A new vaccine is approved for a fast-spreading emerging disease. The TGA did its job well. State and Federal Health ministers are briefed. Budgets are approved and allocated. Departments and health authorities develop their plans. The rollout is announced. Doctors, nurses, and pharmacists are trained to administer the vaccine. The system worked as it should….
I’ve been monitoring the Australian Public Service Commission (APSC) public consultation on the current social media guidelines for Australian public servants (APS). While they clearly aren’t interested in comments from former or potential future public servants, having neglected to publish, or even link to, my comments – which I submitted to the APSC four weeks ago – there’s…
Henry Sherrell is a former Australian Public Servant who now works in policy research at the Australian National University. As a researcher, open data has become an important input into his work. As such I thought it worth sharing (with his permission) this post from his blog, On The Move, as an example of some…
I’ve just become aware of the ACT Government’s consultation for a new license plate slogan. Hosted at Your Say, the government is asking for ideas for a 30-character or less slogan, with the best ideas to be put to a public vote later this year. I support this type of consultation approach – it provides…
Across April I’m spending a week participating in government-run sessions to contribute to the democratic life of our nation. I’ll spend two days with CSIRO, supporting their startup commercialisation programs, a day with the NSW Department of Transport supporting their deliberations on future transport needs and policies and a day with the Department of Prime…
I’ve had an interesting day today, with a number of meetings with different businesses to discuss various projects and activities they’re undertaking that are affected to a significant extent by government decisions. In three of those meetings business people, from vastly different businesses, told me about recent decisions by government agencies that had made their…
Now that Australians are heading out of holiday mode, it’s a good time for a reminder about the Australian Government’s process to become a member of the global Open Government Partnership (OGP), through developing our first OGP National Action Plan. If you’ve not heard of the Open Government Partnership, in a nutshell it’s an international…
On 24 November Prime Minister Turnbull sent a letter to the global Open Government Partnership (OGP) Secretariat confirming that Australia would progress to full membership of the OGP by July 2016 (continuing the process started by the former Labor Government in May 2013). Australia will become the 69th member of the OGP, joining countries such…
I will be presenting at November’s IAP2 session in Canberra from 6-8pm on ‘Introducing collaboration into the process of planning online participation’. The session will look at how to get internal stakeholders onboard and on the same page for an online participation process, particularly when they have disparate experience and understanding of digital approaches. Using real world examples, and an interactive session involving Social…
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…
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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