information about eGovernment from around the world.

The eGovernment Resource Centre in 2002
The site (at www.egov.vic.gov.au) grew to contain tens of thousands of resources and articles on eGovernment and related topics, attracting tens of thousands of visitors each month.

Over the years the site's focus expanded to cover Government 2.0 activities around the world, a monthly enewsletter on the latest eGovernment and Gov 2.0 initiatives and a range of community features as well as a social media presence.

The eGovernment Resource Centre in 2013
During its life the site became widely known and highly regarded as Australia's premier source of eGovernment information.

The eGovernment Resource Centre was also highly regarded overseas, being recognised at the 2008 World e-Democracy Awards and having many overseas governments and Gov 2.0 experts reference or link to the site as well as many practitioners rely on it for information and news.

Alas, due to a changing focus in Victoria, the eGovernment Resource Centre was discontinued at the end of 2013.

All the information, articles and links the site contained after more than a decade of operation have been taken offline. The many links in Google search and 3rd party website now redirect to the Victorian Government's digital strategy.

I, for one, am sad to see the demise of this great eGovernment and Government 2.0 resource. For years it was my bible for what was happening around the world in these topics - always with new information, insights and initiatives that could be used to influence and improve the government agencies I worked for and with.

The loss of access to the information and resources in the eGovernment Resource Centre is likely to also affect many public servants within Australian governments, and the publics they serve for years to come. Even if they don't realise what they are missing, the lack of easy access to knowledge and past experience will surely affect the level of 'corporate knowledge' related to egovernance within the Australian public sector.

Kudos must go to the Victorian Government for running the site for as long as it did, as well as particular thanks to the individuals responsible for keeping the site current, useful and usable - particularly one individual in particular who curated the site for many years (you know who you are).

However for every ending, there can be new beginnings. It is the start of a new year and hopefully we'll see governments across Australia continuing to improve and enhance their online engagement systems and release more of their data openly and in reusable formats.

It may also not be the end for the eGovernment Resource Centre - I am looking for ways to resource and renew the Centre, building on the fantastic site the Victorian Government supported and extend it into a sustainable global eGovernment and Government 2.0 resource.

Anyone who wishes to get involved, please drop me a line.

However, for now, the Victorian Government's eGovernment Resource Centre is no more.

It was a great resource built with a great deal of vision. While the resource is gone, I hope the vision is not.

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By Craig Thomler at 2:18 PM 3 comments Bookmark and Share
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