I had a great chat on Monday with one of the best online comms people in federal government, which touched on how the role of social media has evolved within agencies and how this matched the overall evolution and maturing of social use by the community in general. I’ve thought through this and roughly mapped…
The last week has seen a range of major issues for the Australian Government’s new MyTax service. As reported across both traditional and social media, people using MyTax to file their tax returns have experienced shut-outs, had the process freeze when they were almost complete and had it fail to autofill their pre-saved details. MyTax…
While I’ve been very tardy at posting this year, due to busyness, significant life and work changes and a general lassitude brought on from blogging for so many years, the Government 2.0 scene in Australia has continued to progress. While some of the faces and names have changed, and the public sector talks more about…
Imitation is often referred to as the sincerest form of flattery, however the attempt by the Treasury to mimic the success of Census Australia’s lighthearted Twitter approach demonstrates how carefully agencies must consider their social strategies in light of public opinion. Many will remember when the ABS launched its Census Twitter campaign with an engagement…
I’ve had a two month break from blogging over summer due to a range of other things going on in my life. I’ll be getting back into the habit of blogging over the next few weeks to catch up on all the awesome – and not so awesome – things happening in the Gov 2.0…
In 2011 an IBM computer, Watson, beat human competitors at Jeopardy! This was a new landmark in artificial intelligence – a computer capable of correctly responding to plain English questions, in real time, by figuring out their intent. At the time Watson was a computer as big as a room, and it was the only…
This week one of the top stories for one of Australia’s leading newspapers has been the purported rape of a woman after she met a man using the ‘Tinder’ matchmaking app. Rape is a terrible act and unacceptable in every circumstance. However the newspaper chose to make Tinder the story, not the rape. Tinder is…
While agencies often invest significant money into tools for tracking trends on social media, one of the simplest ways to detect and monitor the rise and fall of key topics and issues online is through Google Trends. Google Trends tracks the frequency of use of specific search words in Google searches. This represents the majority…
I’ve been tracking the active Twitter accounts of Australian government agencies and councils for over four years now. In February 2013 I reported that the number of tweets by government agencies and councils had reached one million in January of that year, and eleven months laters in November 2013 I reported that the number of…
On Tuesday 16 September I participated in the panel for the National Library’s Digiculture event: Social Media and the Public Sector, along with Facebook’s Mia Garlick and the Department of Finance’s John Sheridan. It was well attended and well-discussed on Twitter (under #digiculture), with the biggest laughs of the afternoon coming from the surprising (blooper)…
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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