Back in 2009 I predicted that government communications professionals only had about 10 years to gain social media skills or become unemployable. At the time I received quite a bit of scoffing and pushback from senior communications professionals in government. They believed that digital wouldn’t grow very fast and would remain a minor component in…
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…
In a little over two weeks it’ll be time again for UnConference Canberra, the renamed, brighter & shinier version of BarCamp Canberra. Being held on Saturday 9 April at the Canberra Innovation Network (CBRIN) on level 5 of 1 Moore Street, the event will feature the same great mix of people, presentations and cupcakes. It…
Open government means different things to different people, and in Australia, where our government is already quite open, it’s sometimes not considered such a priority. However alongside our open data, public consultations, freedom of information laws and transparent voting systems, there’s still many areas where the Australian government could lift its openness and improve public…
Below is a guest post from John Sheridan of DB Insights, republished with permission from his LinkedIn blog. John is, in my view, one of the most insightful and thoughtful people in the Australian digital space and I heartily commend reading John’s other posts. Ready, willing and able… Most of you won’t remember the song…
It’s fairly widely acknowledged throughout the emergency community that due to the rise in citizen use of technology, emergency services are now rarely the first on the scene of a disaster. Most emergencies are first publicly highlighted on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or another social media platforms as people proximate to the situation take photos and…
The other week I was in Wellington, New Zealand for the international Linked up, Loud and Literate: Libraries enabling digital citizenship conference. Below is my presentation from the day, including the story of a recent customer experience with an Australian government agency. For other presentations from the day visit nsla.org.au/digital-citizenship-2015.
I’ve been having a play with IBM Watson’s Personality Insights Service. The service uses “linguistic analytics to extract a spectrum of cognitive and social characteristics from the text data that a person generates through blogs, tweets, forum posts, and more.” While this is quite a mouthful, the service provides an interesting external perspective on how…
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 Mandarin reports that six significant federal agencies are currently seeking permanent Chief Information Officers, while both the ACT government and the Federal government’s Digital Transition Office recently resorted to overseas hires to fill senior leadership roles requiring strong digital backgrounds. Does this signify a shortage of senior digital and ICT talent in Australia (or…
This archive mirrors the original eGov AU blog — Craig’s professional commentary on AI, digital government and technology in public life, running since 2006.
'; loop.parentNode.insertBefore(w,loop); })();