While diamonds may be forever, Department and agency names, communications campaigns and government programs are not. This poses an interesting challenge when planning social media strategies – how do you effectively exit from a channel when a campaign ends (as the money stops and people go), or reframe a social media presence when your agency…
There’s still many government online forms and consultation systems that don’t make use of ‘human recognition’ tools such as CAPTCHA to help verify that the people filling in the forms are humans and reduce the attractiveness of online government forms to large-scale automated attacks by bot-armies. However, even where government has added CAPTCHA security, I’ve…
Microsoft has launched a website specifically designed to get organisations to stop using Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) and upgrade to newer browsers. The Internet Explorer 6 Countdown website has the stated goal of watching global use of IE6 drop below one percent, stating that, 10 years ago a browser was born. Its name was Internet…
Over the last two years we’ve seen a concerted effort by governments across Australia to increase the level of online engagement, debate and discussion involving public agencies. In 2009 the Government 2.0 Taskforce, commissioned by then Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner and chaired by Dr Nicholas Gruen, conducted a six month process of engaging public servants…
On Saturday 19 March Canberra is hosting the 4th BarCamp Canberra, a free one-day user-generated not-for-profit ‘unconference’ covering topics ranging from social innovation, Gov 2.0, web, technical development, science communication, critical thinking, sustainability and the environment. If you’ve attended previous BarCamps you’ll know how exciting and fun they can be, packed full of interesting and…
At least one state agency in the US, Maryland Division of Correction, recently started requiring employees to provide their personal Facebook password and allow their employer to scrutinise their account as a condition of continued employment. Apparently this request wasn’t illegal – although it breaches Facebook’s usage policy (which could mean the employee loses their…
Last Friday I presented on a personal basis at the Seamless CMS Government Conference in Melbourne to a collection of Councils from around Australia and New Zealand about the state of Government 2.0 in Australia. I’ve included my presentation below. It was an interesting conference. Councils are struggling with the same issues regarding Government 2.0…
According to The Australia, at least one Australian Government agency is full of ‘Bureaucrats twitting at our expense‘ (sic – the correct term is ‘tweeting’). Based on a question which identified that, in a single week of measurement last year, staff at the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR), spent 400 hours using…
Mary Meeker, managing director for Morgan Stanley’s global technology research unit recently gave an excellent presentation on mobile internet trends. It highlights the incredible growth of tablets and apps, the rise of Android, the new uses that smartphones are being put to (only 32% of time is spent on phone calls) and the relative effectiveness…
We’ve seen enormous movement towards the opening up of public access and permission to reuse government information in Australia over the last year, both at state and Commonwealth levels. However these attempts to improve transparency and increase the capability for information reuse shouldn’t be led by government alone. The public, media, commercial and not-for-profit sectors…
This archive mirrors the original eGov AU blog — Craig’s professional commentary on AI, digital government and technology in public life, running since 2006.
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