It appears that the the Clerk of Queensland’s Parliament has barred OpenAustralia from republishing the state’s Hansard on a series of grounds, in a blow to OpenAustralia’s goal of making all of Australia’s parliamentary Hansard records available online in a searchable format. OpenAustralia has blogged about the matter, in the post, Queensland bars OpenAustralia from…
Noted Australian social media expert, Laurel Papworth, is releasing a range of courseware to support people running social media courses under a Creative Commons License, allowing reuse for non-commercial or commercial purposes. Representing a selection of the material Laurel has created over the last five years, this courseware provides individuals and organisations with materials useful…
I’ll be speaking at the Managing Your Online Content conference from Ark group in Sydney this Wednesday on the topic of Aligning your web content strategy with organisational objectives. I’ll be making an effort to log the conference online, either via Twitter (#MYOCG09) or via a liveblog on this blog, if I have access to…
Last year I posted about redesigning sites to put customers at the centre of the universe. At the time we were reviewing my agency’s primary site based on usability research and surveys. Through these our customers had indicated that the site was perceived as about us rather than about them (the tools and information they…
The Victorian government has published the Intranet Information Architecture Best Practice Analysis report, conducted by the IA Strategy project team in the Web Domain Group, Department of Human Services (DHS) Victoria. The analysis is available in summary and in full from the eGovernment Resource centre. One of the writers of the report, Suze Ingram, has…
Ari Herzog has begun a series on social media best practice in his blog, AriWriter. Kicking it off is a fascinating interview with Utah’s Chief Information Officer, David Fletcher, providing an insight into how Utah has implemented its online strategy, taking it to win the Best of the Web award for US state governments twice…
Cost cutting is a fact of life across public and private sectors. At some point every few years (or every year in some cases) organisations decide that the most effective way to improve productivity or profits is to reduce expenditures. Intranets are a common target of cost cutting, either by delaying improvements to infrastructure, cancelling…
The McKinsley Quarterly has published a very interesting piece on the future of innovation, The next step in open innovation. This explores the concept that companies – and government departments – have traditionally been ‘closed shops’ for innovation. All their innovation has occurred internally with few linkages to the work underway at other organisations. However…
One of the biggest issues I’ve seen in government websites is excessive use of words. Government agencies often treat each website page as a stand-alone fact sheet. This means they err on the side on completeness, leading to wordiness. Most of us have seen the research. People don’t read wordy, jargon-filled pages – they skim….
I have a very strong view on who owns a government agency’s website – it’s operated by the agency on behalf of the public. The teams who look after the code, functionality, design and content are custodians and gatekeepers who ensure that the website; works (is online 24/7) meets all required standards uses appropriate current…
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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