Votaire said, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”. This is often quoted in politics where the acts of creating, selling, passing, implementing and maintaining complex policies can result in challenging decisions between perfect, yet practically impossible and practical but only good outcomes. I’d like to suggest a similar saying for bureaucrats,…
Listening to the US’s National Public Radio (NPR) last week, I caught a story about how Chinese citizens are now using micro-blogging services (similar to Twitter) to communicate about missing or stolen children and, in some cases to locate them. According to The Guardian article, Chinese parents turn to microblogging in hunt for missing children,…
The Queensland State Archives recently commissioned a whole of Government Recordkeeping and Web 2.0 online survey to investigate how Queensland’s public authorities were using Web 2.0 and social media2 tools to conduct government business. The survey also asked public authorities about the policies and procedures they had in place to guide the business use of…
Last week the Commonwealth Bank received a panning for its new social media policy. Going beyond guidance for staff in their use of social media, the policy made it a requirements that Commonwealth Bank staff tell their managers about any negative comments about the bank they see online. The policy also required that staff do…
This is a thought-provoking video that looks at where good ideas – innovation – comes from. It raises an interesting point about the correlation between connections and innovation. That the more we interact and connect with others, the more likely it is that we can combine our partial ideas, our hunches, the greatest the prospect…
Here’s an excellent example of where crowdsourcing doesn’t work. The City of Austin decided to crowdsource a new name for its Solid Waste Services Department. It received plenty of ideas and votes, however few were meaningful or useful – though a number are quite funny. However don’t take this as a lesson that crowdsourcing doesn’t…
Chris Quigley of Delib is in Australia at the moment, on a trip around capital cities talking about Open Government from a UK and US perspective. Today and tomorrow he’s in Canberra meeting with various people around the traps (and speaking at the Gov 2.0 lunch). Tonight, to welcome Chris, we’re having informal drinks at…
Alex Howard over at GovFresh has a great article and video interview with Nicholas Gruen regarding Gov 2.0 in Australia and some of the challenges of the required cultural change. Read it over at Nicholas Gruen on Gov 2.0 in Australia and cultural change.
Sometimes it surprises me how much some organisations like using email newsletters over other tools like blogs. They spend weeks or even months crafting news items, bundle them together into a single email and then send them out to a subscriber list – sometimes without even using a system to measure the response rate or…
Today telecommuting often refers to people who work from home, logging into computer networks to prepare documents and exchange information remotely. However across the world we’re starting to see examples of much broader and more intense forms of telecommuting. Warfare Take for example the RQ-1 Predator, an unmanned aerial vehicle that has been used since…
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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