Traditionally one of the roles of the ‘free press’ is to keep governments honest, to shine a light on inappropriate conduct, poor decisions and uncover corruption, falsehoods and backroom deals. With the advent of social media I’ve been watching this role slowly twist into new forms and relationships. One of the more interesting developments has…
At the next Gov 2.0 Canberra lunch we’re taking a look at a topic rapidly growing in importance for government agencies – managing and moderating online communities. Quiip Director and Community Manager, Alison Michalk, will provide her insights into online community management, user-generated-content moderation and risk mitigation within the Web 2.0 space. The presentation will…
Many people I encounter consider social media as Twitter & Facebook – which is pretty much all that gets reported on via traditional media. However the scope and history of social media is much richer and deeper than this. PeopleBrowsr recently commissioned a cartoon history of social media, which starts with the first robot messageboard…
The Australian National Audit Office has just released a report ‘The Protection and Security of Electronic Information Held by Australian Government Agencies‘ based on a review of the approaches to information security by four agencies, the Office of Financial Management, ComSuper, Medicare Australia, and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Amongst other recommendations…
I’m a big fan of opening up as much public sector information as possible in easily discoverable and reusable ways (taking into account privacy, security and commercial-in-confidence considerations). The data allows citizens and organisations to build a more informed view of their government’s activities, a good accountability measure. It also allows the development of useful…
Facebook’s active membership now exceeds 500 million users – that’s 1 in 13 humans. If it were a country it would be the third largest on earth. Its usage in Australia accounts for roughly 29% of the time spent online. Based on the average Australian internet user spending around 18.8 hours online each month (as…
I remember the great demonstration of November 1997. A plea went out asking citizens to gather outside their leader’s home to protest about major problems with the system. They were requested to be peaceful and law-abiding, to simply chant slogans, drink beer and remove their clothes. This demonstration was to be in Ultima Online, a…
Joining the US, Canada, the UK, New Zealand and a host of other jurisdictions already leading the way around the world, the Australian Government has now launched its official government data sharing website, www.data.gov.au Announced by Special Minister of State, Gary Gray, in the post Release of data.gov.au on AGIMO’s blog, Minister Gray said that,…
While diamonds may be forever, Department and agency names, communications campaigns and government programs are not. This poses an interesting challenge when planning social media strategies – how do you effectively exit from a channel when a campaign ends (as the money stops and people go), or reframe a social media presence when your agency…
There’s still many government online forms and consultation systems that don’t make use of ‘human recognition’ tools such as CAPTCHA to help verify that the people filling in the forms are humans and reduce the attractiveness of online government forms to large-scale automated attacks by bot-armies. However, even where government has added CAPTCHA security, I’ve…
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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