While travelling to and from the GovHack international awards red carpet event (which was great BTW), I’ve been reading ‘So you’ve been publicly shamed‘, the latest book by Jon Ronson (the author of The men who stare at goats), and was reflecting on some of the experiences he talks about. A common theme throughout the…
Below is a list of all of the GovHack 2015 International and National winners… The GovHack 2015 International categories had competitors across Australia and New Zealand: The International Best Disaster Mitigation Hack, iHelp by team Tremorz in New Zealandhttps://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/tremorz The International Digital Humanities Hack patentstori.es by team Patent Trolls in Canberrahttps://hackerspace.govhack.org/content/patentstories International Bounty for Best…
Australia’s Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, has now announced the review panel for MP remuneration expenses, and in my view it’s close to becoming another missed opportunity to improve government engagement, accountability and transparency with the community. The panel will consist of five ’eminent’ individuals. Two will be former politicians (one Labor and one Liberal), one…
I’ve been reading about a new entrant in the government online consultation market – Balancing Act, a simulation tool for involving the public in government budget consultations. It joins a range of other tools for this type of ‘trade-off’ consulting online – including Budget Allocator from Bang The Table and, my favourite, Budget Simulator from…
Practically everyone in Australia has followed the entitlements issue triggered by media reports of House of Representatives Speaker, and Liberal politician, Bronwyn Bishop’s helicopter trip from Melbourne to Geelong over the last three weeks. While at times other politicians were reluctant to criticise Bishop’s expenses, on the basis that most politicians spend quite a bit of…
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…
Last week it was announced that the first driverless car trials would begin in Australia in Adelaide. Supported by the South Australian government and the Australian Road Research Board (ARRB), the two-day trial involves Volvo’s XC90, Bosch’s driverfree technology and Telstra’s network. I’m a big fan of self-drive cars and have followed Google’s US self…
One of the emerging challenges for governments in the online age is managing the discrepancy between the speed of transparency and the speed of accountability. With digitalisation and the internet, the speed at which government information is made public is becoming faster, with it being easier to collect, aggregate and publish information and data in…
PS News has a great report on the growth of data.gov.au – linking to a report on the Department of Finance’s blog which indicates the site added 100 datasets in June. The site has also upgraded to provide more data visualisation capability for users, as well as a responsive template for improved mobile access. Most interesting…
I’ve been attending a number of networking and other business events in the last month across Canberra, and have noticed that amongst all the CEOs, CTOs, Financial Directors and similar, that there’s been no senior public servants in attendance. While there was a good turn-out of public servants at one event I’ve attended, the Life…
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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