My team has been throwing around approaches for improving our internal agency staff directory on the intranet to make it more of a knowledge resource for staff. As this is the most used tool in our intranet (people need to contact other people), improving the service contributes measurably to our staff’s capacity to collaborate and…
Fresh+New, a blog written by Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum, has brought to my attention Aza Raskin’s Ubiquity, a very interested look at the possible web of the future, using semantic browsers to provide a more connected experience. More details are in Seb’s post, More powerful browsers – Mozilla Labs Ubiquity, or on Aza’s…
According to the NextGov article Air Force opens bidding for virtual air base, the US Air Force is preparing to launch a virtual air base where airmen will attend courses in a 3D virtual world.Simulators have long been used in training pilots and astronauts, due to the fatal consequences of mistakes by novices. This air…
Related to my previous post, AZcentral reports that, Death notices removed from county Web site. Privacy concerns and identity-theft fears prompted Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell to halt public viewing of death certificates on the agency’s Web site. “There is so much personal information on them: a mother’s maiden name, what they died from,” Purcell…
Over in California a controversy over the level of public access to public information flared up where the The Bee newspaper in Sacremento published a searchable online database of public sector officials and their salaries. The newspaper simply pulled publicly available information together into a single source – no information was assumed or obtained illegally. This has…
Futuregov has an excellent article, An Australia quest for e-health discussing progress in the Australian e-health scene. It is good to see that there is a clear understanding of the need for a national approach – tying states into one consistent system, rather than individually building separate systems in each state at additional cost. In…
In the last few years I’ve witnessed the rise and rise of design and particularly usability/user experience design as a professional area. In the mid-90s, when I was conducting wireframe-based user testing, observing user behaviour in applications and asking users which functionality was most important to them before building websites, there was low awareness in…
On Friday the Disability Discrimination Commissioner, Graeme Innes, at the Australian Human Rights Commission released a media statement, Climate change secretariat excludes people with disabilities, indicating the Commmision was prepared to ‘out’ government publishers who did not meet Australia’s mandatory accessibility requirements for online material. “I recently said that, if things did not start to…
On Monday this week United Airlines in the US experienced a 75% drop in their share price (from $12.30 to $3.00 per share). This was due to a 6-year old news story on a newspaper website that was accidentally tagged as current and distributed across the US financial press through Bloomberg’s online News Service. The story has…
The US has had a number of voting dramas over the last ten years, probably none so well documented as that of the Florida recount in the 2000 Presidential election that saw George Bush Jnr win. As a result of the paper ballet issues uncovered by this and other elections, the US has introduced e-voting systems,…
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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